Participants in a recent Open Science Grid workshop held in Argentina. Image courtesy of Carolina Leon Carri, University of Buenos Aires

For some Latin American students, a recent workshop held in Santa Fe, Argentina, may have been an important step towards a lifetime of working with grids.

The goal of the "Hands-on Workshop in Grid Computing," presented by educators at the Open Science Grid and the University of Buenos Aires, March 12-14, was to give young scientists, with almost no background in distributed computing, the ability to use grids in their research.

The workshop, part of a two-week-long information technology school organized by the National University of the Littoral in Santa Fe, hosted 20 students from universities all over Argentina.

"The students were interested and very capable," said Ben Clifford, OSG science education specialist, about his trainees. "The group included a nice spectrum, from people interested in applications to those wanting to set up grid resources."

One of the event's organizers, Carolina Leon Carri, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires Complex Systems Laboratory, a center for computer science, saw the need for students in her lab to receive training in grid technology. She contacted OSG to organize the workshop, so students in her lab, and in similar labs in Argentina, could use grids to implement workflows for scientific applications.
The workshop was at the invitation of the project on the Promotion of Information and Communication Technologies (PROTIC), funded by Argentina's National Agency for the Promotion of Science and Technology. Collaborating groups at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Cuyo are developing a PROTIC sub-project on grid technologies. They saw a strong match between the goals for their information technology sessions and the module OSG could provide by way of the workshop.

"We are very happy with the workshop," said Leon Carri. "It gave us significant grid experience, especially in the workflow area, and enhanced e-Science among several groups who will pursue collaboration using grid technologies."

Following the workshop, OSG hopes to make its resources available to students from Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, initially through OSG's Education Virtual Organization, and later through VOs for specific scientific projects.

More information about the workshop, including the program and background reading, is online.

-Jen Nahn, Open Science Grid