In collaboration with the Russian Academy of Science (RAS), GEON co-organized and participated in a workshop on “Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences” from June 25-26 in Moscow, Russia. The workshop involved participants from several institutes of the RAS, including the: Geophysical Center; Space Research Center; Institutes of Systems Programming and Program Systems; Kurchatov Institute, Nuclear Physics Institute, and the Joint Supercomputer Center of RAS and Moscow State University.U.S. participants represented GEON, PRAGMA and CUAHSI-HIS at this workshop, where presentations and discussions were held regarding current activities, developments, and the potential for future collaborations. The group visited the RAS Supercomputer Center and Geological Museum at Moscow State University, as well as the Russian Space Research Center.

A GEON node is being installed at the Russian Academy of Science, within the Geophysical Center. The full program and presentation materials will shortly be available at www.geongrid.org/workshops/moscow2007/.

The NSF recently announced its decision to fund the implementation of an integrated EarthScope (ES) data portal. The ES Portal will be a single-entry point to access data products from USArray, PBO, and SAFOD components of EarthScope, and will be built based on the GEON portalarchitecture. GEON/SDSC will serve as the technical lead and project manager for this activity, working in close collaboration with IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford (ICDP). Each of these institutions will develop the necessary Web services which will be invoked from the central ES Portal. These services will enable users to issue metadata queries from the portal and access and download corresponding data sets.

The first Alpha release of the portal is scheduled to be completed by March 1, 2008 and the production portal is scheduled to be available to the entire ES community by September 15, 2008.

• USArray: http://www.iris.edu/USArray/
• PBO: Plate Boundary Observatory, http://pboweb.unavco.org/
• SAFOD: San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth,
  http://www.icdp-online.org/contenido/icdp/front_content.php?idcat=712
• IRIS: http://www.iris.edu/
• UNAVCO: http://www.unavco.org/
• ICDP: International Continental Drilling Program, www.icdp-online.org
• SDSC: San Diego Supercomputer Center, www.sdsc.edu

This year’s GSA annual meeting will be held in Denver, CO with a theme of “Earth Sciences for Society”. A variety of Geoinformatics related sessions are being planned at this meeting sponsored by the GSA Geoinformatics Division. The abstract deadline is July 10, 2007. To see a full list of Division Sponsored sessions please visit the Divisions web site at http://geoinformatics.sdsc.edu/gsa_division.

Ashraf Memon, GEON’s Chief Software Engineer participated in the planning process workshop for Teragrid on June 7th 2007 at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union, Madison. This workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation to discuss high-end computing requirements of projects represented by TeraGrid Science Gateways, and how Teragrid can meet the scientific needs of the associated user communities. Ashraf represented SYNSEIS, which is one of the Earth Science gateways in TeraGrid (see portal.geongrid.org/synseis). The TeraGrid Science Gateways enable a community of users to easily gain access to national supercomputing facilities. Several technical issues were discussed at the workshop. A common authorization mechanism and increasing queue times at job submission were on the top of the list. A workshop report will be published on the Teragrid planning website summarizing the issues and suggestions from participants for possible solutions. Several follow-up meetings are being planned to discuss these issues in further detail.