D4Science 5th Technical Committee meeting at CERN

The 5th Technical Committee (TCom) meeting took place between the 1-5 of December in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting was hosted by CERN (Meyrin site).

A D4Science TCom event is a face-to-face meeting which aims to collectively address any technical issues that arise along the course of the project and to define a concrete plan to properly address them. It is open and flexible, i.e. besides technical partners the whole consortium is potentially invited to attend dependent on the topics to be discussed.

This TCom event primarily focused on (i) analysing the current status of activities, (ii) identifying a short term plan towards the release of the four expected Virtual Research Environments (VREs), i.e. Global Ocean Chlorophyll Monitoring VRE, Global Land Vegetation Monitoring VRE, Fishery Country Profiles Production System VRE, and Integrated Capture Information System VRE and (iii) planning the activities needed to achieve the project goal in the long run.

The meeting consisted of 38 slots some of them occurring in parallel, and discussing the following topics:

• gCube technology: critical bugs, status and next steps;
• gCube technology support for infrastructure population: guidelines and open issues;
• toward gCore 5.0: planned features;
• Production Infrastructure: status and plans;
• Service Activities: status and plan;
• User Community Requirements: feedback on current functionality;
• User Community Requirements: supporting statistical data;
• User Community Requirements: deploying a gCube-based Infrastructure on a single site.

Together with the TCom event, a Project Executive Board (PEB) and a Project Management Board (PMB) meeting took place. During these meetings the members of the governing boards analysed the current status of the project activities, the short and long term plans resulting from the TCom and decided on concrete actions to put in place in the context of the project.

10 out of 11 participating organisations joined the event with a full total of 25 persons in attendance.

Jointly with the TCom, a ‘D4Science – EGEE’ meeting was organised to provide EGEE project representatives with details on the D4Science Infrastructure Monitoring technologies and to analyse the exploitation of such technologies in the context of the EGEE infrastructure.