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The EGI Technical Forum 2012 will take place at the Clarion Congress Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic between 17-21 September 2012. The event will be hosted by EGI.eu in partnership with CESNET, the consortium of Czech universities and the Czech Academy of Sciences that represents the country in the EGI council.
Reflecting a little on the considerable progress made by the collaboration so far and looking forwards to the challenges of public availability, reusability and transparency of scientific methods and data in Open Science, the core theme of this Technical Forum is to be:
“The development of an open and sustainable EGI ecosystem that will support Open Science in the digital European Research Area.”
Please note: the timetable represents a framework into which submitted proposals will be placed. There is room to accomodate other material if that fits in with the track descriptions.
General information: http://www.globuseurope.org/
Agenda: http://www.globuseurope.org/agenda
Call for participation: http://www.egcf.eu/site/cfp_ge2012/Invitation_to_GlobusEUROPE.html
General information: http://www.globuseurope.org/
Agenda: http://www.globuseurope.org/agenda
Call for participation: http://www.egcf.eu/site/cfp_ge2012/Invitation_to_GlobusEUROPE.html
NGI International Liaisons meeting (closed).
Further information: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Virtual_Team_Projects
<u>Proposed agenda:</u>
Session 1
Reports from active VTs, 5minutes each
- Steven Newhouse: Introduction
- Ladislav Hluchy: Fire and Smoke Simulation
- Steve Brewer: Digital Cultural Heritage DCH-EGI Integration
- Ladislav Hluchy: SPEEch on the griD (SPEED)
- Robert Lovas: Science gateway primer
- Sergio Andreozzi: Scientific Publications Repository
- Sara Coelho (EGI.eu): Inter NGI Usage Report (second phase)
- Gergely Sipos (EGI.eu): Assessing the adoption of Federated Identity Providers within the EGI Community
- Zdenek Sustr (CESNET): MPI within EGI
- NEW: Yannick Legre (Idgrilles) - Environmental & Biodiversity VT
- NEW: Daniele Cesini, Antonio Lagana: New VT in Computational Chemistry
- John Walsh (TCD, Ireland): GPGPU requirements (General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units)
Session 2:
- NEW: Ludek Matyska: New VT on ELIXIR ESFRI
- NEW: Ladislav Hluchy: New VT on Fire simulation application integration
General information: http://www.globuseurope.org/
Agenda: http://www.globuseurope.org/agenda
Call for participation: http://www.egcf.eu/site/cfp_ge2012/Invitation_to_GlobusEUROPE.html
NGI International Liaisons meeting (closed).
Further information: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Virtual_Team_Projects
<u>Proposed agenda:</u>
Session 1
Reports from active VTs, 5minutes each
- Steven Newhouse: Introduction
- Ladislav Hluchy: Fire and Smoke Simulation
- Steve Brewer: Digital Cultural Heritage DCH-EGI Integration
- Ladislav Hluchy: SPEEch on the griD (SPEED)
- Robert Lovas: Science gateway primer
- Sergio Andreozzi: Scientific Publications Repository
- Sara Coelho (EGI.eu): Inter NGI Usage Report (second phase)
- Gergely Sipos (EGI.eu): Assessing the adoption of Federated Identity Providers within the EGI Community
- Zdenek Sustr (CESNET): MPI within EGI
- NEW: Yannick Legre (Idgrilles) - Environmental & Biodiversity VT
- NEW: Daniele Cesini, Antonio Lagana: New VT in Computational Chemistry
- John Walsh (TCD, Ireland): GPGPU requirements (General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units)
Session 2:
- NEW: Ludek Matyska: New VT on ELIXIR ESFRI
- NEW: Ladislav Hluchy: New VT on Fire simulation application integration
Keynote talks
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
If you want to participate, please register at the following URL: http://go.egi.eu/security
This is a sequence of sessions starting Tues 18th at 11:00, followed by Wed 16:00 and concluding with a double session on Fri.
In this security hands-on, the participants will take on the role as security teams being responsible for the operational security of simulated grid sites running in a virtualized environment. The sites will face attacks very similar to those seen in real life. The team's task is to respond to these attacks and keep their services up and running as far as possible.
The target audience is system administrators with a good knowledge of linux. Please note that the number of participants will be somehow limited by the underlying testbed used for the hands-on (18 max).
An introduction to the the tutorial can be found here:
https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/EGI_CSIRT:TDG/SecTut-EGI17092012
Marketing and communicating your work effectively is a key aim for EC-funded projects. With Horizon 2020 coming onstream in 2014, funders are increasingly focused on getting the research they support noticed. Marketing strategies need to focus on establishing engagement with a range of audiences, including scientists, research infrastructures and policy makers. This interactive session focuses on building outreach strategies that will open up two way channels with different audiences and encourage dialogue. This is particularly important when addressing new audiences, such as new users of e-infrastructures like the ESFRI projects, in order to ensure that their requirements can be gathered and to promote new tools and services available to them.
