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The EGI Community Forum 2014 took place from 19 to 23 May in Helsinki, Finland at the Helsinki University Main Building. This event was hosted by EGI.eu in partnership with the University of Helsinki and the CSC-IT Centre for Science Ltd.
In view of the continuing impact and recognition that the EGI Forums have within the EGI user community, the following other conferences are also being co-located at this event:
Further details are available via: EGI CF14 Website.
CF2014 App
The CF2014 programme is available through the Conference4me smartphone app. The app is available for Android and Apple iOS devices. To download mobile app, please visit http://conference4me.eu/download or type Conference4me in Google Play or iTunes App Store.
Managing security in a cloud environment is a challenge. The focus in this session is on security monitoring technologies and how to
use them in a cloud environment.
In order to help assess VM images from a security point of view we suggest couple of checks and tools that can be done. The intended audience is either the cloud provider administrator, VM endorser, or VM operator, mostly running Linux-based OS. We will demonstrate how an VM can be checked to detect vulnerable packages installed on VM filesystem and will show how these checks could be persistently installed in the image.
It is also important to have a centralized log management available, therefore we discuss possibilities how to store these logs from within the VM, either run-time or at least offline.
There are also couple of other rather simple precautions that can foster security of a node on the public Internet, e.g. to disable password-based authentication, preventing from common directory and/or brute-force attacks. We will also discuss these possibilities and demonstrate how they can be enforced.
Another central problem in distributed computing environments is to efficiently suspend identities found in activities misusing the infrastructure. In this session we will show how a central user suspension framework is deployed in the European Grid Infrastructure.
To register follow this link: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2196
This face-to-face meeting is organised for the members of the EGI Engagement Board to discuss latest developments in EGI's user engagement domain. Members of the board are: NGI International Liaisons, EGI Champions, User Community Board. The meeting is open to any other attendee of the EGI Community Forum, but registration is required. (See on page linked below.)
Detailed agenda and registration page is available at https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2060
Helix Nebula brings together leading European scientific organisations, commercial cloud suppliers, technology providers and publicly funded e-Infrastructures to provide an open standard based cloud platform and marketplace to provide cutting edge services able to satisfy the highly demanding requirements of complex use cases by scientific communities, public authorities, private research labs, and users working in the “long tail” of science.
The Helix Nebula EC funded project moves toward its conclusion and suppliers in Helix Nebula’s initiative shifted to production phase with the launch of the Helix Nebula Marketplace (HNX). With the vision of creating a single marketplace in Europe for ICT services for science, EGI.eu has contributed to link the commercial suppliers in HNX with the EGI Federated Cloud so to ensure integration and interoperability.
The objectives of this workshop includes presenting HNX addressing the technical, business and governance perspectives. It also provides an update on the interoperability and integration with e-Infrastructures offering an opportunity to discuss how to complete the EGI integration from the technical and business level. Finally, it presents the viewpoint of the European Space Agency as big data provider wanting to create platforms for the exploitation of Earth Observation data for both science and industry.
EGI operational tools are part of the EGI Infrastructure and Collaboration Platform, are technology agnostic and they can be easily extended to meet the operational needs of any distributed Research Infrastructures. The adoption of EGI operations tools, deployed and developed within EGI-InSPIRE, allows the reuse of existing solutions that address the typical needs of any distributed RI. This session is aimed at NGI operators, Research Infrastructure operators and user communities interested in learning about that.
Description, registration page with connection details for remote attendees are available at https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2197
Applications belonging to the broad field of EarthSciences have been successfully using European e-Infrastructures for their research for a long time. Applications from various different domains like atmospheric chemistry, seismology, meteorology, hydrology, etc. have been deployed and used to produce scientific results.
This session shall highlight some of the more recent applications, employed solutions and results that have been acquired using EGI, or national Cloud and Grid infrastructures.
Solutions implemented on the basis of different middlewares and in combination with data infrastructures such as proposed/provided by EUDAT and domain-specific infrastructures will be presented.
There have been many recent developments in the accounting service: updates to existing software, addition of new accounting types and research into how to provide accounting services. This session aims to introduce the new developments along with instructions on how to configure the necessary software so sites can take part. Additionally, it will introduce some upcoming developments and seek discussion on the plans for taking them forward.
The International Desktop Grid Federation is working closely together within an EGI Virtual team to make it as easy as possible for scientists to use Desktop Grid resources: unused computing capacity from university computers (local desktop grids) or from volunteer citizens at home (Crowd computing).
The session presents the results to scientists and community organisers:
16h30 Opening & Welcome - Arie Vleugel, Member of the Board, Stichting IDGF
16h30 - 16h45 The HADDOCK WeNMR portal goes crowd computing - Alexandre M.J.J. Bonvin, WeNMR, Faculty of Science - Chemistry, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
The HADDOCK web portal is a widely used scientific portal for the modelling of biomolecular interactions. It makes use of the EGI grid infrastructure for job submission. Users interact through a user-friendly web interface. Each user submission translates into several hundreds of individual grid jobs that are handled by the complex workflow beyond the portal. To date HADDOCK counts over 3900 registered users worldwide and has resulted in the last year in over 860.000 grid jobs for a total of over 150 CPU years (normalized CPU time (kSI2K) - source EGI accounting portal).
