The five tracks that follow reflect a continuing evolution of the infrastructure towards a sustainable layered model but authors should also think in terms of the values that underpin Open Science – the public availability and reusability of both scientific data and experimental methodologies.
The deadline for submission of abstracts to TF12 is Monday 11 June 2012.
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EGI Operations (Tiziana Ferrari: track leader)
This track covers the operational services and tools used by EGI to deliver a federated infrastructure composed of a multitude of national resource providers. The track will comprise a series of community events, EGI-InSPIRE activity sessions to steer progress in the implementation of the EGI operations roadmap, workshops to address specific technical areas and shape the future of operations, training events and thematic sessions. We solicit contributions in the following areas: Firstly, evolving EGI operations - how should the current operational model evolve to simplify day-by-day operations and to adapt to emerging service provisioning models? This area includes the advancements in operational tools and new models that allow platform operators to better serve the EGI ecosystem. Secondly, EGI operations for international Open Science: this area addresses sustainability of operational services provided by external infrastructures peering with EGI, use cases for integration of EGI operations with new Research Infrastructures, and the extensions of the EGI operational services needed for a coupled usage of HTC and HPC resources.
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Resource Infrastructure services (Peter Solagna: track leader)
This track brings together the work of technology providers and platform integrators to provide generic infrastructure services that can be integrated and operated at a European scale in the production Virtual Research Environments (VRE) upon which research communities depend. Training sessions for service administrators will be included in this track. Example topics relevant in this area are: firstly, the various functional services in use across Europe and beyond from software consortia such as ARC, dCache, gLite and UNICORE, Globus, SAGA and others – being developed and integrated by projects like EMI and IGE. Secondly, federated AAIs (authentication and authorisation infrastructures) and their integration with the existing infrastructure. Thirdly, services for the provision of diverse resource types, such as desktop and GPGPU (General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units) based resources.
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Virtualised Resources: challenges and opportunities (Michel Drescher: track leader)
This track focuses on the work of technology providers, platform integrators and platform operators. It will look at the grand challenges that relate to the integration of virtualised resource into the operational infrastructure to establish the emerging European digital research landscape. Examples of topics relevant in this area are: the services used to access virtualised resources, virtualised management environments and the impact of virtualisation on the operations model and costs, the integration of these services into the operational infrastructure.
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Virtual Research Environments (Gergely Sipos: track leader)
VREs are a combination of environments that provide researchers with easy access to the services deployed through the EGI to enable data analysis activities. As the digital research landscape broadens, so more research communities are seeking to establish such VREs. These VREs will use third party academic and commercial resources in order to support multi-national communities on a sustainable and long term basis. Examples of topics relevant in this area are: experiences and results from the development and use of VREs; integrated and customised portals, science gateways; tools and services for science gateway development; workflow applications, workflow development and management environments; services, applications and components for VREs.
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Community and Co-ordination (Sergio Andreozzi: track leader)
This track focuses on community and co-ordination aspects that will enable EGI to fully flourish as an open ecosystem to support Open Science and enable the European Research Area. Appropriate governance processes and policy frameworks will also need to be identified and adopted. Clear business models for the individual actors and for the EGI as a whole need to be identified. On the co-ordination front, the track seeks to explore ways to improve current marketing strategies, communication channels and outreach to existing and new partners and communities. Examples of topics relevant in this area are: development of governance models for e-Infrastructures; sustainability and business models for the EGI ecosystem, including Resource Providers and Technology Providers; strategic alignment with EU and national priorities (e.g. with EU2020); best practices for establishing NGI policy frameworks, experience in communication and outreach activities; innovative marketing strategies for reaching key stakeholders