New features and training for service administrators/users
Cloud platform operators talk about cloud service design, customer support (account management, service desk etc.) and integration into operational infrastructures
Research infrastructures (RIs) play an increasingly important role in the advancement of knowledge and technology. They are a key instrument in bringing together a wide diversity of stakeholders to look for solutions to many of the problems society is facing today. RIs offer unique research services to users from different countries, attract young people to science, and help to shape scientific communities. RIs help to create a new research environment in which all researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world. RIs are therefore at the centre of the knowledge triangle of research, education and innovation, producing knowledge through research, diffusing it through education, and applying it through innovation.
EGI supports the digital European Research Area and RIs with an open federation of services that provide uniform access to national computing, storage and data resources. National Grid Infrastructures (NGIs), providers of EGI services, accumulated knowledge on developing, deploying, operating and monitoring custom services for scientific purposes in Europe and beyond. This double-session includes presentations about RIs that consume services from EGI and about collaborations that are forming between the NGIs and RIs.
This session focuses on experience in community building and user championing and covers VRCs, NGIs, ESFRI projects and other initiatives. Within EGI-InSPIRE, this activity primarily falls under the Community Engagement work package and in particular the tasks Community Outreach and Technical Outreach to New Communities (TONC). In addition to these activities, the function and operation of the User Community Board (UCB) will also be presented. Many of the user community representatives within the UCB are from recognised Virtual Research Communities but not all. In addition to the structure of the Forums, Technical and Community, two new entities have been created during the second year of EGI-INSPIRE - namely NGI International Liaisons (NILs) and Virtual Teams (VTs). NILs are responsible for non-operational matters and may participate in VTs to achieve short time-frame goals.
Two sessions covering IPv6 and monitoring and troubleshooting tools. Will involve EMI/IGE/HEPIX.
New features and training for service administrators/users
During the EGI-EUDAT-PRACE workshop we will
Cloud platform operators talk about cloud service design, customer support (account management, service desk etc.) and integration into operational infrastructures
Research infrastructures (RIs) play an increasingly important role in the advancement of knowledge and technology. They are a key instrument in bringing together a wide diversity of stakeholders to look for solutions to many of the problems society is facing today. RIs offer unique research services to users from different countries, attract young people to science, and help to shape scientific communities. RIs help to create a new research environment in which all researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world. RIs are therefore at the centre of the knowledge triangle of research, education and innovation, producing knowledge through research, diffusing it through education, and applying it through innovation.
EGI supports the digital European Research Area and RIs with an open federation of services that provide uniform access to national computing, storage and data resources. National Grid Infrastructures (NGIs), providers of EGI services, accumulated knowledge on developing, deploying, operating and monitoring custom services for scientific purposes in Europe and beyond. This double-session includes presentations about RIs that consume services from EGI and about collaborations that are forming between the NGIs and RIs.
The Scientific Publications Repository project started in June 2012 in order to define tools, policies and processes to track the scientific outcome that was possible thanks to the use of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). The ultimate goal is to improve the evidence of the EGI scientific impact. This session will describe the proposed processes, policies and tools to be established. It is aimed at NGI / VO representatives and all people interested in demonstrating the scientific impact of their research or infrastructure and will give the opportunity to provide feedback to the defined plan before starting the implementation.
Two sessions covering IPv6 and monitoring and troubleshooting tools. Will involve EMI/IGE/HEPIX.
During the EGI-EUDAT-PRACE workshop we will
Cloud platform operators talk about cloud service design, customer support (account management, service desk etc.) and integration into operational infrastructures
Scientific communities require various software and support services - such as training, consultancy, software development - to engage with the technical services of the European Grid Infrastructure. These services are provided in EGI by distributed teams operated within the NGIs (National Grid Infrastructures), VRCs (Virtual Research Communities), VOs (Virtual Organisations) and national and international projects and scientific collaborations. The provisioning is facilitated by a variety of software tools. The Applications Database from Greece, the Training Marketplace from the UK, the Client Relationship Management system from Spain and Portugal and the Requirement Tracker from the Czech Republic are examples of services that scientific groups and their supporters are already benefiting from. New initiatives - such as the Globus Market from IGE or ScienceSoft from EMI - are emerging, and target certain functionalities that EGI needs to florish as a successful, innovative, distributed community.
This session includes presentations and discussion of the current and emerging tools that EGI uses or needs for the coordination and delivery of community building and user support activities.
