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Workshop on Porting Applications on the Computational Grid

The workshop was conducted as a collaborative effort from ICTP, SPIDER, & UCSC. Although we got highly competent resource personnel it is so disheartening to see such a bad response from the local research community. I am really not sure the reason for lack of interest. However it may be the feeling among most local scientists that computers can't support there conventional research, "it's not for us...", or "it's for the new generation...".
The whole objective of the workshop was to get researchers together & discuss about the possibility (or benefits) of porting their applications (if they already have such applications) to a Grid environment or development of new applications. The infrastructure is already in place & what we need is applications to run on top of those machines. All these are there for the benefit of the country & to the rest of the world.
If they don't know how to program or port their research into a computational environment there are plenty of undergraduates following computer science & related subject doing projects at various levels. Most of the them love to carry out interdisciplinary research or projects.
At the end of the day, the whole objective was to facilitate local scientific community with a better research infrastructure where they can run their applications much more effectively & at no cost. At least they should have been there to discuss about what they are doing. It is the time for even the senior researches to realize that their research can be enhanced with modern technology. They may have missed the modern era of information driven community but they can still be effective if they collaborative with local ICT initiatives.

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Anonymous said…
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