News & Events

Yannick Legré was recently appointed director of EGI.eu, which coordinates and manages the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). iSGTW speaks to Legré about his vision for the organization, as well as the challenges it faces, ahead of next month’s EGI Community Forum in Helsinki, Finland.

You’ve been involved in grid computing in Europe for over a decade now. Could you tell the iSGTW readers about this?

I worked with the DataGrid project right from the beginning.  My work was concerned with integrating the different components produced by the project and ensuring that they were appropriate for the communities served. I also started playing with the Globus toolkitback when it was still at version 1.1 or 1.2, so a very early stage.

According to an article published on BizTechAfrica, IBM  announced the results of a new study entitled ‘Setting the pace in Africa: How IT leaders deliver on the potential of emerging technologies’, which found that while nearly 87 percent of African IT leaders rank new technologies such as analytics, cloud, mobile and social media as being critical to business success, only 53% are pushing forward with adoption.

According to an article published on Primeur Weekly Magazine, Big Data is a rather broad and sometimes confusing area. However, there are some aspects of Big Data on which everyone seems to agree. First, the biggest Big Data can be found in science. Second, HPC and to a lesser extent Cloud computing provide the engines to access and process Big Data. And third, Big Data can provide a good ROI in industry for well chosen applications. Hence, a conference that combines these three aspects, provides a convenient way to absorb the latest developments in Big Data. This is exactly what the ISC Big Data Conference, September 25-26, 2013 in Heidelberg, Germany will do. Being chaired by Sverre Jarp from CERN - one of the largest scientific Big Data producers, and with Felix Wortmann, from Bosch Internet of Things Lab and Intel's Stephan Gillich & Girish Juneja providing keynotes, the conference will start with a solid scientific and industrial foundation. Being part of the ISC family of conferences - with the yearly ISC supercomputing event as its flagship - the new conference provides a deep link into the HPC community.

The TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive (TCD) platform should focus on turning personal cloud storage facilities of national research and education networking organisations (NRENs) and universities into trusted services that offer academia alternative storage solutions for data that might pose an unacceptable risk if it were to come into the possession of a foreign government in a non-transparent way. These recommendations were made in the final TCD pilot project report, available as a PDF at http://www.terena.org/publications/.

According to an article published on primeur Weekly Magazine, this year Almere, conveniently located near Amsterdam Airport, will once again host a Cloud Computing Summerschool that will bring together students from all over the world. Keynote lectures will be given by leading European Cloud experts and major Cloud projects such as Contrail. Hence, students get lectures from the persons that are paving the way to the Cloud.

 ITNewsAfrica.com announced in an article that Avanade South Africa and SAS Institute South Africa have confirmed their lead sponsorship of the next Innovation Dinner scheduled in June. The theme chosen for this event is “Big Data, Cloud and the African Enterprise.”

Information technology (IT) research firm, Gartner, predicts that the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) cloud service market could grow its revenue by 24.5% to $462.3 million in 2013.
 
According to Gartner this is the result of that region’s public cloud services market, which grew by 13.4% in 2012 to $371.2 million, compared to $110 billion worldwide.
 
It was further reported that business process services, the largest segment in the cloud services market, accounted for 38% of the total Middle East and North African market last year.