Keynote talks
Resources of the European Grid Infrastructure provide services for research communities through various grid middleware and cloud platforms. These services use X509 certificates for user authentication and authorisation (AA) purposes. A growing number of the existing and potential new user communities of EGI consider personal certificate based access as a main barrier of the infrastructure uptake. Some of these communities – together with their supporting NGIs, NRENs and scientific projects – developed ad-hoc solutions to simplify or hide the certificate based Authentication Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) from these users. Before such solutions could be widely adopted within EGI they need to be assessed from a number of perspectives. Georgaphical coverage, availability for any scientific discipline, scalability, robustness, integrate-ability with current and emerging EGI platforms, sustainability and simple usage are the main criteria for a AAI to be adopted within the European Grid Infrastructure.
The workshop aims to bring together representatives from existing and potential user communities, their support teams, platform technology providers and resource providers to present and discuss state-of-the-art AAI solutions and next steps towards the wider and harmonised adoption of these within the NGIs, the providers of EGI resources. The workshop will consists of two parts:
First part (Session 1 & 2):
• Presentations by user community representatives, by NGIs, by Technology providers and by projects about AA solutions they developed to simplify access to grid middleware or cloud EGI platforms. (for example Identity federations; OpenID; science gateway frameworks; online certificate storages, robot certificate providers, identity mapping frameworks)
• Presentations by representatives scientific communities about the use cases and requirements for the integration of new AA appriaches into the production infrastructure.
Second part (Session 3):
Open discussion of an architecture that integrates AA services from the EGI community and provides a platform for portal developers who want to create research community specific, web portal based Virtual Research Environment that provide access to resources of the EGI production infrastructure (grid/cloud services) and are integrated with the identity federation(s) used by the research community.
A short document that outlines this platform has been prepared prior to the workshop. This document is available below (look for the link Discussion_document on the page). The document describes a possible architecture of this platform (EGI federated identity platform) and identifies existing software components from the community that could be used to implement the platform. The discussion session of the workshop is used to
1. Refine the vision of the ‘EGI federated identity platform’, and if possible endorse it as a service that the EGI community wants to implement and provide for research collaborations.
2. Identify software providers and service providers from the community that would participate in the implementation and provisioning of a production instance of the platform for the whole community.
3. Identify issues or threats that would make a specific service from the platform, or the platform itself unusable or irrelevant for research communities.
Workshop follow up:
The platform vision document will be updated as soon as possible based on the feedback that have been received during the discussion session. If you wish to provide written feedback on the document then please email this to Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu).
If you wish to stay involved in the further development of the vision document and the platform implementation, then please email your EGI SSO account name to Gergely Sipos (you can request one at www.egi.eu/sso). You will be added to the email list that will be setup for this purpose after the Technical Forum.
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
This system administrator oriented tutorial is based on the second release of the EMI middleware, EMI-2 "Matterhorn", and will provide practical tutorials about the installation and configuration of the most used services. Specific examples will be provided, highlighting best practices and most common mistakes. It is mainly intended for System Administrators. See the details for further info about the topics.
Each session will feature an hands-on part, where virtual machines will be available for those willing to practice the exercise performed by the speaker.
Those who are not attending the conference can follow remotely through the session webcast. Guest access is enabled, but remote participants are warmly requested to insert their real name and provenance. The webcast recording is permanently available at the URL reported in the session details.
The EC-funded Helix Nebula project is a step towards a European cloud‐based scientific e‐Infrastructure composed of resources and services from commercial and publicly-owned providers. This workshop is the first of three to bring together the appropriate technology and policy representatives from both the public and commercial sectors to address the integration and interoperation of their respective infrastructures. The workshop is composed of three sessions addressing respectively 1) technical interoperability (http://go.egi.eu/hnws1-p1), 2) network connectivity (http://go.egi.eu/hnws1-p2), and 3) business models and legal aspects (http://go.egi.eu/hnws1-p3).
The first session focuses on requirements for technical interoperability among publicly-funded e-Infrastructures and commercial cloud providers. The session kicks off with two presentations describing the technical architecture of the EGI Federated Cloud and Helix Nebula. An initial list of current and potential use cases for using integrated clouds infrastructures will be highlighted. This session is expected to provide Helix Nebula with initial list of meaningful use cases, a set of agreed technical requirements, as well as the identification of working groups that should be started in order to analyse them towards the definition of a roadmap for their implementations.
