e-IRG Workshop in Zürich, 24-25 April, 2008
The e-IRG workshop gathered almost 80 experts for two days at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. The aim of this workshop was to discuss and explore open issues and questions for enabling an easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe based on sustainable e-infrastructures
The first day focussed on security. Thomas Dübendorfer from ISSS / Google presented today’s ten top security trends. He stressed the new economic value of information, the question of controlling the information and its use, and listed critical infrastructure outages and misuses. Marko Bonac from ARNES, who was also representing the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA), viewed security issues from the National Research and Education Networks (NREN) standpoint. He underlined the importance of trust between different actors forming the research e-Infrastructures. Speakers representing Grids (EGEE III), supercomputers (DEISA) and data infrastructure projects (EMBL) presented security models, solutions and challenges as seen in their respective areas. It was widely concluded that there is a need for an increased collaboration in security issues between all communities at institutional, national and international levels.
The second day brought a global perspective into the discussion, when Kento Aida from the National Institute of Informatics of Japan (NII) gave an overview of Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI). CSI is a new information infrastructure to boost today’s advanced scientific research in Japan including networking, federated ID management and grids. Bill Feiereisen from the American National Science Center underlined the impact of recent advances in HPC computing and the future opportunities enabled by the field. He emphasised the need for stronger collaboration between the US and Europe in e-Infrastructure development efforts. Kyriakos Baxevanides, Deputy Head of the Research Infrastructures Unit of the European Commission presented the e-Infrastructure projects and efforts of the international collaboration efforts between e-Infrastructures during the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme. He also accentuated the role of the European Union in supporting the development of global cross-disciplinary research infrastructures in the future.
The workshop was followed by a closed e-IRG meeting with the e-IRG delegates. Leif Laaksonen, Chair of the e-IRG, stated immediately after the meeting that securing the information infrastructure to create confidence among the key stakeholders will be a major challenge for the e-IRG.
The next e-IRG workshop will be held during the French EU Presidency in Versailles, France, on October 2008. More information of the event will be published shortly on the e-IRG website (www.e-irg.eu).
