The 2nd BalticGrid Summer School will be held in Riga, Latvia at the Riga Technical University, on 2-6 July, 2007. This summer school is devoted mainly to application users and developers who want to exploit grid resources. It will cover five days of lectures and practical work. The first day will include a lecture and an introductory course on Grid Computing. Lectures and exercises on various aspects of applications grid-enabling will cover the next three days. The last day of the school will be focused on Grid security issues.

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences organizes a Joint EGEE and SEE-GRID-2 Summer School on Grid Application Support on 25-30 June 2007 in Budapest. The school aims at introducing distributed computing & grid technologies to academy and industry. Whereas the Web is a service for sharing information over the Internet, the Grid is a service for sharing computer power, storage capacity, data and knowledge over the Internet. The Grid goes well beyond simple communication between computers, and aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource. The summer school introduces tools and technologies developed by the Enabling Grids for E-Science (EGEE) project. The EGEE project brings together experts from over 40 countries with the common aim of building on recent advances in Grid technology and developing a service Grid infrastructure which is available to scientists and companies 24 hours-a-day. The EGEE infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research especially where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures. The first applications to use the EGEE Grid infrastructure were from the fields of high energy physics and biomedicine, but EGEE now also supports applications from many other scientific domains such as astrophysics, computational chemistry, earth sciences, finance, fusion, geophysics, seismic processing, health care, geography, digital libraries, archeology and multimedia. In addition, there are several applications from the industrial sector running on the EGEE Grid, such as applications from geophysics and the plastics industry.

A synergy between the SEE-GRID-2 and the BELIEF project has been enacted with a signed MoU that will guarantee the wide spread of the SEE-GRID-2 public documentation through BELIEFs digital library. BELIEF is a FP6 project that aims to to facilitate knowledge-exchange on eInfrastructures through the development of a one-stop home for public eInfrastructure documentation.

SZTAKI is pleased to announce that P-GRADE portal 2.4.1 version is released. The differences between release 2.4 and 2.4.1 are as follows: 1. New features and improvement of services: a. Since many VOs in EGEE changed from LCG-2 to gLite, the portal is extended to provide full support for gLite. Jobs can be submitted to EGEE VO-s via both LCG-2 and Glite infrastructure. b. Since many VOs in EGEE introduced the usage of VOMS, automatic VOMS extension of certificates has been introduced by the portal. c. As we experienced that the EGEE brokers not 100% stable, the new portal release supports the usage of several brokers. The portal can be configured with all the brokers that are available in a VO. If the primary broker is down for any reason, the portal automatically transfers jobs to the secondary broker. If even the secondary broker is down the third broker is used and so on. 2. Bug fixes: a. Possibility to store the data of the end users in reliable databases: It has turned out that the default hibernate function (HSQL) supported by Gridsphere is error prone and in some cases the logging data of users have been lost after restarting the Portal. Therefore the Portal administrator is supported to define and set up an external Data Base (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. . see details in the attached Installation Guide) for storing the log information. b. The data transfer load of the information system has been substantially reduced. The BDII server is asked for data only on user request. c. The internal data management of the portal server has been revised and a more accurate quota handling mechanism has been implemented. d. A bug has been fixed occurring at the concurrent upload and download of proxy certificates. This failure occurred typically at conducted practices during training courses when many users executed the same command within a short time. e. The source code was further polished up and many smaller bugs have been removed. We strongly recommend to up-date your portal from 2.4 to 2.4.1. From now on SZTAKI will support only portal version 2.4.1 in the future. We are going to up-date our SEE-GRID-2 service portal on the 5th of January and hence we kindly ask you to make sure that all your jobs and workflows will be finished by that time. The up-date procedure will start at 8 am and after that time we cannot guarantee the execution of your jobs. As soon as the up-date procedure is completed we will notify you and you can resume the usage of the portal. The expected day of the notification is Monday (8th of January).