Second Phase of Openlab Begins
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CCEJunCompNews18-21 16/5/06 12:45 Page 18 COMPUTING NEWS Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel COLLABORATION Second phase of openlab begins The second phase of the CERN openlab was inside the Grid. officially launched with a ceremony at CERN The Grid Interoperability Centre is proposed on 17 May. The industry partners in the as a reinforcement of the second phase of the second phase are HP, Intel and Oracle. It will Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE) project build on experience from the first three-year led by CERN, allowing the CERN openlab phase, during which time the partnership partners to take part in integrating and between CERN and leading IT companies certificating Grid middleware. The project will produced many excellent technical results. focus on three activities: testing and The flagship project of the first phase of certification of the EGEE middleware stacks openlab was the CERN opencluster, an on testbeds provided by the partners; advanced computing and storage cluster, support, analysis, debugging and problem which contributed to several landmark results resolution to deal with the problems in CERN’s Grid and high-speed networking encountered on the contributed testbed; and activities. The partners during the first phase interoperability efforts that review current were Enterasys, HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle. The levels of Grid interoperability, also with opencluster results showed that CERN middleware stacks proposed by the partners. openlab is a novel and effective framework for In addition to these centres, CERN openlab collaboration between multiple industry has launched an initiative in computer security. partners, in a pre-competitive spirit and based Jarno Laitinen, a CERN openlab student, Initially, the bulk of this effort will be in malware on open standards. Activities for the start-up of checks the routers for the CERN opencluster. protection, anti-spyware, intrusion detection the second phase of CERN openlab are based and intrusion prevention, with a particular focus around a platform competence centre, a Grid environment presented by a virtual-machine on client security and mail-server security. The interoperability centre and IT security activities. hypervisor, independent of all the hardware Finnish companies F-Secure and Stonesoft will The Platform Competence Centre focuses intricacies. Software and hardware join CERN openlab as contributors, a status on platform virtualization, as well as software optimization is a vital part of the deployment created to allow smaller IT companies to and hardware optimization. Platform of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, participate on targeted topics for a shorter virtualization enables Grid applications to as the demand for resources by researchers is period. The Helsinki Institute of Physics was benefit from a highly secure and standardized likely to outstrip available resources, even instrumental in setting up these activities. SIMULATION STUDIES including elementary-particle physics and chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental nuclear physics. The new supercomputer theory of strong interactions. By simulating KEK installs Japan’s system, which started up on 1 March, consists QCD on a computer, the researchers expect to of the Hitachi SR11000 model K1 with a peak develop their understanding of the masses fastest simulation performance of 2.15 × 1012 floating point and reactions of particles such as protons, operations a second (2.15 Tflops) and the IBM neutrons and mesons (CERN Courier June supercomputer Blue Gene Solution with a peak performance 2004 p23). The supercomputer system at of 57.3 TFlops. At the time of installation, this KEK is shared with researchers from other The High Energy Accelerator Research system constituted the highest computing Japanese laboratories and universities Organization, KEK, in Japan has installed a power in Japan. working on particle- and nuclear-physics new supercomputer system for simulation The supercomputer is used mainly for the simulations, as well as those working on the studies of high-energy accelerator science, lattice simulation of quantum accelerator facilities at KEK. Les gros titres de l’actualité informatique L’openlab entame sa deuxième phase 18 Le bulletin CNL fête ses 40 ans 20 Le KEK installe le superordinateur de simulation le plus rapide Des nanopoints magnétiques à Brookhaven 20 du Japon 18 Le champion du monde des réseaux de fibres optiques 20 Un forum EGEE rassemble des utilisateurs de la Grille 19 Plus d’autonomie grâce à un nouveau clavier braille 21 Produits 19 Evénements 21 18 CERN Courier June 2006 CCEJunCompNews18-21 17/5/06 10:50 am Page 19 COMPUTING NEWS EVENTS EGEE forum unites Grid users One of the plenary sessions in full swing at the first EGEE User Forum, held at CERN in March. The first User Forum of the Enabling Grids for quantum chemistry were just a few of the E-science (EGEE) project took place on applications discussed. Digital