MAiN
 
:: Educational Goals

The overall aim is to give students a broad and well balanced understanding of Grid computing that will serve well as a foundation for more specific work or research.
Through lectures from, and discussions with, leading researchers, students will receive an integrated and well-structured introduction to Grid computing and its applications. This will expose principles, research challenges, technical issues and leading views. It will illustrate likely future developments.

Grids underpin e-Infrastructures, which are a new approach to distributed computing that supports collaboration and resource sharing with significant economic advantages from amortising costs over a wide range of uses.

Practical exercises will illustrate the functions that may be achieved by e- Infrastructure and develop experience with several widely used technologies. They will also provide experience of collaboratively using Grid-based resources.

Students should leave the course with:
  1. A good understanding of the principles and foundations of Grid computing.
  2. An appreciation of the variations in technologies and views of Grid computing.
  3. An awareness of good strategies for using these emerging technologies in their research.
  4. Practical skills and confidence in using several of the available technologies.
  5. Experience of forming a team and tackling a simulated research challenge.
  6. An introduction to the research challenges and the future of Grid computing.
We anticipate that the majority of the students will be described by these categories:
  1. Engaged in or planning to engage in advanced middleware design and development.
  2. Applications developers who will be or are using advanced Grid middleware.
  3. Overlapping the preceding two groups, those who will be undertaking or planning research into Grid middleware.
Others may be:
  1. Researchers who plan to use deployed Grids.
  2. Those engaged in Grid deployment and operations.
Accordingly the Summer School will primarily address the needs of the first three categories above. We will adapt the curriculum and presentations to match the needs of those who actually are selected to participate, but the curriculum and lecturers have been chosen with the first three categories as the principal audience.