| Name | Short name | Country |
| Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences | MTA SZTAKI | Hungary |
| University of Innsbruck | UIBK | Austria |
| Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin | C-UB | Germany |
| French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS | France |
| University of Westminster | UOW | United Kingdom |
| Cardiff University | CU | United Kingdom |
| Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam | AMC | Netherlands |
| University of Southern California | USC | USA |
The Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems of MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute plays a leading role in the research of cluster and grid technologies in Hungary.
MTA SZTAKI has significant experience in doing research and providing infrastructure services in the filed of service and desktop grids. MTA SZTAKI was a member of the European DataGrid project and was leader of the Grid Monitoring work package of the European GridLab project and the Automatic performance Analysis and Grid Computing WP of the European APART-2 project. MTA SZTAKI participated in the EGEE project as the Central-European Regional Training Centre of EGEE and contributed to the NA4, NA2 and SA1 WPs. It led the Grid
Middleware WP of the SEE-GRID project. Currently, LPDS is a partner in the EGEE-II, SEEGRID-2, ICEAGE and CoreGrid FP6 projects. It was also member in the GridCoord projects.
MTA SZTAKI participated in the vast majority of Hungarian Grid projects (DemoGrid, ClusterGrid, SuperGrid, Chemistry Grid, Hungarian Grid, SuperClusterGrid, etc.) and led several of them. MTA SZTAKI contributed to the construction of the Hungarian ClusterGrid infrastructure and established the HunGrid Grid infrastructure that is the Hungarian VO of the EGEE Grid. MTA SZTAKI played a leading role in the establishment of the SEE-Grid
infrastructure, too. MTA SZTAKI adapted and extended the BOINC technology in order to create the SZTAKI DG (SZDG) system. MTA SZTAKI has been actively participating in the research of DG technologies in the framework of the EU CoreGrid project. MTA SZTAKI as the Central-European Regional Training Centre of EGEE plays active role in providing Grid trainings in the CE and SEE regions.
Key personnel:
Prof. Dr. Peter Kacsuk - Peter KACSUK is the Head of the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems of MTA SZTAKI. He received his professor title from the Hungarian President in 1999 and the Doctor of Academy degree (DSc) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2001. He has been a part-time full professor at the Cavendish School of Computer Science of the University of Westminster and the Eötvös Lóránd University of Science since
2001. He served as visiting scientist or professor several times at various universities of Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Spain, Japan and USA. He has published two books, two lecture notes and more than 200 scientific papers on parallel computer architectures, parallel software engineering and Grid computing. He is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Grid Computing published by Springer. He has been granted for more than 40 national and international research projects since 1992. He played key roles in several international projects
and work groups such as: Performance Monitoring WG of the European Grid Forum, Performance Monitoring WG of the Global Grid Forum, EU DataGrid project, EU GridLab project, EU COST MetaChem project, EU CoreGrid project, GridCoord project, Grid Middleware WP of the SEE-GRID project, etc.
Dr. Robert Lovas - is the deputy head of the Laboratory of the Parallel and Distributed Systems of MTA SZTAKI. From 2004 he has been a member of the Technical Committee of the Hungarian Grid Competence Center, and Technical Coordinator of Grid Application Support Centre, Budapest from 2007. From 1997 he has been involved several national, intergovernmental and European research projects as a key developer of P-GRADE
programming environment. In the frame of Harness project he worked as a research associate at the Department of Math and Computer Science, Emory University (USA) in 2000. He is a coauthor of more than 30 scientific papers on parallel software engineering and Grid computing tools particularly from design, debugging and application aspects.
