Established in 1980 as a 501(c)3 membership association, SURA's membership is now comprised of 63 research universities located in 16 southern US states plus the District of Columbia. SURA's broad mission is to foster excellence in scientific research, to strengthen the scientific and technical capabilities of the nation and of the Southeast, and to provide outstanding training opportunities for the next generation of scientists and engineers. SURA maintains several active programs including; management of the DOE funded Jefferson National Laboratory, the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program, a technology transfer and commercialization program, regional optical network development initiatives, and SURAgrid.

SURAgrid is a highly collaborative regional grid computing initiative that evolved from the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) Integration Testbed program that SURA managed as part of the NMI-EDIT Consortium funded by NSF Cooperative Agreement 02-028, ANI-0123937. The SURAgrid infrastructure has been developed over the past several years through investments by SURA and the growing number of universities that are active participants and contributors of computational resources to SURAgrid. To learn more about SURAgrid visit www.sura.org/SURAgrid.

The Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), a subordinate element of the United States Army Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), is charged with managing core Research Development Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) and congressionally mandated projects in telemedicine and advanced medical technologies. To support its research and development efforts, TATRC maintains a productive mix of partnerships with federal, academic, and commercial organizations. TATRC also provides short duration, technical support (as directed) to federal and defense agencies; develops, evaluates, and demonstrates new technologies and concepts; and conducts market surveillance with a focus on leveraging emerging technologies in healthcare and healthcare support. Ultimately, TATRC's activities strive to make medical care and services more accessible to soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen; reduce costs, and enhance the overall quality of military healthcare.

The USAMRMC's telemedicine program, executed by the TATRC, applies medical expertise, advanced diagnostics, simulations, and effector systems integrated with information and telecommunications enabling medical assets to operate at a velocity that supports the requirements of the Objective Force. The program leverages, adapts, and integrates medical and commercial/military non-medical technologies to provide logistics/patient management, training devices/systems, collaborative mission planning tools, differential diagnosis, consultation and knowledge sharing. These capabilities enhance field medical support by improving planning and enabling real time "what-if" analysis. Specifically, this program will:

• Reduce medical footprint and increases medical mobility while ensuring access to essential medical expertise & support
• Incorporate health awareness into battlespace awareness
• Improve the skills of medical personnel and units
• Improve quality of medical/ surgical care throughout the battlespace

The iVDGL (international Virtual Data Grid Laboratory) was tasked with establishing and utilizing an international Virtual-Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL) of unprecedented scale and scope, comprising heterogeneous computing and storage resources in the U.S., Europe and ultimately other regions linked by high-speed networks, and operated as a single system for the purposes of interdisciplinary experimentation in Grid-enabled, data-intensive scientific computing.

Our goal in establishing this laboratory was to drive the development, and transition to every day production use, of Petabyte-scale virtual data applications required by frontier computationally oriented science. In so doing, we seized the opportunity presented by a convergence of rapid advances in networking, information technology, Data Grid software tools, and application sciences, as well as substantial investments in data-intensive science now underway in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Experiments conducted in this unique international laboratory influence the future of scientific investigation by bringing into practice new modes of transparent access to information in a wide range of disciplines, including high-energy and nuclear physics, gravitational wave research, astronomy, astrophysics, earth observations, and bioinformatics.

iVDGL experiments also provided computer scientists developing data grid technology with invaluable experience and insight, therefore influencing the future of data grids themselves. A significant additional benefit of this facility was that it empowered a set of universities who normally have little access to top tier facilities and state of the art software systems, hence bringing the methods and results of international scientific enterprises to a diverse, world-wide audience.

iVDGL was supported by the National Science Foundation.

The Open Science Grid is a national production-quality grid computing infrastructure for large scale science, built and operated by a consortium of U.S. universities and national laboratories. The OSG Consortium was formed in 2004 to enable diverse communities of scientists to access a common grid infrastructure and shared resources. Groups that choose to join the Consortium contribute effort and resources to the common infrastructure.

The OSG capabilities and schedule of development are driven by U.S. participants in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, currently being built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The distributed computing systems in the U.S. for the LHC experiments are being built and operated as part of the OSG. Other projects in physics, astrophysics, gravitational-wave science and biology contribute to the grid and benefit from advances in grid technology. The services provided by the OSG will be further enriched as new projects and scientific communities join the Consortium.

