Speaker
Printable Summary
Over the last decade or so since the start of the DataGrid project we have been able to build distributed infrastructure that offers a fairly good quality of service to its users. However, in its present state, the infrastructure is very much tailored to very specific use cases and very monolithic and rigid in its structure. It is very well suitable for a particular kind of applications but not for others. In order to attract more user communities, we believe the infrastructure should become more versatile and it should be easier to incorporate new middlewares or infrastructures. In this presentation we discuss ideas on how EGI can facilitate any middleware or type of (sub)infrastructure a user community or NGIs on behalf of user communities desire by providing the glue needed to tie together the multinational/multi-NGI resources in order to enable international cooperation between individual users, small user groups and organized multinational user communities.
Wider impact of this work
The presentation may be of interest to Operations Management
Description of the work
Over the last decade or so since the start of the DataGrid project we have been able to build distributed infrastructure that offers a fairly good quality of service to its users. However, in its present state, the infrastructure is very much tailored to very specific use cases, middleware and deployed services. We envisage that in order to attract more user communities, the infrastructure should become more versatile. Efforts in this direction are underway in terms of incorporating other middlewares like Globus and UNICORE into the infrastructure and at the moment people are also looking at integrating Cloud resources.
Since the infrastructure appears to be rather rigid, this process is rather time consuming and take a considerable amount of effort. Separate integration taskforces are formed to deal with al kinds of issues related to operations, security, accounting etc. that play a role in incorporating new middleware and new technologies into the infrastructure.
We envisage that in the future, EGI will focus on treating change as a “business as usual”. This meaning that that it becomes a day to day routine to incorporate new services etc. without the need for creating taskforces to guide this process. EGI should facilitate any middleware or type of (sub)infrastructure a user community or NGIs on behalf of user communities desire by providing the glue needed to tie together the multinational/multi-NGI resources in order to enable international cooperation between individual users, small user groups and organized multinational user communities. This glue being the operational infrastructure containing the operational and security procedures and policies, security models, operational tools, user support and the development of these, accounting, grid oversight etc. EGI should become more software/infrastructure/technology agnostic and should provide a generic platform for collaboration