-== University of Innsbruck ==-
The Distributed and Parallel Systems Group at the University of Innsbruck focuses on simplifying the effective use of multiprocessor architectures and geographically distributed heterogeneous resources as the basis for the next generation Internet-enabled performanceoriented applications. A team of 25 researchers led by Thomas Fahringer is conducting the research that crafts the ASKALON development and computing environment for Grid and cloud
computing infrastructures. ASKALON is fostering research, education, and technology transfer programs that are contributing to evolutionary new ways of utilizing the global information infrastructure as a platform for computation, changing the way in which scientist and engineers solve their everyday problems. We are working closely with a large number of collaborators from industry and academia to leverage Grid and cloud computing for real-world application development in many areas including applied environment applications, finance modelling, high-energy physics, meteorology, medical sciences, on-line gaming, e-learning and disaster management.
UIBK has been involved in a large number of national and international Grid and cloud computing projects including: SFB Aurora, Austrian Grid project, EU EGEE I-III Integrated Project (Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe), EU K-Wf Grid STREP (Knowledge-based Workflow systems for Grid applications), EU ASG Integrated Project (Adaptive Services Grid), EU edutain@grid STREP, EU CoreGrid Network of Excellence, and EU EC-Gin (Europe-China
Grid InterNetworking).
Key personnel:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Fahringer is a professor of computer science and head of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck. His research interests are in programming languages, performance tools, debuggers, compiler analysis and program optimisation based on advanced technologies such as genetic algorithms and machine learning. He has a long research history on parallel and distributed high performance systems and their applications starting in 1988. He participated in numerous EU-funded (ESPRIT PPPE, ESPRIT APART 1 and IST APART 2, ESPRIT Eurotools), international (including DARPA, NSF and NASA funded projects) and national projects. He has also been involved in many Grid-related performanceoriented projects such as IST K-Wf Grid, IST ASG, IST CoreGRID, and IST EGEE. He is currently coordinating the edutain@grid STREP which will be completed in August 2009. He has published over 140 papers in the area of performance-oriented parallel and distributed high-performance computing including 30 journal articles, 3 books, and won 3 best paper awards at top ranking IEEE and ACM conferences in the area of parallel computing.
Dr. Radu Prodan earned his Ph.D. in 2004 from the Vienna University of Technology and his Habilitation degree in 2009 from the University of Innsbruck. Currently he is an associate professor at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck. Prodan participated in several national and European projects and is currently work package leader in the IST-034601 edutain@grid project. He is the author of over 75 conference and journal publications, including one book, and one IEEE best paper award.
The Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin is a joint institution of the Free University Berlin and the Humboldt-University of Berlin.
At the Charité, scientists and physicians engage in state-of-the-art research, patient care and education. More than half of the German Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology come from the Charité, among them Emil von Behring, Robert Koch and Paul Ehrlich. The Charité also has an international reputation for excellence in training. It extends over four campuses with more than 100 clinics and institutes bundled under 17 Charité Centers. The Charité has a turnover of nearly 1 billion Euros per year, and it is one of the largest employers in Berlin with
14,500 employees.
The Charité has one of the most prestigious medical faculties in Germany. Currently, there are a total of 7,000 enrolled students. Study programs include the fields of medicine, dentistry, and medical and nursing pedagogy/nursing sciences as well as numerous postgraduate study programs.
In 2008, the medical faculty of Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin received more than 129 million Euros of external funding for research ("third-party funding"). As such, the Charité holds one of the top positions in research among medical faculties in Germany.
The Institute of Medical Informatics is part of the Center for Therapy Research. It develops diagnosis and therapy systems, in particular using methods of medical imaging and signal processing, multimedia and virtual reality. The institute's task also includes the development of strategic information technologies. The Institute's research encompasses intraoperative navigation, computer-assisted therapy planning and IT-solutions connected with protecting image data. The Institute is coordinating the image processing module of the MediGRID project,
concerned with the adoption of medical image processing applications to the D-Grid infrastructure, the German national grid initiative. A focal point is the reliable, user friendly and fault-tolerant grid integration of medical imaging applications, thus employing the grid workflows as a virtualization step between the user and the grid. Further activities are in the development of secure medical image transfer between clinical picture archiving systems and the Grid Infrastructure as well as the development of portal-based graphical user interfaces.
