e-Science News 4th Policy Board Meeting of the European Grid Initiative 4th Policy Board Meeting of the European Grid Initiative
- 22/09/2008
On 22 September 2008, the 4th Policy Board Meeting of the European Grid Initiative (EGI) was held in Istanbul, taking advantage of the EGEE’08 Conference from 22 to 26 September 2008, which had 450 registered participants.
Portugal participates in the EGEE – Enabling Grids for E-sciencE in Europe Project through LIP – the Experimental Particle Physics and Instrumentation Laboratory (Lisbon and Coimbra), the Universities of Porto and Minho, the Centre for Plasma Physics at IST (Instituto Superior Técnico), and IEETA – the Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of the University of Aveiro, and the Lusíada University (Familicão).
THE EGEE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 240 scientific institutions in 45 countries to provide a permanent GRID Computing structure which consists of 41 000 CPUs and 5 Petabytes disc space (5 million Gigabytes), involving the simultaneous functioning of 100 000 computational processes. The project was initially focused on high energy Physics processes and life sciences, and now includes applications from other areas, such as Geology, computational Chemistry and image processing.
The President of The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and Professor Gaspar Barreira, Director do LIP – Laboratory for Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics, form part of the EGI Policy Board as representatives of the National GRID Initiative.
The EGI Policy Board, initially designated as the EGI Consultative Board, elected Professor Gaspar Barreira as its interim President upon initiating its activities in 2007 for the period in which it was being set up and its statutes approved. Given that this stage concluded with the meeting of 1 July 2008, it was decided to elect the President of the Policy Board at the meeting of 22 September 2008 for a regular term of office, and Professor Gaspar Barreira was once more elected to the post.
This meeting of the EGI Policy Board of the European Grid Initiative decided to open a call for proposals for the location of the services of the future European Grid Initiative, specified its respective terms of reference and debated alternatives for the legal personality of the future organization and the EGI Blueprint Proposal which has been prepared with the aim of guiding the setting up and activities of the new organization.