radio 1–3 March at CERN. The event allowed broadcasting and financial modelling, as well members of the expanding community of Grid as research from outside Europe, such as users to meet to compare experiences and Taiwan’s National Digital Archive Project, were strengthen ties, and it enabled leaders of the also highlighted. EGEE project to update users on the status The forum mixed plenary sessions, and recent developments within the project describing the EGEE infrastructure and the and the infrastructure. achievements of several application More than 90 abstracts from new and communities, with two afternoons of parallel established applications were considered for sessions. The first set of parallel sessions was presentation and the some 250 attendees organized around application domains, the considerably surpassed the target of 150. The second was thematic with presentations abstracts submitted showed the variety of grouped by different issues in Grid computing. Grid applications, from the more standard in This User Forum was the first in a series, biology and high-energy physics, for example, with the next event planed for spring 2007. to others in more unusual fields, such as The next major EGEE event will be the EGEE’06 online gaming and archaeology. conference on 25–29 September in Geneva. Scientists at the meeting shared their ● The full programme and all presentations of research results and plans through the User Forum are available online, together presentations and posters. Protein with a booklet containing all 90 abstracts sequencing, medical imaging, fusion-energy submitted to the event. For details see research, gamma-ray astronomy, climate http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceTimeTable. modelling, earthquake simulations and py?confId=286. PRODUCT INFORMATION simplify the XML data-integration tasks faced by developers. The significant performance and Stylus Studio, the industry-leading provider of extensibility enhancements to XML-deployment XML development tools and components for adapter technologies provide a compelling, advanced data integration, has announced the standards-based solution for working with availability of Stylus Studio 2006 Release 2 heterogeneous data sources. For a free trial XML Enterprise Edition. The new release download go to www.stylusstudio.com/ provides powerful new XML tools and utilities to xml_download.html. CERN Courier June 2006 19 CCEJunCompNews18-21 17/5/06 10:43 Page 20 COMPUTING NEWS CNL ARCHIVE electronic mail has to be paid for!), but also the superstitious nonsense in chain letters CNL is 40 years old about “bad luck if you break the chain” might actually worry some people. If you receive After CERN’s 50th anniversary in 2004, this such a letter, please have the common sense year there is another (admittedly smaller) to break the chain and send an appropriate anniversary: the first CERN Computer comment to the person who wasted your time Newsletter (CNL) was circulated in 1966. As by sending it. (CNL 188 March–May 1987.) CNL celebrates its 40th year, we will take a look back at some of the highlights – and Removal of central card punching and historical curiosities – of the early years of card-reading services computing at CERN, seen through its pages. The last central card punch and card reader, You will find a brief look at previous issues of presently connected to the CDC 835, will not the CNL here; for an extended retrospection be available after the Christmas–New Year read the CNL, which is also available online shutdown. (CNL 171, Nov–Dec 1983.) from www.cerncourier.com. View of part of the Computer Centre in 1988. The CRAY X-MP/48 supercomputer can be CRAY introduction WARNING: Future electronic-mail address seen in the background against the rear wall. At the June meeting of the Finance Committee, change for CERN the acquisition of a CRAY X/MP-48 computer In order to conform to new de facto [email protected] or [email protected]. was agreed, for installation in October 1987. standards, and to prepare for transition to CERN). (CNL 193 Sept–Dec 1988.) The system has 4 processors with a basic international standards, we are planning to clock period of 9.5 ns, 8 million 64-bit words introduce new electronic mail addresses for Computerized foolishness of bipolar main memory organized in 32 CERN users, namely [email protected] or, An electronic-mail chain letter has recently banks with a 38 ns cycle time, and for users of VMS Mail, [email protected]. been intercepted at CERN. Not only is such 128 million 64-bit words of secondary CERN.CH […] (currently addresses are foolishness a waste of time and money (yes, memory. (CNL 185 May–Sept 1986.) STORAGE MEDIA HIGH-SPEED LINKS Brookhaven creates magnetic nano-dots Fibre-optic network sets world record In March, scientists from a MultiTeraNet project, funded by the German Federal Ministry 2000 nm 500 nm of Education and Research, established a new An individual magnetic element showing local magnetization under an applied field via world record with colleagues from Fujitsu. They magnetic phase imaging and various reconstruction methods.