Until recently, the grid-enabled portal was only making use of standard gLite-based submission and retrieval of jobs via a user-interface. In collaboration with the IDGF team we have ported and validated the HADDOCK computational engine, the CNS software, into a Linux virtual machine for BOINC. This effectively enables the HADDOCK portal to send jobs to IDGF resources using the same gLite-based mechanism as for regular EGI resources.
The IDGF-enabled HADDOCK portal has now been in operation since a few months, sending about 10% of its jobs to IDGF resources. Results show that the Desktop Grip computing resources are performing at a similar level as regular EGI sites.
URLs:
http://haddock.science.uu.nl/enmr/services/HADDOCK
http://www.wenmr.eu
16h45 - 17h00 Spatially explicit ecosystem modelling with the help of workflows and desktop grid technology - Peter Ittzes, BioVeL
Understanding and predicting ecosystem functioning is a key subject of ecological research. Effects of different environmental changes on ecosystems like climate change is a frequently occurring topic, even in the public media. However, modelling these systems is complex and computationally demanding due to the high number of parameters, various options and exhaustive meteorology input requirements. This problem is multiplied if modelling happens over a heterogeneous and patchy geographic landscape. In the BioVeL consortium with the cooperation of MTA SZTAKI a toolset is being developed, that integrates scientific workflow and desktop grid technology. We are working on integration with GIS for spatially explicit ecosystem modelling, which utilizes Taverna workflows, EDGeS desktop grid and Open GIS technology. Main steps of Desktop Grid integration will be demonstrated in the presentation.
17h00 - 17h15 Utilisation of IDGF computational resources: alternatives - Jozsef Kovacs, MTA SZTAKI, Hungary
The IDGF-SP infrastructure consists of volunteer and institutional BOINC projects, bridges to and from EGI (European Grid Infrastructure) type of grids (e.g. gLite), cloud resources, science gateways, monitoring and accounting systems, and virtualization support for the volunteer resources. Several EGI communities are already utilizing these volunteer resources. The infrastructure provides several alternatives for accessing and submitting jobs to Desktop Grids. This presentation gives an overview about the different ways and strategies communities are using the IDGF computational resources.
Port applications to this engine and provide additional number crunching to scientists. IDGF has a support team that can help.
17h15 - 17h30 Establishing and operating local desktop grids - use the power of your institution's idle computers - Tamas Kiss, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
Research institutes, universities and companies all operate large numbers of personal computers to support their employees or students. These PCs are purchased by the institution for supporting its major business, education or research activity, and maintained centrally by an IT department. However, these computers are very often idle, just sitting on the desk and doing nothing. This happens during the night or out of office hours, during holiday periods, at lunchtime, or between scheduled lessons. Using desktop grid technology, for example BOINC, the free computing power of these resources can be utilised for useful scientific or business computations that require large computing capacity. This can be done without compromising the availability and performance of the computers, or negatively influencing the user experience.
The advantage of this solution is that no specific new hardware needs to be purchased, and the maintenance is also performed centrally by the institution independently from the desktop grid utilisation. This presentation will demonstrate via the example of the University of Westminster BOINC desktop grid how local desktop grid infrastructures can be set up and operated. The Westminster Local Desktop Grid connects almost 2,000 laboratory PCs into a powerful computing resource supporting diverse application areas. Porting, deploying and operating applications on these local resources will also be covered and illustrated with examples from both research and teaching. Finally, the support available from IDGF covering the full lifecycle of local desktop grid set-up and operation will be outlined.
It is exciting to see thousands of enthusiastic citizen volunteers donating computing time to your applications. Not only can you get your work done more quickly, but also it provides an excellent opportunity to spread the knowledge about your research to society. IDGF has a special, supported, crowd computing Grid dedicated to EGI applications.
17h30 - 17h45 Overview Crowd Computing - Ad Emmen, Stichting IDGF & AlmereGrid, The Netherlands
In the last years there have been a lot of initiatives labeled "crowd". We have crowd funding, crowd sourcing and also crowd computing. It all has to do with using the strength of the "crowd", the large number in a crowd, so that, although each individual contribution may be small, the whole crowd contribution can be very large indeed.
Crowd computing is about sharing computer capacity. One computer may be small, but the power of a million put together can match a supercomputer's number crunching capabilities. Although most crowd computers are smaller than that, even 10.000 computers in a crowd can already do significant computing work.
Crowd computing can not only be used for number crunching, but also for storage, and data.
There are many Crowd computers in the world, some old, some new, some small, some very large. Some of the most mature ones are the so called voluntary desktop grids that are mainly aimed at helping science. About 50 of them are member of the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF).
In this presentation we will give a short overview of crowd computing and a number of examples of crowd computers that can be used by members of the European science community.
