Announcing the School for Grid Application Porting

Announcing the School for Grid Application Porting : Johannesburg, 15 - 26 March
(see important dates and links at the end of this announcement)

During the last few months, the South African National Grid (SAGrid) federation has been preparing to move from prototype to production phase. In order to encourage usage  and develop user communities, two member institutes - the universities of Johannesburg (UJ) and the Witwatersrand (Wits) will be hosting a user training and application development school from March 15 to 26. The school will be run in collaboration with EGEE-II (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) and GILDA (Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities)

In scientific research, collaboration, resource sharing, advanced computing facilities and data are enabling the acceleration of discovery, innovation and efficiency more than ever. The grid-computing paradigm is a crucial aspect of today's e-Science, and national infrastructures have been deployed worldwide, with a strong emphasis on usability, interoperability and collaboration. However, development and support of the user communities is just as crucial as that of the infrastructure itself.

This school aims at bringing new research groups to use the SAGrid services, so as to increase the number and diversity of application domains and scientific communities supported by the SAGrid e-Infrastructure. While the course is aimed at porting new applications to run natively on the SAGrid infrastructure, beginners who would like to have a first contact" with the grid are also strongly encouraged to attend.

Training and Curriculum

The training programme will include lectures, as well as practical hands-on tutorial sessions, and dedicated application development sessions. Fields of research including, but not limited to Computer Science and informatics, physics, astronomy, life sciences and biomedical informatics engineering, chemistry, geomatics and earth observation,
human languages, humanities.

Application porting prerequisites

The School will assume that students have diverse backgrounds and no prior experience with grid computing, however will build on existing experience with shell programming, operating systems (Linux flavours and Windows XP) and programming languages (python, C++, perl, Java).

Important Dates :

Candidate Application Submission Closure Date : 19 February 2010
Application Selection Announcement : 3 March 2010
Registration Open : 3 March to 10 March

Important links :
Event Home for more info and registration: http://indico.sagrid.ac.za/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=64
SAGrid: http://www.sagrid.ac.za
EGEE: http://eu-egee.org
GILDA: http://gilda.ct.infn.it
University of Johannesburg Research Cluster: http://physics.uj.ac.za/wiki/cluster
University of the Witwatersrand Knowledge and Information Management: http://kim.wits.ac.za