Printable brochure: http://go.egi.eu/hnws1-brochure
The Resource Centre Forum puts together experts and representatives from the EGI Resource Centres to discuss operational and technical issues that concern various topics such as deployment of licensed software, resource allocation to new user groups, deployment of GPGUS, deployment of batch systems such as Grid Engine, etc. During the Resource Centre Forum we will discuss the creation of a permanent group of experts to address site-specific VO operational issues. The ultimate goal of the Resource Centre Forum is to improve support to multiple disciplines, foster collaboration between Resource Centres from different NGIs and to allow sharing of expertise between them. The III Resource Centre Forum meeting is aimed at VO operations managers, to site representatives and NGI operations teams.
A series of 3 sessions dedicated to Operations and covering accounting and the advancement of tools and regionalization.
The ERINA+ consortium will be presenting the final shape of the assessment methodology, as a comprehensive means to enable a socio-economic impact analysis of e-Infrastructures. Part of the discussion will be dedicated as well to the main operational tools which, above all, helped the Consortium in the gathering of information and, therefore, allowed the projects to enter the second phase of data analysis, coming to a first overall assessment of the e-Infrastructures domain through: The ERINA+ Project Self-Assessment Webtool, released in July 2012; and Online questionnaires for retrieving information and feedback from e-Infrastructures from two perspectives (a) e-Infrastructure Key Stakeholders of and (b) Users of the projects’ services.
Resources of the European Grid Infrastructure provide services for research communities through various grid middleware and cloud platforms. These services use X509 certificates for user authentication and authorisation (AA) purposes. A growing number of the existing and potential new user communities of EGI consider personal certificate based access as a main barrier of the infrastructure uptake. Some of these communities – together with their supporting NGIs, NRENs and scientific projects – developed ad-hoc solutions to simplify or hide the certificate based Authentication Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) from these users. Before such solutions could be widely adopted within EGI they need to be assessed from a number of perspectives. Georgaphical coverage, availability for any scientific discipline, scalability, robustness, integrate-ability with current and emerging EGI platforms, sustainability and simple usage are the main criteria for a AAI to be adopted within the European Grid Infrastructure.
The workshop aims to bring together representatives from existing and potential user communities, their support teams, platform technology providers and resource providers to present and discuss state-of-the-art AAI solutions and next steps towards the wider and harmonised adoption of these within the NGIs, the providers of EGI resources. The workshop will consists of two parts:
First part (Session 1 & 2):
• Presentations by user community representatives, by NGIs, by Technology providers and by projects about AA solutions they developed to simplify access to grid middleware or cloud EGI platforms. (for example Identity federations; OpenID; science gateway frameworks; online certificate storages, robot certificate providers, identity mapping frameworks)
• Presentations by representatives scientific communities about the use cases and requirements for the integration of new AA appriaches into the production infrastructure.
Second part (Session 3):
Open discussion of an architecture that integrates AA services from the EGI community and provides a platform for portal developers who want to create research community specific, web portal based Virtual Research Environment that provide access to resources of the EGI production infrastructure (grid/cloud services) and are integrated with the identity federation(s) used by the research community.
A short document that outlines this platform has been prepared prior to the workshop. This document is available below (look for the link Discussion_document on the page). The document describes a possible architecture of this platform (EGI federated identity platform) and identifies existing software components from the community that could be used to implement the platform. The discussion session of the workshop is used to
1. Refine the vision of the ‘EGI federated identity platform’, and if possible endorse it as a service that the EGI community wants to implement and provide for research collaborations.
2. Identify software providers and service providers from the community that would participate in the implementation and provisioning of a production instance of the platform for the whole community.
3. Identify issues or threats that would make a specific service from the platform, or the platform itself unusable or irrelevant for research communities.
Workshop follow up:
The platform vision document will be updated as soon as possible based on the feedback that have been received during the discussion session. If you wish to provide written feedback on the document then please email this to Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu).
If you wish to stay involved in the further development of the vision document and the platform implementation, then please email your EGI SSO account name to Gergely Sipos (you can request one at www.egi.eu/sso). You will be added to the email list that will be setup for this purpose after the Technical Forum.
The workshop aims to assess the progress made on interoperability with the demo of the Science Gateway and a feed-back from the VRCs.
A preliminary version of the Roadmap will also be presented
Technology Providers' presentations - how do their offered solutions fit the Platform Operator's needs and improve their operating costs. Technical overview on components, interfaces, and supported standards (technical and process)
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
This system administrator oriented tutorial is based on the second release of the EMI middleware, EMI-2 "Matterhorn", and will provide practical tutorials about the installation and configuration of the most used services. Specific examples will be provided, highlighting best practices and most common mistakes. It is mainly intended for System Administrators. See the details for further info about the topics.
Each session will feature an hands-on part, where virtual machines will be available for those willing to practice the exercise performed by the speaker.
Those who are not attending the conference can follow remotely through the session webcast. Guest access is enabled, but remote participants are warmly requested to insert their real name and provenance. The webcast recording is permanently available at the URL reported in the session details.