17h45 - 18h00 Panel discussion and Wrap-up
More details on the programme and speakers at: http://desktopgridfederation.org/programme20
The need for novel more efficient and affordable solutions for data preservation and curation is increasing in the Social Science and Humanities, in particular the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) sector is producing a large volume of digital content that needs to be safely stored and curated, permanently accessed, and easily shared and re-used by researchers.
At the same time, the so-called "hard sciences" are demonstrating that research capabilities can really be advanced by the use of e-Infrastructures and that a shared implementation of common e-Infrastructure layers could be beneficial and cost effective.
In the last years, e-Infrastructures and DCH communities entered a dialogue and now several data-infrastructure projects exist, whose results can be adapted and re-used in the DCH domain. To this aim, to test the services and tools developed to facilitate the storage, access and preservation of digital data and to provide feedback for the further improvement of such services, fruitful cooperation started among these projects.
Aim of this workshop is:
- from the one hand to present the first concrete results of the cooperation between different projects
- from the other hand to attract new projects and initiatives working in the domain of DCH, e-infrastructures and digital preservation to find synergies and discuss opportunities for cooperation, starting from concrete use cases.
The evolution of computing technologies towards networks of remotely accessible top level machines (High Performance Computing, HPC), like the US XSEDE, meets the needs of intensive number crunching and big data handling applications of computational scientists of various disciplines. Compute time on such machines, however, is preferentially awarded as grants offered to few record breaking ambitious scientific projects selected by means of an ex ante evaluation of the proposals submitted after a centralized call. This discourages the undertaking of multiannual development projects in addition to not explicitly fostering integration with local resources.
Opposite to the grant system is the opportunistic one adopted by the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) in which members of the research communities are offered on demand access to a shared platform made of lower level resources (High Throughput Computing, HTC). However, the opportunistic model, while allowing multi-annual development projects and the integration of several heterogeneous local resources, reduces the possibilities of undertaking true large scale applications.
The workshop will discuss the pros and cons of the synergistic model proposed by the COMPCHEM Virtual Organization (VO) that combines the use of HTC and HPC machines and fosters both a better long term research planning and a combination of collaborative/competitive (between complementary/opposed) computational approaches. The analysis will focus on the use for that purpose of XSEDE and EGI platforms and related middleware.
Preliminary agenda:
- M. Rynge: XSEDE for extreme computing in science
- P. Kacsuk (or deputy) - WS-PGRADE gateway for Molecular sciences
- A. Costantini - The CMMST VRC of EGI
- C. Manuali - Quality Evaluation on the Grid and Requirements
- H. Neeman (or deputy) - Oklahoma University-COMPCHEM collaboration
- A. Sill (or deputy) - TTU COMPCHEM collaboration
Grid and cloud computing are now a fundamental element in all analyses and experiments in Life Sciences. This is coming even more evident in the world of Big Data and the Horizon 2020 work programme. This workshop aims to bring together researchers active in Life Sciences from around Europe and facilitate the networking between them within the context of EGI. The first part of the workshop will motivate participants by including targeted talks from key infrastructures and projects within the Life Sciences community, such as ELIXIR. Furthermore, the participants will have a chance of introducing their experience and expertise in a round of flash presentations. Finally, the discussion phase will aim to provide clear proposals for possible collaborations and suggestions for future EGI actions.
The annual NorduGrid Conference. Please visit the official NG2014 conference website for details. The co-located event is open for every EGI-CF participant.
Research Data Alliance Europe (RDA), EUDAT, OpenAIRE & ATT
Meeting co-located with the EGI CF 2014
This session will focus on two topics. Software Vulnerability handling and practical incident recognition.
The first part will review the Software Vulnerability Group (SVG) activities and the changes needed to take this activity to the Cloud.
The main focus of SVG continues as ever to be to "eliminate existing software vulnerabilities from the deployed infrastructure and prevent the introduction of new ones, thus reducing the likelihood of security incidents". This will include what anyone (including a user) should do if they spot a potential software vulnerability.
In the second part we will look at a scenario when it all went wrong and you suddenly have a VM that does more than the things you expect when starting it up. As a hands-on exercise we will provide you with a Cloud-VM, that has several settings/installed software that you probably don't really want there. You have to find them.
A more general "Security Threat Risk Assessment" with a focus on the EGI Federated Cloud is at present planned and any threats of high risk value or high impact value can then be addressed to improve the overall security of the EGI Federated cloud infrastructure.
The CernVM FileSystem (CernVM-FS) is firmly established as a method of software distribution for the LHC experiments at the WLCG sites. Use of CernVM-FS outside WLCG is growing steadily, its advantages being acknowledged by other HEP and non-HEP communities.
The session will explore why CernVM-FS makes easier for VOs to manage their software and run jobs at sites and also how this technology addresses the problem of application software installation at sites and what are the costs involved.
The workshop also compares CernVM-FS with the Frontier Distributed Database Caching system which uses the same http proxy cache infrastructure as CernVM-FS but is optimized for distributing common information from a database rather than software.
The second half of the session will be a hackathon that will help users with trying out the CernVM FileSystem and/or the Frontier Distributed Database Caching System with their own applications. Experts with these systems will advise users on whether their applications are a good fit and if so, help them adapt their applications to try CVMFS and/or Frontier.