Key personnel:
Dr. rer. nat. Dagmar Krefting has studied physics and chemistry at the University of Göttingen, where she finished her PhD in applied physics. After postdoctoral studies in the Fritz-Haber-Institute, the Max-Planck Institute for physical chemistry, she joined the Institute of Medical Informatics in 2004 as scientist and lecturer. Her main focus is on development and userfriendly provision of medical image and biosignal processing for clinical research. As leader of the medical image processing module within the MediGRID project, the German national grid project for life science and medicine, she integrated several workflow based data analysis methods into the D-Grid infrastructure, encompassing neuroscience, sleep medicine and hemodynamic simulations. She is deputy leader of the project "PneumoGrid" and associate partner in "MedInfoGrid", both Healthgrid projects within the publicly funded D-Grid initiative.
-== Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ==-
CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) is a public institution depending on the French Ministry for Research. Its role is the acquisition of knowledge and the exploitation of this knowledge for the benefit of the society. CNRS hires more than 26000 permanent staff (more than 11600 scientific researchers and more than 14400 engineers). Its budget for year 2009 was 3.3 billion Euros, including 607 million Euros of selfproduced resources. CNRS is active in more than1200 units through the French territory and covers all major areas of knowledge. Its activities are structured in ten scientific departments: chemistry, ecology and environment, physics, nuclear and particle physics, biology, humanities, mathematics, engineering, computer sciences and universe.
Most of the research units of CNRS are collaborating with Universities, research institutes, and industrial parties (several thousand collaborations). In the area of distributed computing, CNRS has played a major role in particular with a strong involvement in the European projects EU-DataGrid, EGEE, EGEE-II and EGEE-III. CNRS is one of the main actors of the European Grid Initiative and strongly involved in the French National Grid Initiative set up. CNRS has created a national Institute of Grids in 2007, covering both production use and research on distributed computing infrastructures. The INS2I department of CNRS (National Institute of Computer Sciences and their Interactions) is both addressing the scientific and the technological aspects of IT and it fosters collaborations between these disciplines. It aims at developing, designing, producing and exploiting safe, efficient and communicating systems tackling the human needs, in particular health. INS2I is pioneering the development of distributed computing infrastructures. It is one of the major actors of the Grid'5000 French national infrastructure dedicated to research on large-scale distributed systems. It is involved in the development of networks and mobile systems. It tackles the problems of manipulating, managing and processing large data sets. It is also involved in the areas of signal and image processing, modelling, biomechanics, fluid modelling, etc. Two CNRS research units are involved in this project: I3S and CREATIS.
Key personnel at CNRS/I3S:
Dr Johan Montagnat- Johan Montagnat is a senior computer scientist at CNRS. He is the head of the Modalis research team from the I3S laboratory, the scientific leader of the GWENDIA national project, and involved in many European and National research projects related to distributed infrastructures design, distributed computing optimization, and application workflows. In addition, he has a strong background in medical image analysis pipelines and the support of large-scale scientific experiments on distributed infrastructures.
Dr Diane Lingrand–Diane Lingrand is an assistant professor at the University of Nice – Sophia Antipolis, attached to the I3S laboratory as a member of the Modalis research team. Diane Lingrand is specialized in the modelling and optimization of very large-scale distributed computing infrastructures. Her research focuses on the job submission strategies implemented in grid middlewares and/or adopted by end users in practice. She works at the interface
between the distributed computing community and the end users exploiting distributed infrastructures in production.
Key personnel at CNRS/CREATIS:
Dr Tristan Glatard – is a junior computer scientist at CNRS. He is the leader of the VIP national project (Virtual Imaging Platform), involved in the EGEE-III EU grid project and in two other national projects related to the execution of scientific applications on distributed platforms (Gwendia, hGATE). He has a strong background in designing and using workflow systems to run medical imaging application on large-scale distributed infrastructures.