The second session dives into the topic of networking services covering coordination with GEANT and the NRENs to ensure network connectivity and policy compliance for the data-intensive use cases and presentations on commercial networking solutions from Helix Nebula suppliers. As the evaluation criteria and key performance metrics for the Helix Nebula cloud offering will be defined based on the specific goals of each flagship application, networking performance will also be a key aspect. It will also allow EGI to fine-tune with the agenda of GEANT/NRENs in terms of next steps for activities related to cloud services and to discuss common issues in this area (requirements/constraints).
A series of 3 sessions dedicated to Operations and covering accounting and the advancement of tools and regionalization.
Resources of the European Grid Infrastructure provide services for research communities through various grid middleware and cloud platforms. These services use X509 certificates for user authentication and authorisation (AA) purposes. A growing number of the existing and potential new user communities of EGI consider personal certificate based access as a main barrier of the infrastructure uptake. Some of these communities – together with their supporting NGIs, NRENs and scientific projects – developed ad-hoc solutions to simplify or hide the certificate based Authentication Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) from these users. Before such solutions could be widely adopted within EGI they need to be assessed from a number of perspectives. Georgaphical coverage, availability for any scientific discipline, scalability, robustness, integrate-ability with current and emerging EGI platforms, sustainability and simple usage are the main criteria for a AAI to be adopted within the European Grid Infrastructure.
The workshop aims to bring together representatives from existing and potential user communities, their support teams, platform technology providers and resource providers to present and discuss state-of-the-art AAI solutions and next steps towards the wider and harmonised adoption of these within the NGIs, the providers of EGI resources. The workshop will consists of two parts:
First part (Session 1 & 2):
• Presentations by user community representatives, by NGIs, by Technology providers and by projects about AA solutions they developed to simplify access to grid middleware or cloud EGI platforms. (for example Identity federations; OpenID; science gateway frameworks; online certificate storages, robot certificate providers, identity mapping frameworks)
• Presentations by representatives scientific communities about the use cases and requirements for the integration of new AA appriaches into the production infrastructure.
Second part (Session 3):
Open discussion of an architecture that integrates AA services from the EGI community and provides a platform for portal developers who want to create research community specific, web portal based Virtual Research Environment that provide access to resources of the EGI production infrastructure (grid/cloud services) and are integrated with the identity federation(s) used by the research community.
A short document that outlines this platform has been prepared prior to the workshop. This document is available below (look for the link Discussion_document on the page). The document describes a possible architecture of this platform (EGI federated identity platform) and identifies existing software components from the community that could be used to implement the platform. The discussion session of the workshop is used to
1. Refine the vision of the ‘EGI federated identity platform’, and if possible endorse it as a service that the EGI community wants to implement and provide for research collaborations.
2. Identify software providers and service providers from the community that would participate in the implementation and provisioning of a production instance of the platform for the whole community.
3. Identify issues or threats that would make a specific service from the platform, or the platform itself unusable or irrelevant for research communities.
Workshop follow up:
The platform vision document will be updated as soon as possible based on the feedback that have been received during the discussion session. If you wish to provide written feedback on the document then please email this to Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu).
If you wish to stay involved in the further development of the vision document and the platform implementation, then please email your EGI SSO account name to Gergely Sipos (you can request one at www.egi.eu/sso). You will be added to the email list that will be setup for this purpose after the Technical Forum.
The workshop aims to assess the progress made on interoperability with the demo of the Science Gateway and a feed-back from the VRCs.
A preliminary version of the Roadmap will also be presented
Technology Providers' presentations - how do their offered solutions fit the Platform Operator's needs and improve their operating costs. Technical overview on components, interfaces, and supported standards (technical and process)
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
If you want to participate, please register at the following URL: http://go.egi.eu/security
This is a sequence of sessions starting Tues 18th at 11:00, followed by Wed 16:00 and concluding with a double session on Fri.
In this security hands-on, the participants will take on the role as security teams being responsible for the operational security of simulated grid sites running in a virtualized environment. The sites will face attacks very similar to those seen in real life. The team's task is to respond to these attacks and keep their services up and running as far as possible.
The target audience is system administrators with a good knowledge of linux. Please note that the number of participants will be somehow limited by the underlying testbed used for the hands-on (18 max).
An introduction to the the tutorial can be found here:
https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/EGI_CSIRT:TDG/SecTut-EGI17092012
This system administrator oriented tutorial is based on the second release of the EMI middleware, EMI-2 "Matterhorn", and will provide practical tutorials about the installation and configuration of the most used services. Specific examples will be provided, highlighting best practices and most common mistakes. It is mainly intended for System Administrators. See the details for further info about the topics.