Chair: Samuel Keuchkerian
European Research Infrastructures are facing growing demands for managing, storing, processing and analysing growing amounts of research data. For these purposes advanced e-Science and e-Infrastructure components are necessary. To assist the research infrastructures the ENVRI project "Common Operations of Environmental Research Infrastructures" has been set up. ENVRI is collaboration in the ESFRI Environmental Cluster, with support from ICT experts, to develop common e-Science components and services for environmental RIs.
In its third year, ENVRI is placing emphasis on ensuring sustainability of the common developments, focusing on sub-system interoperability, data discovery and access, and data integration, harmonization and publication.
ENVRI: Dealing with complexity in Environmental Research Infrastructures
This workshop gives an overview of the ENVRI project and its achievements. Emphasis is on the developed Reference Model a conceptual model that is used to describe computational aspect of research infrastructures. The ENVRI Reference Model provides common language and understanding, promotes technology and solution sharing, and improves interoperability.
ENVRI: Sustainability of Research Infrastructures
This workshop discusses challenges and opportunities in sustained operations of research infrastructures, especially concerning the solutions for data management and processing. The European e-infrastructures are a potential source of providing long-term services for research infrastructures. The perspectives from ENVRI Sustainability planning activity are reported and discussed together with views from service providers.
Grid and cloud computing are now a fundamental element in all analyses and experiments in Life Sciences. This is coming even more evident in the world of Big Data and the Horizon 2020 work programme. This workshop aims to bring together researchers active in Life Sciences from around Europe and facilitate the networking between them within the context of EGI. The first part of the workshop will motivate participants by including targeted talks from key infrastructures and projects within the Life Sciences community, such as ELIXIR. Furthermore, the participants will have a chance of introducing their experience and expertise in a round of flash presentations. Finally, the discussion phase will aim to provide clear proposals for possible collaborations and suggestions for future EGI actions.
The annual NorduGrid Conference. Please visit the official NG2014 conference website for details. The co-located event is open for every EGI-CF participant.
Research Data Alliance Europe (RDA), EUDAT, OpenAIRE & ATT
Meeting co-located with the EGI CF 2014
The CernVM FileSystem (CernVM-FS) is firmly established as a method of software distribution for the LHC experiments at the WLCG sites. Use of CernVM-FS outside WLCG is growing steadily, its advantages being acknowledged by other HEP and non-HEP communities.
The session will explore why CernVM-FS makes easier for VOs to manage their software and run jobs at sites and also how this technology addresses the problem of application software installation at sites and what are the costs involved.
The workshop also compares CernVM-FS with the Frontier Distributed Database Caching system which uses the same http proxy cache infrastructure as CernVM-FS but is optimized for distributing common information from a database rather than software.
The second half of the session will be a hackathon that will help users with trying out the CernVM FileSystem and/or the Frontier Distributed Database Caching System with their own applications. Experts with these systems will advise users on whether their applications are a good fit and if so, help them adapt their applications to try CVMFS and/or Frontier.
Chair: Samuel Keuchkerian
European Research Infrastructures are facing growing demands for managing, storing, processing and analysing growing amounts of research data. For these purposes advanced e-Science and e-Infrastructure components are necessary. To assist the research infrastructures the ENVRI project "Common Operations of Environmental Research Infrastructures" has been set up. ENVRI is collaboration in the ESFRI Environmental Cluster, with support from ICT experts, to develop common e-Science components and services for environmental RIs.
In its third year, ENVRI is placing emphasis on ensuring sustainability of the common developments, focusing on sub-system interoperability, data discovery and access, and data integration, harmonization and publication.
ENVRI: Dealing with complexity in Environmental Research Infrastructures
This workshop gives an overview of the ENVRI project and its achievements. Emphasis is on the developed Reference Model a conceptual model that is used to describe computational aspect of research infrastructures. The ENVRI Reference Model provides common language and understanding, promotes technology and solution sharing, and improves interoperability.
ENVRI: Sustainability of Research Infrastructures
This workshop discusses challenges and opportunities in sustained operations of research infrastructures, especially concerning the solutions for data management and processing. The European e-infrastructures are a potential source of providing long-term services for research infrastructures. The perspectives from ENVRI Sustainability planning activity are reported and discussed together with views from service providers.
Grid and cloud computing are now a fundamental element in all analyses and experiments in Life Sciences. This is coming even more evident in the world of Big Data and the Horizon 2020 work programme. This workshop aims to bring together researchers active in Life Sciences from around Europe and facilitate the networking between them within the context of EGI. The first part of the workshop will motivate participants by including targeted talks from key infrastructures and projects within the Life Sciences community, such as ELIXIR. Furthermore, the participants will have a chance of introducing their experience and expertise in a round of flash presentations. Finally, the discussion phase will aim to provide clear proposals for possible collaborations and suggestions for future EGI actions.
The annual NorduGrid Conference. Please visit the official NG2014 conference website for details. The co-located event is open for every EGI-CF participant.
