e-Science News 6th Meeting of the Policy Board of the European Grid Initiative 6th Meeting of the Policy Board of the European Grid Initiative
- 01/03/2009
The 6th Meeting of the Policy Board of the European Grid Initiative (EGI) took place on 1 March 2009, taking advantage of the holding of the 4th EGEE User Forum / OGF 25 event from 2 to 6 March 2009, in Catania, Sicily, Italy, which involved 630 participants.
Portugal participated in the EGEE – Enabling Grids for E-sciencE in Europe Project through LIP - the Experimental Particle Physics and Instrumentation Laboratory (Lisbon and Coimbra), of 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 (IEETA) and the University of Aveiro.
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 Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and Professor Gaspar Barreira, Director of LIP – the Experimental Particle Physics and Instrumentation Laboratory, joined 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.
At this meeting the main decisions taken by the EGI Policy Board were the location of the services of the future European Grid Initiative, with Amsterdam being chosen; the legal status of the new organisation, which will be a Foundation, and the provision of a transitory solution regarding its operation until its new structure is up and running.