EGEE-III (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE)
EGEE-III is an EU 7FP "e-Infrastructure - Capacity Programme" co-funded project. It is the 3rd phase of the EGEE project and involves 70 partners. This project is maintaining the largest multidisciplinary grid infrastructure in the world, which brings together more than 120 organisations to make a reliable and scalable computing resource available to the European and global research community. At present, it consists of 250 sites in 48 countries and more than 68,000 CPUs available to some 8,000 users.
The current phase has two clear objectives that are essential for research infrastructures:
- to expand, optimize and simplify the use of the worldwide largest production Grid by continuous operation of the infrastructure, support for more user communities, and addition of further computational and data resources;
- to prepare the migration of the existing Grid from a project-based model to a sustainable federated infrastructure based on National Grid Initiatives.
The D4Science predecessor, DILIGENT, was the first project external to EGEE to exploit the EGEE middleware (gLite) and the EGEE Infrastructure. This achievement has been obtained thanks to the close collaboration between the two projects. This strict collaboration continues and spans in different areas of work.
Technology
The D4Science project collaborates with EGEE Joint Research Activities by directly exploiting the gLite middleware. In particular, the D4Science software interfaces with the gLite Workload Management System, the gLite Disk Pool Manager, and the gLite Virtual Organization Membership Service. This collaboration requires the interaction between the development teams of both projects.
Another more specific collaboration has been initiated to understand and use the GridMap application. This application, developed as part of the EGEE project, supports the monitoring and visualization of the status of the infrastructure. Meetings have been organised with the GridMap developers in order to become familiar with the technology and understand how it could be used and extended to cover the D4Science monitoring needs.
Service
From the infrastructure perspective, D4Science actively contributes to the EGEE production infrastructure by providing four gLite sites and therefore extending the EGEE computing and storage resources. These sites provide almost all services of the gLite 3.1 release. The deployment and certification of these D4Science gLite sites is done in strict collaboration with different EGEE Regional Operations Centres (ROCs) and relies on the procedures and tools defined by EGEE for the operation of gLite sites.
On the other hand, the d4science.research-infrastructures.eu Virtual Organisation (VO) has been approved by the EGEE Service Activity, allowing D4Science users to access the resources of the EGEE infrastructure where the D4Science VO is recognized. This has been achieved via direct collaboration with the EGEE Service Activity and the EGEE VO Managers groups. D4Science is one of few cross-sites and cross-ROCs VOs.
Networking
There is also a strong collaboration between the two projects with regard to dissemination. D4Science is regularly present at EGEE Conferences and EGEE User Forums. This participation is extremely useful to synchronize the activities of both projects and better plan the future activities. In particular, D4Science participated in the 3rd EGEE User Forum (Clermont-Ferrand, February 2008) by presenting its work on metadata management and actively participating in the organisation of the session dedicated to the data management. The project also participated in the EGEE'08 Conference (Istanbul, September 2008) by organising two sessions on ”Scientific Data Infrastructure Ecosystem”. This session was attended by approximately 50 people, most of them being EGEE users or technology providers. As a result of this session a number of synergies with other projects was discussed. The project is already working to the preparation of session proposals for the upcoming EGEE-User Forum/OGF25 that will be held in March 2009 in Catania (Italy).
Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Wed, 19/11/2008 - 14:03
