The International Desktop Grid Federation has published a Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map, earlier this year. It summarizes several years of efforts to turn Desktop Grids into useful computational tools for day to day large scale computational tasks. The Road Map provides advise on all aspects, from technical to political oriented audiences. An important part of the Road Map is dedicated to Green Desktop Grids. While also legal asepcts of Desktop Grids are described in the Road Map, it equally explains where Desktop Grids fit into the eScience and Cloud landscape.

The presentation will concentrate on illustrating the implementation of the Desktop Grid Roadmap in all kinds of situations, ranging from small local Desktop Grids that allow for better use of a department's resources, to large interconnected infrastructures, with several Desktop Grids, and EGI type of Grids, bridged to allow seamless integration in complex scientific work flows.

The International Desktop Grid federation organizes the Desktop Grid Community ( desktopgridfederation.org ). The work is supported by the EDGI ( edgi-project.eu ) and DEGISCO projects ( degisco.eu ).

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In 2002 there was a supercomputer that could hit 3.7 TFLOPS, that computer took 25 racks, 512 servers and used 128 kW. By 2007 that same 3.7 TFLOPS could be had by just a single rack's worth of computers. Today single rack does more than 10 TFLOPS and consumes only 30kW so clearly Moore's law is alive and doing well in the datacenter, but what does this mean to our HPC challenges?

Today as we have commoditized the server, we have un-commoditized the data center, but this is NOT a ''crisis'', rather it is an opportunity to differentiate. Those who apply the right planning and engineering in the exascale data center will prosper, those who do not will suffer.

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This talk will focus on the achievements of WLCG in the light of the first two years of data taking at the LHC. Starting from Ian Foster's three-point checklist for grid computing, it will analyze how well we have satisfied these criteria and how grid computing weighs up with respect to alternative models (clouds, centralized clusters and/or supercomputers). It will also analyze grid use cases and motivate the need for retaining many but not all elements of the current model for the foreseeable future. Finally, it will discuss future directions not only for the HEP and WLCG communities but also in the wider context of Europe's digital agenda. The talk will be given from a personal viewpoint emphasizing the role of individuals and the benefits to science and society that go way beyond the direct goal of providing a distributed computing and storage solution to meet the needs of the LHC experiments.

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VPH-Share is building an infrastructure for the sharing of tools, models and data between members of the Virtual Physiological Human research community. To provide concrete instantiations of the benefit of a coherent infrastructure, the first target is to support and to disseminate four specific workflows from existing projects (either completed or well-advanced before the commencement of VPH-Share). This talk will include a discussion of the state-of-the-art in development of VPH simulation workflows, including the challenges of model personalisation and of clinical translation. Currently our ability to produce geometrically faithful representations of the individual patient anatomy is somewhat stronger than our ability to represent individual physiology. One of the challenges is to define the appropriate simulation envelope for the individual. The talk will explore the requirement for establishment of an appropriate infrastructure and architecture for meeting the needs of the VPH community.

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It is scale that matters for the FP7 UrbanFlood (www.urbanflood.eu) early warning system. It has been designed to monitor thousands of dikes and dams, and one can use it also for a single one. It can handle hundreds of thousands of sensors, and one can also use it for a measurement in your backyard. Crucially, data driven modeling is deployed as there is no other way to make sense of data from remote dikes and dams from which any details are lacking. The keynote will reflect upon the UrbanFlood system as an operating system for cyber physical infrastructures and details modern computer science concepts that lie at its hart. This will be illustrated by detailing and visualizing the applied concepts for cloud and network architectures and AI.

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Today scientists and engineers are commonly faced with the challenge of modelling, predicting and controlling multiscale systems which cross scientific disciplines and where several processes acting at different scales coexist and interact. Such multidisciplinary multiscale models, when simulated in three dimensions, require large scale or even extreme scale computing capabilities. The MAPPER project develops computational strategies, software and services for distributed multiscale simulations across disciplines, exploiting existing and evolving European e-infrastructure. Driven by seven challenging applications from five representative scientific domains (fusion, clinical decision making, systems biology, nano science, engineering), MAPPER deploys a computational science environment for distributed multiscale computing on and across European e-infrastructures. By taking advantage of existing software and services, as delivered by EU and national projects, MAPPER will result in high quality components for today's e-infrastructures. We develop tools, software and services that permit loosely and tightly coupled multiscale computing in a user friendly and transparent way. We integrate our applications into the MAPPER environment, and demonstrate their enhanced capabilities. MAPPER integrates heterogeneous infrastructures for programming and execution of multiscale simulations. We reuse as much of the existing infrastructural and software solutions as possible. The MAPPER solutions is developed on top of existing e-infrastructures without the necessity to modify already deployed components. The functionality to be delivered is realized as extensions to existing e-infra-structures. The integration is done using well defined APIs and standard based interfaces, thus reducing potential im-pact of changes on middle-ware level components.

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The Virtual Research Community model was established a year and a half ago at the time of the creation of the European Grid Infrastructure as a federation of resource providers across Europe and the start of the associated EU-funded project EGI-InSPIRE. Virtual Research Communities or VRCs were envisaged as flexible organisations of scientists and researchers who had a common area of academic interest for which having a single voice to communicate their needs would benefit their research in terms of e-Infrastructure. The mechanism for this communication is the User Community Board or UCB which meets monthly to review the changing landscape of e-Infrastructure-based research in Europe. As a formal channel into EGI, the UCB is empowered to guide the evolution of the infrastructure and to advise on current activities especially with respect to support and delivery. Of course communication operates in two directions and the community representatives are also expected to act as messengers back to their own communities with insight into the operations and plans of EGI and EGI-InSPIRE.

In the past the user communities were treated as more or less equally large blocks of similar users. Whilst this was applicable under the large project framework which funded support for grid research it is less applicable today. We live in the world of the long tail and infinite customisation. People, especially researchers, expect to be be fully in charge of their destiny. For this reason the services that EGI (and EGI-InSPIRE) offer to users and communities are increasingly being designed to be scalable and flexible so that they are equally applicable for the traditional Heavy User Communities such as High Energy Physics and Life Sciences but also for smaller communities such as structural biology in the form of WeNMR for example. Having established the EGI Training Marketplace, Applications Database and the Requirements Tracker during the first year, we then went on to develop web gadgets (also known as widgets) which can be embedded into your own or your group’s web site or portal to provide a customised interface to these support-related resources.

As more research communities come on board as VRCs - both large and small, established and emerging - so more flexibility and customisation will be built into the delivery of the infrastructure. As the architecture of the infrastructure, in the widest sense of the word, moves towards a multi-tiered model, so this personalisation will be come more powerful and have a greater impact in terms of science and research across Europe and beyond. EGI is listening and is evolving.

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Clouds seem to be the next natural step in searching for maximal efficiency of computing systems, after SMP architectures, clusters and grids. As they were treated as an idea for a few years, more and more persons are now looking for ready to run implementations. HP, the company who has got the word ''cloud'' listed in the company strategy, offers various approaches to the solution, from lending the infrastructure or applications, through migration of traditional data center models to the clouds, to building modern converged infrastructure to be served in the cloud model. The presentation will show HP approach to the paradigm, focus on the areas interesting in HPC and list a few real case studies, where the clouds are implemented.

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