IBERGRID was created under the Scientific and Technological cooperation agreement signed between Spain and Portugal in 2003, and the collaboration agreements on Grid Technologies and Communication Networks for R&D. The IBERGRID collaboration also includes a series of open meetings and conferences within the framework of the collaboration, which are held annually alternately in each of the two countries. The IBERGRID 2024 conference will take place in Portugal. More information at www.ibergrid.eu
Guest post by Isabel Campos (CSIC)
The IBERGRID conference held its 12th edition this year in Benasque, at the Pedro Pascual Science Center facilities, on 24-30 September 2023. The motto of this year's conference was: “Better Software for better Science”. The conference is organised annually, alternately in Spain and Portugal, by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP) and the National Infrastructure for Distributed Computing (INCD). The EGI federation and user community has as always played a central role in the event.
The conference included the participation of European experts in the area of high-performance distributed computing, scientific data management, and deployment of computing infrastructures. Throughout the week, a total of 58 presentations took place focused on the development of innovative software services oriented to R&D, science and technology of scientific data spaces, design of digital twins, artificial intelligence, and in general the areas development commons in which cooperation between the Spanish and Portuguese scientific communities is essential.
The development of digital twins for the Earth has received special attention, with a joint session of the European projects funded by Horizon Europe DT-GEO and interTwin. CSIC coordinates DT-GEO, and participates as leader of the model validation work package in the EGI Foundation coordinated project interTwin. Both projects are intended to pilot, in cooperation with ECMWF, the development of open and interoperable computing technologies to enable the deployment of digital twins in areas such as extreme climate events (droughts, climate modelling) or the Earth's crust ( earthquakes, volcanology, etc.).
The development of medical data spaces was addressed within the framework of different initiatives, the most prominent being the flagship project EUCAIM, European Cancer Imaging Initiative, funded within the framework of Digital Europe, whose objective is to launch an image repository at European level relating to different types of cancer. The architecture of the EUCAIM data space was presented by our colleagues at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. The technical achievement of the necessary patient data privacy was also addressed in depth by INFN colleagues, who presented their approach based on blockchain technologies.
Digital data spaces and the technologies necessary to put them into practice were also addressed in areas such as the development of agriculture and the Internet of Things, or the exploitation of marine resources, by our colleagues in Poznan (PSNC) and the Center of Supercomputing of Galicia - CESGA.
The user and data space level needs of the area of photon and neutron (synchrotron light) science were addressed by our invited DESY colleagues. Likewise, we have a series of presentations to update the scientific community on the status of computational deployment and future plans for key infrastructures for Particle Physics such as the LHC and astrophysics with the SKA experiment.
Finally, given the interest aroused in the last edition of IBERGRID 2022 in Faro, on Friday the 29th the technical session on Computer Centers was broadcast by videoconference to the entire community. In this session, 9 computer centers at the national and European level shared their experiences in terms of user support, status and future expansion plans at the hardware and software level.
