Objectives and vision of D4Science and D4Science-II projects

D4Science

The D4Science project deployed the e-Infrastructures built by the EGEE and DILIGENT projects to address the needs of the Environmental Monitoring and Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management scientific user communities. It deployed an application that exploits resources provided by ESA, FAO and WorldFish but that can also integrate and process data from any other sources.

The D4Science e-Infrastructure was created, progressively enriched and consolidated. It provides facilities for creating Virtual Research Environments (VREs) based on shared computational, data and service resources offered by EGEE and DILIGENT at a European level, as well as on data and domain-specific service resources offered by large international organizations.

The DILIGENT testbed infrastructure was brought into production by preserving its usage dependencies with the corresponding EGEE production infrastructure. It is managed and upgraded by periodic deployment of new resources and more consolidated and extended releases of the services in the gCube system.

The D4Science e-Infrastructure offers a secure sharing, dynamic allocation of resources and configurable GUIs for the project target communities and opens it up to other user communities.The D4Science e-Infrastructure interoperates sites based on gLite services providing computing and storage grid resources. It is also based on gCube services providing on demand and dynamic Virtual Research Environments. D4Science extended the EGEE production infrastructure with additional gLite sites allowing the sharing of computational and storage resources for D4Science communities at a large scale.

D4Science-II

The main objective of D4Science-II is to advance the current D4Science e-Infrastructure into a pivotal element that, through its capabilities and mediating role, will be capable of drawing numerous infrastructural initiatives and scientific communities within the scope of a Knowledge Ecosystem. Indeed a more powerful model in which e-Infrastructures are not isolated but dynamically interoperate and influence each other as the components of an ecosystem will be introduced. To create such a D4Science-II Knowledge Ecosystem, the project will focus on the deployment and exploitation of mechanisms and policies for the interoperability of application-level infrastructures and infrastructural services.

D4Science-II will develop technology and methodologies that will enable sustainable interoperation of multiple, diverse and heterogeneous data e-Infrastructures that have been established and are currently running autonomously, thereby creating e-Infrastructure ecosystems that can serve an expanded set of communities dealing with complex, multidisciplinary challenges whose solution is beyond reach with existing resources. Furthermore, D4Science-II will use the existing D4Science e-Infrastructure as a hub to bring and hold together several established scientific e-Infrastructures and, thus, set up a prototypical instance of such an e-Infrastructure ecosystem.

Infrastructures exchanging resources (using the D4Science e-Infrastructure as the mediator) will complement their individual strengths at a contained cost. Interoperability will foster the coordination of otherwise autonomous application-level infrastructures and infrastructural services into a true Knowledge Ecosystem.

The D4Science e-Infrastructure will act as the driving force behind the formation of the envisioned ecosystem. Given its layered approach to infrastructure building, it can conveniently mediate access to the computational facilities of the underlying EGEE infrastructure and, in turn, the connectivity fabric of the GÉANT infrastructure. Likewise, it can export unique functionality for the definition, operation, and autonomic management of Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Such capabilities appeal to many application-level infrastructures, repositories, and other infrastructural services that (i) have been extremely successful at aggregating resources of interest to their communities, but (ii) for strategic as well as practical reasons, have excluded the provision of advanced computational and collaborative services from the scope of their current design, and in some cases, from their future roadmap.