Each session will feature an hands-on part, where virtual machines will be available for those willing to practice the exercise performed by the speaker.
Those who are not attending the conference can follow remotely through the session webcast. Guest access is enabled, but remote participants are warmly requested to insert their real name and provenance. The webcast recording is permanently available at the URL reported in the session details.
The final session of the workshop looks at potential business for integrated e-infrastructures with commercial clouds and the legal and policy issues around scientific data in publicly-owned and private infrastructures. In addition, understanding the overall costs of e-Infrastructures and service provision is a prerequisite in planning long-term sustainability and any possible business model. A study that goes beyond a simple “cost per core hour” comparison by analysing qualitative differences in service between HTC and HPC e-Infrastructures and their closest commercial counterparts will also be presented. The expected outcome of this session includes a preliminary list of usage models for hybrid clouds and a possible identification of cost models as well as of scenarios to operate cloud services in current and changing regulatory environment. The workshop will close with an overall summary including agreements, open issues and actions.
A series of 3 sessions dedicated to Operations and covering accounting and the advancement of tools and regionalization.
Keynote talks
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
This operations track addresses the problem of the future technical evolution of EGI operations, and on the sustainability of NGI and EGI.eu operational services.
In the morning session we will discuss the status and next steps for a unified EGI information discovery service.
A single session on Services followed by a double session training workshop for service administrators.
As the digital research landscape broadens, so more research communities are seeking to establish community or science domain specific environments for data sharing and analysis scenarios. These environments, the so called Virtual Research Environments (VREs) use a mix of EGI, third party academic and commercial resources to support multi-national communities on a sustainable and long term basis. Science gateways are key enablers of VREs: they integrate and provide a coherent view of the various software tools and services that a researcher needs for a custom analysis workflow. Authentication frameworks, visualisation tools, monitors, databases, workflow systems, job execution pilots are few examples from the rich set of services that science gateways glue together and make easily consumable through a Web portal or a desktop application.
Over the last decade the members of the European Grid Infrastructure collaboration accumulated rich knowledge on developing, deploying, operating and monitoring science gateways. EGI members provide nearly 30 science gateways for various scientific groups in Europe and beyond. Many of these gateways are built from 'off the shelf' frameworks or components that exist as reusable products to those who wish to build new gateways for their own specific needs. (The gateways and the enabling technologies are listed here: http://go.egi.eu/sciencegateways)
The contributions of this double-session will focus on various technical aspects of science gateway enabling technologies and of gateway development. The EGI-InSPIRE project recently started a 'Virtual Team' with participants from 15 NGIs and from EGI.eu to develop a primer document for gateway developers (https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/VT_Science_Gateway_Primer). The document will collect best practices and state of the art in relevant technological and policy areas. The double-session will provide an opportunity to update the community about the activities to be covered by the primer document and that facilitate the adoption of EGI gateways and gateway technologies within the European Research Area.
This session aims at guiding NGIs to analyse the key issues that need to be faced to become sustainable: costs, cost models, service portfolio, business models and service management structures. The evolution of the European Grid from a project-based structure to a network of organisations with a common strategy to provide federated services is a major step forward for long-term sustainability of the EGI community. In this context, each national infrastructure needs to develop or consolidate its own business model and service management structures to achieve sustainability. This dedicated session is designed to better understand the development and progress of the sustainability plans and strategies coming from the national infrastructures, therefore participation from these representatives is essential.
Which services are needed/available to efficiently use Cloud infrastructures? Services bridging the gap between pure Cloud infrastructure services and VREs, such as Brokers, Workflow services portals, etc.
This is a double session Tutorial being run by Karolina Sarnowska-Upton of Virginia University
This operations track addresses the problem of the future technical evolution of EGI operations, and on the sustainability of NGI and EGI.eu operational services.
In the morning session we will discuss the status and next steps for a unified EGI information discovery service.
A single session on Services followed by a double session training workshop for service administrators.
As the digital research landscape broadens, so more research communities are seeking to establish community or science domain specific environments for data sharing and analysis scenarios. These environments, the so called Virtual Research Environments (VREs) use a mix of EGI, third party academic and commercial resources to support multi-national communities on a sustainable and long term basis. Science gateways are key enablers of VREs: they integrate and provide a coherent view of the various software tools and services that a researcher needs for a custom analysis workflow. Authentication frameworks, visualisation tools, monitors, databases, workflow systems, job execution pilots are few examples from the rich set of services that science gateways glue together and make easily consumable through a Web portal or a desktop application.
