Over the course of the next two weeks there will be a great deal of news about cloud initiatives throughout Europe. A series of events will reveal progress toward European research goals—and will highlight how new ways of sharing resources, collaborating and building tools are setting Europe’s research community apart.

For the entirety of this week, five co-located events that cover the European ecosystem of grid and cloud computing in research and science. Lyon, France will be the setting for a diverse collection of cloud and grid sessions as the EGI Technical Forum is in full swing.

The EGI Technical Forum began yesterday with a range of discussions in honor of French Grid Day and a number of specific technical sessions related to everything from complex data management and authentication issues for computing grids to use cases and stories from the team behind Globus Europe and the GlobusOnline service which we described in detail earlier this year.

We are on-site in Lyon this week to report on select items from the week’s agenda and will also be on site next week in Mannheim, Germany for the ISC Cloud event.  Today, and for the rest of this coming week, however, our attention is focused on European grid and cloud projects that are being carried out on resources throughout the Europe.

The umbrella event in Lyon will be hosted by EGI.eu, the Institut des Grilles du CNRS (the French National Grid Initiative) and the Computing Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics, together with the EGI-InSPIRE and e-ScienceTalk projects.

According to the organizers, the co-located events were developed to “help the community to review progress toward the adoption of a federated virtualized infrastructure for European researchers.” They say that this marks “a critical next phase in providing a production infrastructure able to support diverse user communities.”

The following is a list of the events that are in the lineup for the first week:

•    French Grid Day: Monday, 19 September. The French Grid Day (en français, Rencontres Scientifiques France Grilles 2011) will be the first scientific meeting organised by France Grilles, the French NGI. The mail goal of the French Grid Sessions is to present an overview of the scientific work carried out in all disciplines with an input from production grid infrastructures. The Scientific Committee will award the first France Grilles prize to the most significant contribution.

•    GlobusEUROPE: Monday, 19 September. GlobusEUROPE 2011 is the first-ever conference exclusively for Globus users in Europe. The event is the European counterpart of GlobusWORLD (the leading annual Globus event worldwide) and has an equally strong community focus with topics geared specifically for the concerns of a European audience. If you are a European Globus user, this is the must-attend event of the year! There is no better forum to connect with European Globus users and get your questions answered by experts from Europe and the US. In addition, all attendees will receive a free gift to commemorate this first annual event. GlobusEUROPE is organized by the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) and co-located with the Technical Forum of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the Open Grid Forum 33rd Conference (OGF33), and Grid2011.

•     OGF 33: 19-21 September. Due to its co-location with EGI and Grid2011, OGF33 will provide a unique opportunity to join with leaders from around the world in an open forum to foster collaboration on common interests, develop best practices and further standardization in key areas of distributed infrastructures.

•    Grid 2011: 22-23 September. The 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2011) is an annual international meeting that brings together a community of researchers, developers, practitioners, and users involved with Grid technology and Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI), including cloud computing and Green IT. The conference will feature invited keynotes, workshops, a poster session and refereed paper presentations.

•    SIENA: Wednesday, 21 September: The main goal of the workshop is to focus on DCI assets for the purpose of serving the eScience community and identifying standards required to make these assets interoperable. The workshop features a presentation from Carl Christian Buhr, Member of the Cabinet of Neelie Kroes European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, as well as insights into the various assets that the EC-funded DCI and ESFRI projects can offer in the areas of eScience, Industry and eGovernment. Effective dialogue between stakeholder participants will be ensured through an Open Discussion on technical challenges, eGovernment, industry uptake, and call to action.

•    9th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting (by invitation only): 22-23 September. The meeting aims to introduce the new e-Infrastructures projects starting in 2011, to take stock of progress in e-Infrastructures and to discuss future perspectives on data, cloud technologies and e-Science environments, HPC and Software.
There are a number of key themes that emerge across all of the co-located events. The program features tracks that will examine general cloud and virtualization adoption within the EGI, the overall sustainability of these infrastructures, the state of the communities and services that have built around the cloud, and those that update attendees on various projects in Europe’s cloud, grid and research communities.

We hope that you remain with us during the course of the week as we bring you special coverage from the technical sessions, presentations, and European thought leaders who are shaping the next generation of e-Infrastructure.

As the sessions in Lyon come to a close, another important event for the HPC cloud community, the second annual ISC Cloud ’11 conference, will take place between September 26-27. 

We will also be covering that event, so buckle up for a journey for the rest of this month through Europe’s grid and cloud landscape.