-== University of Westminster ==-
The University of Westminster's Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC) is focused on research and application of distributed and parallel computation technologies. CPC is engaged in research on Grid computing including its Web services-oriented approach based on OGSA/WSRF platforms. CPC was involved in the "OGSI Testbed" e-Science project to evaluate the OGSI platform and its GT3 implementation on a UK multi-site testbed. Within the framework of the project the research team developed the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Applications (GEMLCA).
CPC has installed and runs a BOINC-based Westminster desktop Grid in 2006 using 500 computers as workers. CPC joined the National Grid Service (NGS) as a partner site in February 2006 providing a 32 node cluster for the NGS users. CPC has launched the Westminster Grid Application Service (W-GRASS) in 2007. CPC has been involved in the ePerSpace FP6 Integrated Project and is being participated in the CoreGrid Network of Excellence project and contributing to several work-packages. Currently, the CPC research team consists of one full-time professor, one reader, two senior lecturers and six full-time and part-time PhD students and two researchers.
Key personnel:
Prof. Dr Stephen Winter - is Professor of Distributed Computing Systems, and Head of the Cavendish School of Computer Science at the University of Westminster. He is also the Director of the Centre for Parallel Computing (see above), and has led a number of research projects in parallel and distributed computing technology funded by national Research Councils and the European Union including EDPEPPS, SEPP, and HPCTI. He has also led the development of distributed simulation architectures for urban traffic modelling and microscopic simulation through the EU-funded projects HIPERTRANS, and OSSA. He has published over 100 technical papers in the field of parallel and distributed computing and has supervised around 20 research students. He is a Chartered Electrical Engineer and a member of several professional bodies including IEE, InstMC, IEEE and Euromicro. Until recently he was an editor of the Journal of Systems Architecture, and IEEE Micro. He has been an active organiser of numerous conferences and workshops in the field of parallel and distributed computing.
Dr. Gabor Terstyanszky - is a Reader at CPC, University of Westminster. His research interests include distributed and parallel computing, cluster and Grid computing. He had several research grants at various universities of Germany, Spain, and United Kingdom. He published three electronic lecture notes on distributed and parallel computing and more than 75 papers at European and world conferences and workshops. He was member of programming committees of several conferences and workshops, for example: DAPSYS, SAFEPROCESS. He supervised several projects, such as: COPERNICUS, COST, WINPAR, HPCTI, and SEPP, CoreGrid, ePerSpace, and so on. He contributed to the design and development of Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture (GEMLCA) with the research team of the Centre of Parallel Computing.
Tamas Kiss is a Senior Lecturer in Database Systems at the Department of Information Systems and Computing, and a researcher at the CPC, University of Westminster. His research interests include distributed and parallel computing, cluster and Grid computing. He led the design and development activities resulting in the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture (GEMLCA) solution within the UK EPSRC founded OGSA Testbed project. He contributes to the CoreGrid Network of Excellence project where he leads the Legacy Code Wrapping and Deployment Methodologies Research Group within the Institute on Grid Systems, Tools and Environments. He also co-ordinates University of Westminster's research activities in the framework of the Westfocus Grid Alliance Project that aims applying the benefits of Grid computing to real-world industry applications. He also has extended experience in delivering Grid courses and tutorials. He co-authored one book and more than 40 scientific papers in journals, conference proceedings and as book chapters.
