CoLab activities inspire cooperation between Portugal and Spain

14 Jun 2010

Alberto Proença reports on IBERGRID 2010.

In 2006, the Ministers of Science of Portugal and Spain signed an agreement for bi-lateral cooperation on Nanosciences and Nanomaterials, also stressing the need for stronger cooperation in grid computing under the designation IBERGRID.  Since then the area of cooperation has grown to include supercomputing and e-Science, specifically HPC activities in computational engineering and science, which also require adequate funded activities to go beyond the current organization of an annual conference.

The IBERGRID'2010 Conference, held this year in Braga (http://www.ibergrid.eu/2010/), had a stronger connection to CoLab: (i) one of the Conference Chairs was one of the Directors of the Advanced Computing Program at CoLab in Portugal, Alberto Proença, and (ii) one of the Tutorial activities had the support of TACC, with a talk and a hands-on session by Paul Navrátil, on the world's largest GPU cluster for data analysis and scientific visualization, the Longhorn cluster.

The Portuguese Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, José Mariano Gago, opened the event, together with the representative of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (José Manuel de Labastida), the Scientific Coordinators of the e-Science programs in Portugal (Luís Magalhães) and Spain (Vicente Hernandez), the Director of the Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, DG-INFSO/F, at the European Commission (Mário Campolargo), and the Rector of University of Minho (António Cunha).  The Conference Chair during his intervention challenged this political panel to be more active at IBERGRID by funding concrete actions in a fashion similar to the ones already running on CoLab: on researcher mobility and on joint projects.

In less than two days, the decision to open a Call for e-Science researcher mobility was signed by both Ministers - the call will be simultaneously open in Portugal and Spain from July 1 till July 23 - and the Ministers also agreed to open another call for collaborative projects later this year, for projects to start early 2011.