The Run EGI is free and we welcome all runners, from beginner to advanced.
Please register for the Run EGI so that we know how many of you will come. http://go.egi.eu/run
This session will feature the EGI Federated Cloud demonstrations:
A) SCI-BUS/WS-PGRADE, presenters TBA
B) Biovel - OpenModeller/COMPS, BioSTIF and Openrefine on top of Biovel portal, presenters: Daniele Lezzi et al.
C) The Catania Science Gateway Framework as cloud application broker and infrastructure broker, presenter: Giuseppe La Rocca
D) Peachnote - OCR analysis in music scores & ENVRI/EISCAT_3D, presenter: Salvatore Pinto and Ingemar Haggstrom
The FedCloud demos and the other demonstrations will also be present at the EGI Booths throughout the week. The full schedule of demonstrations is available at: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/internalPage.py?pageId=2&confId=1994
To register your interest in the DIRAC networking session, please go to: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2200
More information and agenda for all the NeIC sessions
NeIC, the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration is facilitating the development of advanced IT tools and services in areas of importance to Nordic researchers. In order to fill the gap between the successful NeIC2013 conference with its popular workshop session and the next big NeIC conference in 2015, some of the current activities going on in Nordic collaboration in the field of e-infrastructure and the handling of scientific data will be presented and can be discussed actively.
The integration of new computational services, such as General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs), into the production EGI grid infrastructure has to be handled in such a way, that access to these new services is provided in a manner consistent to the current grid job-submission mechanism.
The GPGPU Virtual Team was initially established to determine the (then) current and future scale of GPGPU resource deployed at EGI Resource Centres, and also to gauge the impact that these resources would have on Users. Subsequently, several EGI workshops presented a set of technical integration challenges in providing such a service. Furthermore, since September 2013 the GPGPU Virtual Team has been investigating how to address these problems. The result of this work is the first presentation of a prototype GPGPU service. We shall demonstrate a variety of applications from several scientific disciplines, such as Computational Biology, Molecular Dynamic, and Astrophysics
We shall also discuss the remaining strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and will also focus on how this prototype work can be further developed and expanded upon in the future.
A&A was identified as a Heavy User Community (HUC) in EGI. After the startup phase of EGI-InSPIRE, HUCs have been encouraged to organize themselves as VRCs and to subscribe a MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) to be officially endorsed by EGI.
However A&A decided that a single VRC would not reflect its own peculiarities. In fact, A&A is a wide and articulated community with many active sub-communities dealing with specific astronomical research lines and each of these research lines has its own specific requirements and expectations toward DCIs and different ways to approach them.
The aim of this workshop is giving the unique opportunity for A&A community to meet and share experience, problems and successful stories, to present new users, new projects and the work done during the last years.
More information and agenda for all the NeIC sessions
NeIC, the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration is facilitating the development of advanced IT tools and services in areas of importance to Nordic researchers. In order to fill the gap between the successful NeIC2013 conference with its popular workshop session and the next big NeIC conference in 2015, some of the current activities going on in Nordic collaboration in the field of e-infrastructure and the handling of scientific data will be presented and can be discussed actively.
The open access policy to research will be mandatory for all publicly funded projects in Europe within Horizon 2020. Future projects will need to define how make their research outputs publicly available. As this is will be a general concern, EGI has established a collaboration with OpenAIRE to define processes, tools and policies for the EGI community to comply with the open access policy. The goal of this workshop is to explain what new projects need to do to comply with the policy and what are the services available within EGI through OpenAIRE to implement it.
Sustainability of EGI requires a multifaceted approach. One aspect of EGI's strategy is the increase of business development activities and the potential addition of pay-for-use models. To achieve such a result will depend on community engagement from a wide range of both technical and non-technical competencies to implement. Advancing from an initial exploratory report approved by the EGI Council in 2013 is a Proof of Concept that will take place during 2014. This workshop serves as a checkpoint of ongoing activities and an opportunity to discuss key points moving forward.
The integration of new computational services, such as General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs), into the production EGI grid infrastructure has to be handled in such a way, that access to these new services is provided in a manner consistent to the current grid job-submission mechanism.
The GPGPU Virtual Team was initially established to determine the (then) current and future scale of GPGPU resource deployed at EGI Resource Centres, and also to gauge the impact that these resources would have on Users. Subsequently, several EGI workshops presented a set of technical integration challenges in providing such a service. Furthermore, since September 2013 the GPGPU Virtual Team has been investigating how to address these problems. The result of this work is the first presentation of a prototype GPGPU service. We shall demonstrate a variety of applications from several scientific disciplines, such as Computational Biology, Molecular Dynamic, and Astrophysics
We shall also discuss the remaining strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and will also focus on how this prototype work can be further developed and expanded upon in the future.
More information and agenda for all the NeIC sessions
NeIC, the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration is facilitating the development of advanced IT tools and services in areas of importance to Nordic researchers. In order to fill the gap between the successful NeIC2013 conference with its popular workshop session and the next big NeIC conference in 2015, some of the current activities going on in Nordic collaboration in the field of e-infrastructure and the handling of scientific data will be presented and can be discussed actively.