Cardiff University (CU) is a publicly funded university that has a strong research programme in the areas related to SHIWA. The Cardiff University School of Computer science has extensive expertise in Grid Computing and Peer-to-Peer systems, and manages the Welsh eScience Centre (WeSC). WeSC is one of 8 centres established by the UK government to support eScience and Grid computing research in the UK. The Centre has over 25 active projects involving academia and industry (e.g. Sun Microsystems). The School has strong links with other Centres in Grid Computing, such as Max-Planck Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Argonne National Laboratory (US), University of New South Wales (Australia), and the University of Melbourne (Australia). CU has extensive experience of distributed workflow management, and the use of workflow in particular scientific areas, and is especially suited to lead SHIWA's JRA2. The group involved in this project are responsible for the development of the Triana workflow engine, along with distributed enactment techniques using Web Services, P2P and Grid-based middleware. CU is also involved in a number of workflow-related projects, such as ``Workflow Optimization for eScience", EU Provenance, GridOneD, WHIP, and GridLab. CU also has experience in deploying Provenance management techniques alongside workflow engines, and have developed trust models based on provenance data (PASOA project).
Key personnel:
Dr. Ian Taylor is a Senior lecturer in Distributed Systems at the School of Computer Science. Concurrently, he consults through his US company with the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. He has been the co-ordinator of Triana activities at Cardiff, applying distributed techniques and workflow in Grid, SOA and P2P computing. Triana has been successfully applied in application areas ranging from distributed audio and healthcare to astrophysics. Ian has written a professional book with Springer, which succeeded to its second edition 2008 (From P2P and Grids to Services on the Web), has been guest editor for the Journal of Grid Computing on workflow and is co-chair for the OGF Workflow Management Research Group (WFM-RG), and will also use his influential position to promote the SHIWA project results. He was the lead editor of Workflows for eScience book published by Springer, which gave a state-of-the-art of most major workflow projects in the world. He has published over 60 scientific papers. Ian has vast experienced in both managing a number of academic projects (UK and EU) and industrial projects through his US company over the past 10 years. Ian is also is a member of management oversight committee for DPAC project (£10M, STFC) providing data analysis for the ESA GAIA mission to create the most precise 3D one billion star chart of our Galaxy.
Professor Omer F. Rana is a Professorin the School of Computer Science at Cardiff University, and the Deputy Director of the Welsh eScience Centre. He holds a PhD in Computing from Imperial College, London, and works in the areas of high performance distributed computing, multi-agent systems and Data Mining. Dr. Rana co-chaired the "Service Management Frameworks'' research group at the Global Grid Forum (2002-2005), and previously co-led the "Jini" working group at the GGF. Currently, he participates in the GRAAP and Semantic Grid groups. He participates on the Editorial boards of the "Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience", the "Scientific Programming" and the "ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems" journals.
Mr. Andrew Harrison is a Research Associate at Cardiff University and has extensive experience developing web services architectures. Harrison's work has put particular emphasis on deploying Web Services in distributed P2P and Web Service-based environments.
Mr. Ian Kelley is developing Peer-to-Peer data sharing mechanisms for volunteer computing environments, with specific emphasis on enabling secure and decentralized data sharing for BOINC. Kelley has worked in high performance and Grid computing since 1999 and has held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the Center for Computation & Technology at LSU.
-== Academisch Medisch Centrum bij de Universiteit van Amsterdam ==-
The Academic Medical Centre (AMC) is one of the most prominent medical centres in the Netherlands, as well as one of the largest hospitals. The AMC complex houses the university hospital and the medical faculty of the University of Amsterdam, various national research institutes and a number of biotech companies – partly AMC spin-offs. The Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Laboratory of the AMC hosts the
Bioinformatics Laboratory, which was established in 1997 to support biomedical research. It aims to further stimulate and strengthen bioinformatics and e-bioscience research, support and education. Projects are defined and carried out in tight collaborations with (AMC) life sciences, clinical and medical informatics groups. The group members represent a broad range of (bio)informatics, biostatistics and e-science expertise.
