- Bringing leading research communities and researchers together to tackle scientific and societal challenges through the use of innovative technology deployed in Virtual Research Environments
- Sustaining the current production infrastructure and bringing into production a federated infrastructure cloud that will enable a new generation of users from different science domains
- Continuing to build and coordinate the community of human experts that use, operate, manage, develop, support and provide outreach around the production infrastructure
- Refining the financial, technical and political governance of EGI and its ecosystem so that it continues to thrive for the decades to come
The EGITF 2013 will be co-located with international workshops and meetings relating to the research challenges and technical interoperability needed to operate and exploit an open compute and data infrastructure. These include IBERGRID 2013, EU-Brazil OpenBIO, Open Grid Forum 39, GlobusEUROPE and the CloudPlugFest interoperability workshops.
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Virtual Research Environments and Enabling Technologies (Gergely Sipos, Peter Solagna)
This track covers the Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and the enabling technologies that are available on EGI for research communities to conduct their work. The VREs provide customised environments by connecting and making infrastructure resources from EGI available for domain/user specific data and compute intensive applications, as well as for collaborative work. Main themes of the track will include portals and science gateways, workflow systems, data management tools, middleware services to access federated distributed resources, tools for distributed security and identity management, collaboration services, interoperability of infrastructure and application services, best practices for constructing and delivering VREs.
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EGI’s Core Infrastructure Platform (Tiziana Ferrari/Malgorzata Krakowian)
This track covers the operational services, tools and associated requirements for the delivery of a heterogeneous resource federation. The track will comprise a series of community events and workshops to address specific technical areas and shape the future of operations. The main themes of the track are:
the EGI accounting infrastructure and its evolution towards an integrated system for multiple resource types;
the EGI operational tools and their adoption by other resource infrastructures for the support of new services and user communities;
the processes, roles and support tools needed for the implementation of a coordinated federated resource pool comprising heterogeneous resource infrastructures and use cases requiring infrastructure integration;
the adoption of service management best practices in a federated infrastructure for better management of EGI services, which will improve customer experiences. -
EGI & Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Platforms (David Wallom/Michel Drescher)
This track will highlight the activities around the federation of IaaS Cloud providers of different flavours and cloud specific associated services. The IaaS Cloud is introducing new resource types to the federated e-Infrastructure provided by EGI. This track will cover experiences with formal site certification for these new Cloud resources, workshops for Cloud Resource Providers on how to technically integrate Cloud Resources with the EGI federation and the roadmap for future developments, discussions on the necessary policy and practice extensions needed for cloud resources as well as workshops for Research Communities on how to practically utilise EGI’s Cloud Resources.
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EGI’s Human Networks (Catherine Gater/Richard Mclennan)
This track focuses on the development of the human networks that will enable EGI to continue to flourish as an open ecosystem to support open computing, drive innovation and to deliver services to the European Research Area. Sustainable co-development and innovation needs to take place by bringing operation and non-operations staff together with active researchers and technology experts into virtual teams to tackle critical community issues. This track will explore ways to improve current marketing strategies, communication channels and outreach to existing and new partners and communities, including the ‘long tail’ of science, by using and developing these human networks. Examples of topics relevant in this area are: the results from funded and unfunded virtual teams, improving the human capital within these networks through training and the dissemination of best practices, skills gaps and organisational issues needed for the continued uptake of e-Infrastructures, experiences in communication and outreach activities, and innovative marketing strategies for reaching key stakeholders.
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Policies and Business Models for Open Compute and Data Infrastructures (Sergio Andreozzi/Sy Holsinger)
This track will focus on analysing and proposing high-level policies and business models that innovate the current e-infrastructures ecosystem to support open multi-disciplinary research in the European Research Area. The track aims to address emerging topics such as interoperability and integration of e-infrastructures with commercial cloud providers, re-use of open access publications to evaluate the scientific impact of e-Infrastructures, business models and open data, business models for sustainable evolution of open source software for e-Infrastructures, and the role of the EGI ecosystem in the Horizon 2020.