Over the last decade the members of the European Grid Infrastructure collaboration accumulated rich knowledge on developing, deploying, operating and monitoring science gateways. EGI members provide nearly 30 science gateways for various scientific groups in Europe and beyond. Many of these gateways are built from 'off the shelf' frameworks or components that exist as reusable products to those who wish to build new gateways for their own specific needs. (The gateways and the enabling technologies are listed here: http://go.egi.eu/sciencegateways)
The contributions of this double-session will focus on various technical aspects of science gateway enabling technologies and of gateway development. The EGI-InSPIRE project recently started a 'Virtual Team' with participants from 15 NGIs and from EGI.eu to develop a primer document for gateway developers (https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/VT_Science_Gateway_Primer). The document will collect best practices and state of the art in relevant technological and policy areas. The double-session will provide an opportunity to update the community about the activities to be covered by the primer document and that facilitate the adoption of EGI gateways and gateway technologies within the European Research Area.
The technology area within the EGI ecosystem is built upon open-source or commercial software coming from community and generic technology providers that is put together by platform integrators to meet the needs of particular research communities. For instance, the EMI project integrates a platform for high-throughput computing from software that is developed within the project primarily for the EGI community (i.e. community technology providers such as the product teams within EMI) with software developed outside the EGI community (i.e. generic technology providers such as Apache) to meet particular use cases coming from their target research community (e.g. WLCG). The aim of this session is to share vision and strategies from the perspectives of technology providers to guarantee sustainable software and support for the EGI community.
Which services are needed/available to efficiently use Cloud infrastructures? Services bridging the gap between pure Cloud infrastructure services and VREs, such as Brokers, Workflow services portals, etc.
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
This operations track addresses the problem of the future technical evolution of EGI operations, and on the sustainability of NGI and EGI.eu operational services.
In the morning session we will discuss the status and next steps for a unified EGI information discovery service.
A single session on Services followed by a double session training workshop for service administrators.
National Grid Infrastructures are currently in a transition phase from startup states to sustainable organisational structures. A key part of this is precisely defining what services they offer and who will make use of them, This is necessary as not only are NGIs variable in goals, structure and resources, but also because they have often grown out of other organisations. This means that they have often evolved to provide value to many groups without clearly defining either the groups or services.
This session will use knowledge and approaches from commercial IT Service Management and experts from the gSLM & FedSM projects to help NGIs understand who to clearly define service portfolios. This will support later development of business models and structures for efficient and cost effective management of NGIs. The session will work through the process of designing a service portfolio and provide a schema to support NGIs is carrying out the same process themselves.
Virtual Research Environments (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. This session includes presentations of software and services that are available for VRE developers, and experiences in using and establishing services for VREs.
Keynote talks
This is the first face to face meeting of the recently founded GGUS Advisory Group. GGUS (Global Grid User Support) is the tool behind the EGI helpdesk. Since the EGI helpdesk is used for various purposes by a large number of different user groups, the establishment of an advisory group regularly discussing seemed necessary. Amongst other things, the meeting aims to further detail the composition of the group, its processes and frequency of convening. There will be presentations on current development and strategic topics.
This is a closed meeting - anyone intending to attend should contact the Chairman, Dr Torsten Antoni.
The development of GGUS, the tool behind the EGI helpdesk and the EGI technology helpdesk, has been guided by advisory groups since the days of EGEE-II, when first the ESC (Executive Support Committee) and later on the USAG (User Support Advisory Group) were fulfilling this role. With the start of EGEE, this role was shared between the OTAG (Operational Tools Advisory Group) and the USAG (User Services Advisory Group). After the USAG was discontinued it was decided that a GGUS specific advisory body should be founded, bringing on board all the stakeholder from EGI, NGIs, VRCs and Technology Providers. The group will meet on a regular basis to discuss the high level strategic direction the development of GGUS should be taking.
The EGI helpdesk is one of the central tools used to communicate within the EGI ecosystem, inside and across the borders of projects, infrastructures and user communities. As such it is vital that the general strategic direction of the development is discussed with all the stakeholders. This face to face meeting aims at kick starting the new advisory group.
Three separate sessions on security and vulnerability
This session is aimed at personnel contributing to NGI Regional Operator on Duty activities (ROD).
There will be three 30 minute slots. The first one will cover an overview of the Operations Portal - the tool used in daily operations support activities, and information on how recent developments influence daily operators work. Likely a new version of the dashboard will be presented.
The second slot is about the status and issues of the Grid Oversight activity. The Central Operator on Duty team (COD) will also provide information on current status and open issues.
The session will close with a Question and Answer session, which will give attendees the opportunity to ask any questions about grid oversight activities.
This is session is particularly recommended to ROD personnel, in particular from NGIs that recently joined the production infrastructure.
