Steven Newhouse, Director, EGI.eu

in ICT by alovering — August 27, 2011 at 10:21 am | 0 comments

With the increasing scale and complexity of modern scientific challenges, providing a sustainable computing infrastructure to support research is vital. Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI.eu, explains how they are driving innovation in Europe to address society’s key challenges

What is the main focus of EGI.eu and how important is its presence in the research landscape? How does it differ from other initiatives?

EGI.eu coordinates the distributed computing infrastructure used to support data-intensive research across Europe. We aim to expand our community of users, building on a decade of successes from the European Data Grid (EDG) and Enabling Grids for E-Science (EGEE) projects. It is essential to build and support the broad user base this community needs to support continued investment in and expansion of the infrastructure. The focus on the long-term sustainability of the infrastructure and the organisations that underpin it is the main difference between our project and previous initiatives.

In what way is EGI.eu creating and maintaining a pan-European Grid Infrastructure in collaboration with National Grid Initiatives (NGIs)?

EGI.eu is a Dutch Stichting (a non-profit foundation), governed by its participants (the NGIs) and associated participants (eg. the European International Research Organisations such as CERN and EMBL). It is the collaboration between these organisations that has led to the creation of EGI.eu and gives us the mandate to foster the evolution of the pan- European Grid Infrastructure on behalf of the community.

What benefits will the long-term availability of a generic e-infrastructure for all European research communities and their international collaborators bring?

Science is not about pen and paper. The ability to perform large-scale data analysis will soon become fundamental for research, just as having access to the Internet became essential 10 years ago. This innovative research will help solve some of the complex problems facing society today, such as climate change, energy and healthcare. We provide the means to drive innovation in Europe, in collaboration with other user communities and e-Infrastructure providers around the world.

In its role what activities does it coordinate between European NGIs?

Our focus is on European-level services. Day-to-day national activities are run by the NGIs. For instance, we provide a helpdesk to ensure that issues raised by a user in one country can be passed to a resource provider in another, and we monitor this activity to ensure that an answer is delivered. Many resource providers wish to have flexibility in the middleware they use, but our users prefer not to be exposed to the nuts and bolts of the software. Therefore the development and use of standards to achieve interoperability are critical issues we expect our technology providers to address. Making sure that systems are standardised is an important goal, in line with the European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe, which aims to promote the free circulation of knowledge. The concept is enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty as the 5^th freedom of the European Union (after the free circulation of people, goods, capital and services).

Why it is necessary to operate a secure integrated production grid infrastructure that federates resources from providers around Europe?

Security is important at many levels. The individual National Grid Infrastructures are valuable resources and access should be enabled to identified individuals only. Due to the high-profile nature of the work it supports, EGI is unfortunately an attractive target for malicious individuals and software, so to counter these threats we provide a coherent operational security response across all our resource providers. Finally, although much of the work we support is publicly funded, it may have commercial value or could be covered by legislation (eg. medical record protection), and this requires additional security controls such as encrypted storage.

By what means does EGI.eu support research communities and what are you helping researchers to accomplish?

EGI.eu provides support to new and established user communities through human and technical services. We facilitate communication between user communities and by gathering their requirements for how they would like the infrastructure to evolve. We also provide technical services such as an integrated helpdesk, the means to discover and contribute to the applications that are or have been ported to EGI, a library of training material, a registry of trainers, and a calendar of training events. Our user community support team will also support the development of virtual organisations, through community building and consultancy services.

Could you explain your work with software providers within Europe and worldwide?

EGI.eu coordinates the operation of the infrastructure but does not develop software. Instead, we work with external providers to deliver the software needed by our user communities. We collect and prioritise end-users and operations staff requirements, to determine whether their needs can be delivered by our current providers, or if we need to engage with new ones.

What high-quality innovative software solutions are you providing?

We work with some of the most demanding researchers in Europe, who undertake large-scale data analysis on a daily basis. To support this need, we use software from the gLite, ARC, Globus, UNICORE and dCache software consortia to federate our resources, in addition to software developed for and used by other e-Infrastructures – such as Open Science Grid.

What partnerships is EGI working to establish? Do they cover a wide range of disciplines?

EGI has partnerships with three types of organisation: resource providers, user communities and technology providers. Many of the European resource providers are already part of our community, but we aim to establish collaborations with those who are not. For users, we will keep open communication channels to enable a flow of information and requirements between different research disciplines. Software providers who are working with EGI will be able to identify how their products and release plans can contribute to our roadmap, and if the software is deployed as part of the production infrastructure they will be expected to actively support their software.

What prompted the EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) and what do you hope it will facilitate?

EGI-InSPIRE was planned as a result of a community consultation exercise that took place through the European Grid Initiative Design Study (EGI-DS) project. This investigated how a long-term, sustainable European Distributed Computing Infrastructure could be established for the benefit of thousands of users. EGI-InSPIRE is now helping resource providers make the transition to long-term, sustainable structures that European user communities can depend on in the decades to come.

How would you sum up your achievements thus far and what plans are you currently outlining?

Setting up an entirely new organisation such as EGI.eu has been a challenge – especially as it plays such a pivotal role in the community and in the EGI-InSPIRE project. We are now gathering requirements from operations and user communities and establishing interactions with the technology providers. Once this essential groundwork has been laid, we will be working to build on the services we offer to the community.

Are there any other areas of EGI.eu that you would like to mention?

Through its base of national resource providers, EGI.eu is ideally positioned to support research innovation in Europe. By driving the adoption of standards and the integration of resources across Europe, EGI contributes to both The Digital Agenda for Europe and the Innovation Union by deploying innovative ICT solutions. Our ultimate goal is to provide a seamless resource easy to use by all researchers, no matter their scientific field.

www.egi.eu/

Tags: EGI EGI.eu Grid Steven Newhouse