The e-Bioscience group of the Bioinformatics Laboratory, which will participate in SHIWA, was formed in 2008 as result of a successful participation in the Virtual Laboratory for e-Science3 project. It collaborates with various other grid and e-science initiatives for life sciences in The Netherlands (e-science programme of NBIC4 and NGI), Europe and North America. The group has large expertise in the development and deployment of grid-enabled data analysis applications as grid workflows with various publications, conference awards and organization of international events on related topics.. The "e-bioscience infrastructure" (e-Bioinfra) developed and operated by the group is adopted by a growing community of biomedical researchers, providing valuable experience with practical aspects of e-science infrastructures. And finally, the on-going collaboration with other partners of this project (CNRS and Charite), particularly on the area of interoperability and workflows, gives the AMC the necessary usage experience to participate in the requirements analysis, evaluation and dissemination of the results obtained by
the SHIWA project.
Key personnel:
Dr. Silvia D. Olabarriaga - studied Computer Science and obtained a PhD on medical imaging. She is currently assistant professor of the Bioinformatics Laboratory and leads the e-Bioscience group, with a team of 2 persons (+3 in hiring). Before that, she was lecturer at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), and a research fellow at various Dutch and international academic groups. Her research interests reside in the development and deployment of grids for biomedical research, in particular using workflow technology. Since 2005 she participates in Dutch and European e-science initiatives, having organized international workshops and special sections on the FGCS journal on the themes of "Medical Imaging on Grids" (MICCAG-Grid) and "Application of Grids in Healthcare" (CCGrid-Health).
Prof. Dr. Antoine Van Kampen - head of the Bioinformatics Laboratory and holds the chair of Biological and Biomedical Information Science, special focus on Medical Bioinformatics, at the University of Amsterdam. He is also Scientific Director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC, www.nbic.nl), and has been since 2005 an active promoter of the e-science culture in the Dutch Life sciences scene.
Dr. Vladimir Korkhov - is a post-doctoral researcher at the e-Bioscience group, Bioinformatics laboratory, AMC. He received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Amsterdam with the thesis on hierarchical resource management in grid computing. His current research interests are in the area of workflow management on distributed computing infrastructures, workflow interoperability and grid resource management. Since 2001 he has been involved in several Dutch, European and international research projects in the area of distributed and grid computing, he is a co-author of more than 30 scientific publications.
-== University of Southern California ==-
The University of Southern California is one of the world's leading private research universities, a global center for arts, technology and international trade. USC enrolls more international students than any other U.S. university and offers extensive opportunities for internships and study abroad. With a strong tradition of integrating liberal and professional education, USC fosters a vibrant culture of public service and encourages students to cross academic as well as geographic boundaries in their pursuit of knowledge. It was opened in 1880.
USC established itself as a world leader in the fields of communication, multimedia technologies and the life sciences as well as in cross-disciplinary teaching and research.
A unit of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is one of the largest – and most successful -- university-affiliated computer research institutes in the US. It is a world leader in research and development of advanced information processing, computer and communications technologies.
They conduct basic and applied research, bridging a gap between university investigation and real-world prototype development. ISI fulfills three roles: academic, including research and education; industrial, delivering technology-based solutions for government and business partners; and professional, offering students unusual, hands-on experience.
Their expertise spans computer science and engineering disciplines, including computing organizations, interfaces, environments, grids, networks, platforms and microelectronics. A pacesetter for nearly 35 years, ISI helped spearhead development of the Internet, including refinement of communications protocols that remain fundamental to Net operations. They also created the familiar dot-com address system nearly 25 years ago.
Key personnel:
Ewa Dellman Ph.D. is a Project Leader in the Advanced Systems Division at the USC Information Sciences Institute. She is also is a Research Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at USC.
Her main area of research is scientific workflow management in Grids. As part of this work I am leading the design and development of the Pegasus software that maps complex application workflows onto distributed resources. Pegasus is being used in a variety of scientific applications.
She co-edited the book "Workflows for e-Science," published by Springer in December 2006.
SHIWA (project number 261585) is supported by a Grant from the European Commission's FP7 INFRASTRUCTURES-2010-2 call under grant agreement n°261585
Provided by the MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute - Maintained by Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing with Free and Open Source Software (2010)