The conference dinner will take place in Restaurant Wanha Satama, Pikku Satamakatu 3-5. This is within walking distance to the city centre.
Route map from University to Wanha Satama: http://goo.gl/maps/sQX3o (app. 1.3 km).
Public transport: tram 4 goes from Aleksanterinkatu (near Stockmann) to Katajanokka 8 (near Wanha Satama). Information about the public transportation is found from here https://www.hsl.fi/en.
Doors open at 18:30 for a 19:00 start.
Entrance with pre-ordered dinner card only. There is a limited number of dinner cards to be purchased on Monday 19 May. For more information, please contact the registration desk.
This public session will report about the partnership between XSEDE and EGI, and will explore further collaboration opportunities to benefit scientists in the U.S. and Europe. The session will consist of presentations and discussions about the following topics:
1. Security - Status report on the EGI-XSEDE security interoperability based on joint access testing work
2. Help Desk - report about the investigation that explored transferring and resolving tickets between the EGI and XSEDE helpdesks
3. Consulting/training/knowledge presentation - Presentation by XSEDE and EGI on main user support processes and at which points the other, XSEDE or EGI, can be connected into the process
4. Technology Investigation Service - Presentations by XSEDE and EGI on the XSEDE XTED and EGI app database
This session is to be dedicated to report on activities related to the "DIRAC 4 EGI pilot service installation".
DIRAC pilot for EGI is a prototype for a full scale DIRAC installation of an open Virtual Research Environment (VRE) service for any interested research community (or individual researchers) requiring access to distributed e-Infrastructure (grid, cloud or others). The pilot, operating since January 2014, with an increasing number of selected communities, will be opened to a wider target audience after this meeting.
At least 3 different topics should be covered in the reports:
- Setup of the service (Hosting, Operation,...)
- its integration in EGI production structure (Accounting, Monitoring, ...)
- experience from the communities
For details about the workshop agenda see:
https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2125
ABSTRACT:
Topics addressed in the workshop are:
SESSION I: Sustainability
Over the years, EGI has consolidated a portfolio of services and solutions that are currently offered to research communities in Europe and to their world-wide collaborators to conduct top-class research. EGI is committed to continuously innovate and expand the service offering and ensure their long-term availability. This session is devoted to present the strategic actions that are identified that should lead to the EGI growth and long-term sustainability. Attendants will have the opportunity to provide feedback that will be considered for the next iteration of the EGI Sustainability and Business Plan.
SESSION II: New Governance
This session will present an overview of the current draft of the new governance structure and the underlying principles and restrictions behind the draft proposals. It will give participants the opportunity to discuss their views on roles within the new governance, and to discuss various open questions identified by the task force in the development of the draft proposals.
SESSION III: User Engagement and Competence Centres
This session will present the plans for the user engagement strategy and the Competence Centre concept, activities and objectives. The Competence Centres will be supported in the EGI follow-on proposal EGI-Engage.
This session gives the opportunity to discuss the role of the Competence Centres in the European landscape.
Detailed agenda: http://www.egcf.eu/events/egcf-2014/
The EGCF annual event provides a unique opportunity for European Globus users to introduce and discuss their work, challenges, solutions, and best practices within a community atmosphere. The event also gives participants the chance to provide feedback on Globus technologies, as well as present any Globus requirements they may have for their research. Co-organised with the US Globus team, the Forum allows your voice to be heard both within the European community as well as the Globus team in the United States.
This foundation training course in federated IT Service Management provides training in the fundamentals of service management and introduces some of the specific challenges faced when managing IT services across complex and federated communities.
The training is carried out across one afternoon and the following morning, and culminates in a short exam. Successfully passing the exam will grant participants a Foundation Certificate in Service Management for Federated IT Infrastructures, provided by the internationally recognised standards organisation TÜV SÜD.
The course is structured around the FitSM-1:2013 standard (see www.fedsm.eu/fitsm for details), which is compatible with ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 but is tailored to work in federated environments such as Grids and federated clouds. The FitSM standard and the training course are produced and run by the FedSM project, which is funded by the EC to bring improved service management to several infrastructures, including EGI.
Places for this session must be reserved, contact training@fedsm.eu for details.
The aim of this training session is to provide a quick introduction into OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface), describe basic elements defined by the standard, and demonstrate its practical applications while focusing on virtual machine management in IaaS-based clouds as it pertains to the EGI Federated Cloud. It will also describe, explain, and demonstrate the concepts behind virtual machine contextualization and its applicability in various use cases. Attendees will get a chance to apply these concepts in a hands-on part of the session utilizing tools used within the EGI Federated Cloud environment, namely the rOCCI client and various server-side OCCI implementations.
Registration for this tutorial: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2124
In this workshop we will present the current status and the future of the Availability and Reliability Monitoring service, which is now operated and further developed by GRNET, CNRS and SRCE.