As the digital research landscape broadens, so more research communities are seeking to establish community or science domain specific environments for data sharing and analysis scenarios. Workflow systems are key contributors to these environments: they enable scientist to describe a sequence of computational and data manipulation steps in such a way that it can be automated, repeated, monitored, shared and gradually improved by a community of experts. Workflow systems are graphical or text environments that provide interfaces to design workflows, just like word or spreadsheet processors allow users to write a document or set up a series of calculations, and they often also support the execution of workflows on various infrastructures.
EGI workflow systems enable scientific communities to design and execute applications on resources of the European Grid Infrastructure. The 15-20 workflow systems and the few dozens of workflows that have been built and published from these systems until now are available through the EGI website (http://go.egi.eu/workflows).
This double-session will present the most important workflow systems, workflows and support projects from the EGI community and beyond, and will give us opportunity to discuss and exchange experiences, best practices and issues of building ‘communities of interest’ through workflows. The workshop is jointly organised by the EGI-InSPIRE, SHIWA and ER-Flow EC projects. The workshop will be a forum to present and discuss solutions and issues of:
The provision of ICT services for research is increasingly using cloud services to complement the traditional federation of computing centres. Due to the complex funding structure and differences in the basic business model, comparing the cost-effectiveness of these options requires a new approach to cost assessment. The e-Fiscal project has been funded to assess the overall cost of computing service provision for research in Europe, gathering high-level experts in the e-Infrastructure service provision, cost assessment and policy development. This workshop will present the key findings of the project to date, a state of the art review, cost models and analysis, work and results on benchmarking EGI and HPC vs. Amazon EC2 as well as the results of the e-Fiscal Summer Workshop held 3-4 July in Greece. It will also be the occasion to publicly review a new and more concise version of the questionnaire that can be used to collect data. Participants will gain a better understanding of the kind of cost assessment issues high-utilisation rate ICT services that should be considered when choosing between different infrastructure options and is aimed at cloud, HTC and HPC centre management and technical personnel.
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
If you want to participate, please register at the following URL: http://go.egi.eu/security
This is a sequence of sessions starting Tues 18th at 11:00, followed by Wed 16:00 and concluding with a double session on Fri.
In this security hands-on, the participants will take on the role as security teams being responsible for the operational security of simulated grid sites running in a virtualized environment. The sites will face attacks very similar to those seen in real life. The team's task is to respond to these attacks and keep their services up and running as far as possible.
The target audience is system administrators with a good knowledge of linux. Please note that the number of participants will be somehow limited by the underlying testbed used for the hands-on (18 max).
An introduction to the the tutorial can be found here:
https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/EGI_CSIRT:TDG/SecTut-EGI17092012
OTAG-13 on regionalisation
Scientific software in the Cloud: with flexibility comes responsibility - what impact has Cloud Computing on the architecture of scientific software? Which Cloud mechanisms are available to support scientific software in the Cloud e.g. high-availability for scientific applications (self-serving HA, etc.)?
As the digital research landscape broadens, so more research communities are seeking to establish community or science domain specific environments for data sharing and analysis scenarios. Workflow systems are key contributors to these environments: they enable scientist to describe a sequence of computational and data manipulation steps in such a way that it can be automated, repeated, monitored, shared and gradually improved by a community of experts. Workflow systems are graphical or text environments that provide interfaces to design workflows, just like word or spreadsheet processors allow users to write a document or set up a series of calculations, and they often also support the execution of workflows on various infrastructures.
EGI workflow systems enable scientific communities to design and execute applications on resources of the European Grid Infrastructure. The 15-20 workflow systems and the few dozens of workflows that have been built and published from these systems until now are available through the EGI website (http://go.egi.eu/workflows).
This double-session will present the most important workflow systems, workflows and support projects from the EGI community and beyond, and will give us opportunity to discuss and exchange experiences, best practices and issues of building ‘communities of interest’ through workflows. The workshop is jointly organised by the EGI-InSPIRE, SHIWA and ER-Flow EC projects. The workshop will be a forum to present and discuss solutions and issues of:
A series of closed EGI InSPIRE project meetings
If you want to participate, please register at the following URL: http://go.egi.eu/security
This is a sequence of sessions starting Tues 18th at 11:00, followed by Wed 16:00 and concluding with a double session on Fri.
In this security hands-on, the participants will take on the role as security teams being responsible for the operational security of simulated grid sites running in a virtualized environment. The sites will face attacks very similar to those seen in real life. The team's task is to respond to these attacks and keep their services up and running as far as possible.
The target audience is system administrators with a good knowledge of linux. Please note that the number of participants will be somehow limited by the underlying testbed used for the hands-on (18 max).
An introduction to the the tutorial can be found here:
https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/EGI_CSIRT:TDG/SecTut-EGI17092012
OTAG-13 on regionalisation