A Strategy for Sustainable Grid

Ludek Matyska, EGI DS Project Director (CESNET) describes how the implementation and continuance of Grid infrastructures needs a robust approach to ensure Grid technology is a permanent service and fixture for research and development, an issue he indicates that is specifically addressed in The European Grid Initiative Design Study.

The past decade has seen Europe heavily invest in e-science programmes – most notably the EGEE – establishing itself as the world leader in Grid technology and infrastructure. A growing number of scientific communities adopted this technology and rely on it for their everyday work, but a lack of Grid infrastructure sustainability, implied by project oriented funding, is still a problem. So, near the end of 2006, the EGI vision of a sustainable European Grid infrastructure crystallised, supporting research activities without borders. Changing this vision into a reality was the primary aim of a subsequent EGI DS (EGI Design Study) project funded by the European Commission between September 2007 and December 2009. The project concerned the assessment of technical and financial feasibility of large-scale sustainable Grid service and to produce a conceptual design report to help key actors to evaluate and make necessary decisions required to establish and support a sustainable Grid infrastructure.

The solution studied by the EGI DS based the European Infrastructure on National Grid Initiatives (NGI) that represent interests of individual countries and national actors, complemented by an international institution – the EGI.eu – providing all the necessary international coordination. To stay in contact with representatives of groups preparing NGIs or even with NGIs themselves, a Policy Board where each interested country was represented (all the EU full and associated members as well as countries outside the EU participated)¬ – advised the project management and also took some crucial decisions. This guaranteed that any design proposal coming from EGI DS is scrutinised and eventually accepted by the community that will later implement it.

The project started with a collection of requirements and use cases. The resulting Knowledge Base (UUhttp://knowledge.eu-egi.orgUU) contains information on the status and evolution of the NGIs, on the identified EGI functions, on e-Infrastructure activities and projects in Europe and their previous findings and views on EGI, legal options and finally individual NGI pages. Major tangible results of the project are its deliverables (see http://www.eu-egi.eu/), that describe the legal and organisational framework – Guidelines for NGIs, Preliminary work for the establishment of EGI, Options analysis of different legal structures – and the description of functions and services needed for the EGI – First and Final EGI Functions definition – with the EGI Blueprint as the most important document. A very important by-product is the agreement reached within the middleware Task Force between gLite, ARC and UNICORE developers to converge towards the Unified Middleware Distribution as the Grid middleware for EGI infrastructure.

The EGI Blueprint defines the major actors – NGIs and EGI.eu – and provides a clear description of the main roles of NGIs, the global tasks that belongs to the responsibility of the EGI.eu, alongside the business model and financial framework necessary to implement the global and international aspects of the EGI infrastructure. Meetings with important EC representatives gave more input towards the Distributed Computing Infrastructure solutions. The call references the EGI, but didn’t fully accept the EGI financial model, allocating money in a rather fragmented way, compared to the proposal clearly described and justified in the EGI Blueprint. Nevertheless, the EGI DS project community got to work, starting with the implementation of the original EGI vision as specified in the Blueprint.
Legally defined through an EGI Memorandum of Understanding, an EGI Council was created in early July 2009. Its members are not only NGIs (however restricted only to EU member and associated states) but also EIROForum members representing already established large scale international collaborations. Currently, EGI Council consists of thirty NGIs and two EIROForum members (CERN and EMBL). Among other decisions, the EGI Council approved previous nominations, carried out by the EGI DS project management, for the leaders of the editorial board who would be responsible for preparing major EGI projects. Later, the EGI Council also appointed a project director of the prepared and submitted EGI InSPIRE project proposal.

As the EC call on DCI did not match exactly the EGI Blueprint model, more work was necessary to define a matching of the original model presented in EGI Blueprint to the individual priorities of the DCI call. Instead of just one project foreseen by the EGI Blueprint, DCI call conditions required simultaneous preparation of several closely related projects. EGI DS partners worked closely with the project preparation teams, helping to re-shape the original EGI Blueprint model to fit into the new landscape defined by the DCI call conditions. Continuous dissemination and presentation activities provided a focus in scientific communities, from resource and technology providers to researchers, and decision-makers and funding agencies. Also, close collaboration with other projects and activities has been promoted. Apart from EGEE III as the main ‘natural’ partner, this collaboration included projects like PRACE, GridTalk, Belief-II, and D4Science, as well as facilitating extensive liaison with industry (eg. the leaflet Benefits of Grids for Industry).

The EGI DS project has been the major player shaping sustainable Grid infrastructure design in Europe. Through involvement of the national representatives it had the widest impact on the Grid part of complex e-Infrastructures, mobilising not only Grid infrastructure providers and middleware developers, but especially large scientific communities to unite in a preparation of the projects like EGI InSPIRE (also featured in this issue), EMI, ROSCOE, SAFE, and CHAIN, while also oversubscribing in the virtual scientific communities priority of the same call. The EGI DS also participated in the establishment of the of the European e-Infrastructure forum (EEF), that brings together major European e-Infrastructure projects and bodies (EGI, EGEE, DEISA, PRACE, Terena and Geant/Dante) to work on a shared vision of the future European e-infrastructure. A momentum has been gained, and the responsibility for governance is passed to the EGI Council, whilst the operational coordination will be passed to EGI.eu, both bodies conceived within EGI DS work.

Published: Wednesday, 17th March 2010 by Tom Freeman

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