Impact modeling forced by climate data is often connected with big data processing. But impact modelers are often not equipped with appropriate hardware (computing and storage facilities) or appropriate programming experience. Web Processing Service (WPS) is an open standard defined by the Open Spatial Consortium (OGC). It is an interface to perform processes over the HTTP network protocol.
This tutorial in an introduction to an early stage of the ClimDaPs project. ClimDaPs is using WPS for climate data processing. It is based on the PyWPS implementation of WPS and provides additionally a simple web-based user-interface to access and combine climate data processes. It provides access to the climate data archive of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for CMIP5 and CORDEX data. Performing simple processes of climate data up to complex impact models are already available within ClimDaPs. One can also visualize climate data and processed results.
Besides the introduction of existing processing possibilities, we will show how you can add your own climate data processes to ClimDaPs and other WPS services.
Registration and more information at: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2152
This session is to be dedicated to report on activities related to the "DIRAC 4 EGI pilot service installation".
DIRAC pilot for EGI is a prototype for a full scale DIRAC installation of an open Virtual Research Environment (VRE) service for any interested research community (or individual researchers) requiring access to distributed e-Infrastructure (grid, cloud or others). The pilot, operating since January 2014, with an increasing number of selected communities, will be opened to a wider target audience after this meeting.
At least 3 different topics should be covered in the reports:
- Setup of the service (Hosting, Operation,...)
- its integration in EGI production structure (Accounting, Monitoring, ...)
- experience from the communities
For details about the workshop agenda see:
https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2125
ABSTRACT:
Topics addressed in the workshop are:
SESSION I: Sustainability
Over the years, EGI has consolidated a portfolio of services and solutions that are currently offered to research communities in Europe and to their world-wide collaborators to conduct top-class research. EGI is committed to continuously innovate and expand the service offering and ensure their long-term availability. This session is devoted to present the strategic actions that are identified that should lead to the EGI growth and long-term sustainability. Attendants will have the opportunity to provide feedback that will be considered for the next iteration of the EGI Sustainability and Business Plan.
SESSION II: New Governance
This session will present an overview of the current draft of the new governance structure and the underlying principles and restrictions behind the draft proposals. It will give participants the opportunity to discuss their views on roles within the new governance, and to discuss various open questions identified by the task force in the development of the draft proposals.
SESSION III: User Engagement and Competence Centres
This session will present the plans for the user engagement strategy and the Competence Centre concept, activities and objectives. The Competence Centres will be supported in the EGI follow-on proposal EGI-Engage.
This session gives the opportunity to discuss the role of the Competence Centres in the European landscape.
Detailed agenda: http://www.egcf.eu/events/egcf-2014/
The EGCF annual event provides a unique opportunity for European Globus users to introduce and discuss their work, challenges, solutions, and best practices within a community atmosphere. The event also gives participants the chance to provide feedback on Globus technologies, as well as present any Globus requirements they may have for their research. Co-organised with the US Globus team, the Forum allows your voice to be heard both within the European community as well as the Globus team in the United States.
This foundation training course in federated IT Service Management provides training in the fundamentals of service management and introduces some of the specific challenges faced when managing IT services across complex and federated communities.
The training is carried out across one afternoon and the following morning, and culminates in a short exam. Successfully passing the exam will grant participants a Foundation Certificate in Service Management for Federated IT Infrastructures, provided by the internationally recognised standards organisation TÜV SÜD.
The course is structured around the FitSM-1:2013 standard (see www.fedsm.eu/fitsm for details), which is compatible with ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 but is tailored to work in federated environments such as Grids and federated clouds. The FitSM standard and the training course are produced and run by the FedSM project, which is funded by the EC to bring improved service management to several infrastructures, including EGI.
Places for this session must be reserved, contact training@fedsm.eu for details.
Digital encoding has become the dominant way in which we create, shape and exchange information.
Digital Preservation is an emerging field for research and development and needs reflection in education and training. This session provides training customised to the needs of research communities
Impact modeling forced by climate data is often connected with big data processing. But impact modelers are often not equipped with appropriate hardware (computing and storage facilities) or appropriate programming experience. Web Processing Service (WPS) is an open standard defined by the Open Spatial Consortium (OGC). It is an interface to perform processes over the HTTP network protocol.
This tutorial in an introduction to an early stage of the ClimDaPs project. ClimDaPs is using WPS for climate data processing. It is based on the PyWPS implementation of WPS and provides additionally a simple web-based user-interface to access and combine climate data processes. It provides access to the climate data archive of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for CMIP5 and CORDEX data. Performing simple processes of climate data up to complex impact models are already available within ClimDaPs. One can also visualize climate data and processed results.
Besides the introduction of existing processing possibilities, we will show how you can add your own climate data processes to ClimDaPs and other WPS services.
Registration and more information at: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2152
OpenNebula is being used by many supercomputing and research centers to build high performance computing and science clouds for hosting large-scale virtualized computing and data processing environments. These science-optimized clouds are providing service-driven, on-demand access to scientific and technical computing capabilities to solve complex problems and drive innovation. OpenNebula is also one of the main cloud management platforms used in several federated cloud e-infrastructures like the EGI Federated Cloud.