The OSG includes an Integration and a Production Grid. New grid technologies and applications are tested on the Integration Grid, while the Production Grid provides a stable, supported environment for sustained applications. Grid operations and support for users and developers are key components of both grids. The core of the OSG software stack for both grids is the NSF Middleware Initiative distribution, which includes Condor and Globus technologies. Additional utilities are added on top of the NMI distribution, and the OSG middleware is packaged and supported through the Virtual Data Toolkit.

The OSG is a continuation of Grid3, a community grid built in 2003 through a joint project of the U.S. LHC software and computing programs, the National Science Foundations’ GriPhyN and iVDGL projects, and the Department of Energy’s PPDG project.

To learn more about the  OSG we suggest you visit the Consortium section,  OSG@Work, the Twiki and document repository

With an educational background in both computer science and atmospheric sciences, Mary’s work has spanned "both worlds" to understand and model physical processes on large scale, parallel computing systems. She has also spent the last decade studying and deploying many digital video and collaborative technologies. Her most recent affiliations include the ViDe Steering Committee, the Internet2 Commons Management Team, the Georgia Tech representative to the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation(CASC), and the Georgia HPC task force. Mary has participated in the development of a broad range of technology tutorials, user guides, and whitepapers including the ViDe Videoconference Cookbook, ViDe Data Collaboration Whitepaper, Georgia Tech HPC website and tutorials, and an interactive tutorial on building and optimizing parallel codes for supercomputers.

Russ received the PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1995 and has extensive experience in both industry and academia.

Vikram holds an engineering degree in Computer Science from Kuvempu University, India and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.

Gurcharan is currently Director of Research Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, reporting to the Vice President for Research. He provides the leadership and vision to foster research at RIT by partnering with researchers to support advanced research technology resources in computation, collaboration, and community building. Gurcharan created the Interactive Collaboration Environments Lab housed in the Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure at RIT, as a teaching and learning, research and development, practical application, and evaluative studies lab.

Gurcharan was a Member of the Real Time Communications Advisory Group, Internet2 from 2005-2006. He was formerly Associate Director for Research Computing at Dartmouth College. He has served as a consultant on several grant proposals to design and implement multipoint collaborative conferencing systems and twice as a panelist for the NSF Advanced Networking Infrastructure Research Program (2001-2002).

His background includes teaching in the Geography Department and supervising the UNIX Consulting Group in Academic Computing at the University of Southern California from 1992-1995 and teaching and research at the University of California, Berkeley from 1980-1992, where he received his Ph.D. in anthropology.

He helps to run the campus network, the Southern Crossroads (SOX) gigapop and the Southern Light Rail (SLR). He also works with other researchers to coordinate international networking initiatives and chairs the Internet2 Special Interest Group on Emerging NRENs.

Since obtaining his PhD in particle physics, he has been active in many areas of network technology. His current interests include network performance, K-12 outreach and bridging the Digital Divide.

Previously, Jorge served as Deputy Coordinator for the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL) and was a senior member in the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) project. GriPhyN and iVDGL together with other U.S. and European Grid and application communities formed Grid3, one of the first large scale international computational grids. The effort lead directly to the Open Science Grid (OSG) where Jorge also served as Co-Chair in several OSG committees.

Jorge was also the facilities manager for the University of Florida CMS Tier2 Center. The University of Florida Tier2 Center was one of the first and the largest prototype Tier2 Center in the country. It together with Caltech, UC San Diego and Fermi Lab were instrumental in developing the ongoing and successful U.S. Tier2 program which supports computing for the CMS and OSG application communities.

Jorge was born in Havana Cuba and now lives in South Florida with his wife and two kids. He teaches physics, exploits Grid computing for research in elementary particles and has time for little else.

In his spare time he enjoys playing with his children and baking bread. He has trouble keeping his desk clean and hopes that this is a sign of the great complexity of his work instead of inherently disorganized thought. He has a secret desire to visit Pluto one day.

(Note from editor: Alain is a great cook and teacher, in the strict sense of the words. See his instructions for making crepes at Making Crepes.)

With an educational background in both computer science and atmospheric sciences, Mary’s work has spanned "both worlds" to understand and model physical processes on large scale, parallel computing systems. She has also spent the last decade studying and deploying many digital video and collaborative technologies. Her most recent affiliations include the ViDe Steering Committee, the Internet2 Commons Management Team, the Georgia Tech representative to the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation(CASC), and the Georgia HPC task force. Mary has participated in the development of a broad range of technology tutorials, user guides, and whitepapers including the ViDe Videoconference Cookbook, ViDe Data Collaboration Whitepaper, Georgia Tech HPC website and tutorials, and an interactive tutorial on building and optimizing parallel codes for supercomputers.