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Oracle debates future Grid directions at EGEE 06
Oracle presented its Grid Computing technologies and led debate about the future of scientific grids at Europe's largest Grid Computing conference.
Growing enthusiasm for the potential applications of Grid technologies saw 700 participants flocking
to this year's Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) conference.
Held in Geneva from September 25th to 29th, the conference was the largest Grid conference since the GGF5 meeting in 2002. Oracle was delighted
to be not only a sponsor, but also a major participant in the conference presentations and resulting debate.
EGEE is a EU-funded project that will run until spring 2008. It provides the world's largest production-quality scientific Grid infrastructure, enabling scientists and researchers to run applications that require more computing power than each participating project or institution would have been able to supply on its own.
The EGEE Grid currently consists of over 30,000 CPUs available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also offers around five petabytes of storage space, and maintains 10,000 concurrent jobs on average. It is formed from computing resources located at almost 200 sites in 48 countries, and completes
up to 50,000 jobs every day.
Projects that are making use of the EGEE Grid include the German Climate Computing Centre's climate data analysis project, and the European Space Agency's Planck mission to map the microwave sky. In total, more than 90 institutions in 32 countries across the world are participating
in the project.
The EGEE'06 conference was a great opportunity for Oracle to showcase its Grid Computing technologies – already in use in some parts of the EGEE infrastructure – to a large, multidisciplinary scientific and academic audience. It was also an ideal forum for discussion and debate about current challenges, missing features, future directions and possible roadmaps for both commercial
and scientific Grids.
"Oracle has been a major player in enterprise Grid computing for many years, and through some of the R&D projects we are running across Europe, Middle East and Africa, we have also demonstrated how Oracle Grid technology can successfully be used in a scientific environment," said Monica
Marinucci Lopez,
EMEA Oracle in R&D Programme Director. The EGEE'06 Business Track was the natural forum to present and to share results of those projects with the wide and multidisciplinary EGEE
community."
Within the EGEE Business Track, Oracle organised a workshop on Data Management featuring both Oracle and non-Oracle speakers. The aim of the workshop was to discuss how databases can best support data management in a Grid R&D environment, and how the scientific/R&D community can best work with industry
for mutual benefit. Findings from the session were presented during the
Final Panel Discussion of the Business Track, which led to an interesting discussion on the divergence or
convergence of Enterprise and Scientific Grids.
The organisers of EGEE's mini-User Forum also invited Oracle to give a seminar on Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). This is a standard that has been promoted by leading vendors, including Oracle, and which allows discrete web services to be orchestrated into end-to-end business processes. Following the successful application of BPEL in the commercial sector, EGEE users are now investigating how service-oriented architectures, Web Services and their orchestration through BPEL could help the R&D community and EGEE projects in which workflows and event management are
key elements.
Oracle also participated in a public event called First, on e-Archiving and Digital Libraries, which ran alongside the EGEE'06 conference. Along with speakers from the World Health Organisation, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), and the DILIGENT digital library project, Oracle contributed to the session from a more commercial perspective, presenting its Content Management vision.
"We were very pleased that Oracle became involved in the EGEE'06 conference on so many levels," said Bob Jones, EGEE Project Director. "They gave important input on exploring how grid data management techniques are developing, which interested all the participants in the business track, and they also
contributed their extensive experience and perspective to the programme overall."
Participating in EGEE'06 was an outstanding opportunity for Oracle to forge closer links with the European scientific and R&D community, and to explore ways in which enterprise Grid computing can be fruitfully applied in the academic and research sectors. Oracle will continue to contribute to EGEE events, such as the EGEE Industry Days, in order to gain a better understanding of the scientific community's requirements and
to identify opportunities for beneficial collaboration. |
