The Department of Energy and other federal research agencies are developing tools and technologies to support computing "grids," or large-scale projects to develop problem-solving environments using computing and data storage resources at various locations. For example, DOE's proposed "Science Grid" could allow researchers to use supercomputers at NERSC and Los Alamos to analyze data stored in San Diego, Brookhaven National Lab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, all as one integrated system.

Berkeley Lab is co-hosting the premier international symposium on Grid computing in August, and the event offers an opportunity for Lab researchers to learn about Grid computing from some of the leading experts in the field. HPDC-10, the tenth International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, will be held at the Hotel Nikko in downtown San Francisco, with tutorials scheduled for Monday, Aug. 6, and the symposium convening Aug. 7-9. The symposium also features a strong lineup of technical presentations on advanced networking, applications, tools, and middleware in support of computational, data, and collaboration Grids.

Bill Johnston, an internationally recognized expert in Grids and head of the Distributed Systems Department in the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Division, is chair of the symposium's program committee. Horst Simon, director of the NERSC Division, is local arrangements chair. For information about registration and the symposium program, go to: http://www-itg.lbl.gov/HPDC-10/.

The symposium focuses particularly on the hardware technologies, network protocols, the middleware that ties distributed resources together into "computational, data, and collaboration Grids," middleware that enables application use of Grids, and tools and languages that support application development.

Tutorials scheduled in conjunction with HPDC-10 are:

• "Grid Programming in Java and Python," Vladimir Getov, University of Westminster; José E. Moreira, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center; Gregor von Laszewski, Argonne National Laboratory; and Keith Jackson, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• "Grid Computing and the Globus Toolkit," Carl Kesselman, University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute
• "Diagnosing (and Correcting) Poor WAN Performance," John Estabrook and Jim Ferguson, National Computational Science Alliance.

The San Francisco symposium will also feature two related workshops.

The Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments, to be held Monday, Aug. 6, will address research, technological and social issues of developing persistent collaboration infrastructure to address the needs of emerging scientific communities. For more information, visit http://www.mcs.anl.gov/fl/wace/.

The Seventh Globus Retreat, scheduled for Aug. 9-10, will provide an opportunity for users and developers of the Globus Toolkit to discuss common interests, learn about recent developments, and plan future directions. The program includes a two-day technical conference including talks by Globus users and updates on Globus status. For more information, go to: http://www.globus.org/about/events/retreat2001.htm.