On April, the first European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) User Forum will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania. The event will gather grid specialists from all over the world. The forum is organised by Vilnius University (VU) and information technology (IT) company BAIP.
The international event will be an opportunity for IT specialists, scientists and entrepreneurs to search for ways of effective employment of cluster and supercomputing infrastructure in practical researches.
Each year gathering the best IT experts to the forum, EGI brings together different sites in 45 countries into an integrated, secure and reliable grid infrastructure to provide researchers across Europe with the computing resources they need to tackle today’s scientific challenges.
“It is a great acknowledgement for Lithuania. EGI User Forum will attract to Lithuania a number of academic society representatives who specialise in supercomputing and innovation fields”, – said Kazimieras Tonkūnas, CEO of IT company BAIP, one of the project partner.
Soon VU will launch the new supercomputer providing 1500 computing cores and more than 600 TB of disk space which could be used by medicine experts, geneticists and other specialists. “We hope our technologies and intellectual potential will become a link between science and business, it will create overhead value for country’s economy and will propose new products for the market. We will seek for effective solutions together with international IT technology society”, – stated prof. Algimantas Juozapavičius, vice dean for information technologies of Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Vilnius University.
In 2010, technical forum was held in Amsterdam, the application to hold the EGI User Forum in Lithuania was granted for the first time. According to organisers, over 300 technical leaders, scientists, grid users and business representatives from the following international organisations and education institutions – European Organization for Nuclear Research, INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics), CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), Jülich (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), INAF (National institute for astrophysics) etc. will gather into the “EGI User Forum 2011“ which will be held in Vilnius, “Radisson Blu Hotel Lietuva“ on April 11-14.
Current research methods and results will be discussed in the Forum. Lithuanian scientist – prof. Algimantas Juozapavičius, dr. Tomas Plankis, dr. Linas Bukauskas, dr. D. Zuokas, cyber security specialist Gintaras Čiurlionis and other will deliver presentations and hold discussions during the event.