The Workshop will serve as a meeting point for users, operators, and researchers of OpenNebula clouds in Science and HPC, and a unique opportunity for discussion and collaboration with related projects and federated cloud e-infrastructures. This event will focus on:
- Presenting use cases and deployment experiences
- Introducing new integrations and developments
- Discussing limitations and potential enhancements
- Collaborating with other projects and communities
This session is to be dedicated to report on activities related to the "DIRAC 4 EGI pilot service installation".
DIRAC pilot for EGI is a prototype for a full scale DIRAC installation of an open Virtual Research Environment (VRE) service for any interested research community (or individual researchers) requiring access to distributed e-Infrastructure (grid, cloud or others). The pilot, operating since January 2014, with an increasing number of selected communities, will be opened to a wider target audience after this meeting.
At least 3 different topics should be covered in the reports:
- Setup of the service (Hosting, Operation,...)
- its integration in EGI production structure (Accounting, Monitoring, ...)
- experience from the communities
For details about the workshop agenda see:
https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2125
ABSTRACT:
Topics addressed in the workshop are:
SESSION I: Sustainability
Over the years, EGI has consolidated a portfolio of services and solutions that are currently offered to research communities in Europe and to their world-wide collaborators to conduct top-class research. EGI is committed to continuously innovate and expand the service offering and ensure their long-term availability. This session is devoted to present the strategic actions that are identified that should lead to the EGI growth and long-term sustainability. Attendants will have the opportunity to provide feedback that will be considered for the next iteration of the EGI Sustainability and Business Plan.
SESSION II: New Governance
This session will present an overview of the current draft of the new governance structure and the underlying principles and restrictions behind the draft proposals. It will give participants the opportunity to discuss their views on roles within the new governance, and to discuss various open questions identified by the task force in the development of the draft proposals.
SESSION III: User Engagement and Competence Centres
This session will present the plans for the user engagement strategy and the Competence Centre concept, activities and objectives. The Competence Centres will be supported in the EGI follow-on proposal EGI-Engage.
This session gives the opportunity to discuss the role of the Competence Centres in the European landscape.
Detailed agenda: http://www.egcf.eu/events/egcf-2014/
The EGCF annual event provides a unique opportunity for European Globus users to introduce and discuss their work, challenges, solutions, and best practices within a community atmosphere. The event also gives participants the chance to provide feedback on Globus technologies, as well as present any Globus requirements they may have for their research. Co-organised with the US Globus team, the Forum allows your voice to be heard both within the European community as well as the Globus team in the United States.
This foundation training course in federated IT Service Management provides training in the fundamentals of service management and introduces some of the specific challenges faced when managing IT services across complex and federated communities.
The training is carried out across one afternoon and the following morning, and culminates in a short exam. Successfully passing the exam will grant participants a Foundation Certificate in Service Management for Federated IT Infrastructures, provided by the internationally recognised standards organisation TÜV SÜD.
The course is structured around the FitSM-1:2013 standard (see www.fedsm.eu/fitsm for details), which is compatible with ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 but is tailored to work in federated environments such as Grids and federated clouds. The FitSM standard and the training course are produced and run by the FedSM project, which is funded by the EC to bring improved service management to several infrastructures, including EGI.
Places for this session must be reserved, contact training@fedsm.eu for details.
This hands on tutorial will introduce the OpenStack cloud middleware, focusing on the compute project (nova) we will describe its architecture, how all the components interact and what is required to run a fully functional OpenStack cloud (i.e. compute, network, image, volume storage and identity services).
Digital encoding has become the dominant way in which we create, shape and exchange information.
Digital Preservation is an emerging field for research and development and needs reflection in education and training. This session provides training customised to the needs of research communities
OpenNebula is being used by many supercomputing and research centers to build high performance computing and science clouds for hosting large-scale virtualized computing and data processing environments. These science-optimized clouds are providing service-driven, on-demand access to scientific and technical computing capabilities to solve complex problems and drive innovation. OpenNebula is also one of the main cloud management platforms used in several federated cloud e-infrastructures like the EGI Federated Cloud.
The Workshop will serve as a meeting point for users, operators, and researchers of OpenNebula clouds in Science and HPC, and a unique opportunity for discussion and collaboration with related projects and federated cloud e-infrastructures. This event will focus on:
- Presenting use cases and deployment experiences
- Introducing new integrations and developments
- Discussing limitations and potential enhancements
- Collaborating with other projects and communities
The EGI Applications Database has evolved as the de facto EGI FedCloud Virtual Appliance Marketplace, offering the easiest way to automate distribution of heterogeneous cloud infrastructures for scientists for managing virtual machine lifecylces within the EGI federated cloud infrastructure.
The goal of this contribution is to give scientific end-users users and administrators of e-Infrastructures a hands-on experience with the Globus Toolkit and Globus Online services (GO) for reliable, high-performance, and secure file transfer (http://www.globusonline.eu). Data sharing will also be demonstrated. Moreover, the workshop shows the benefit and usage of preconfigured Globus Appliances.
At the end of the training, the participants are expected to be able to manage their own endpoints with Globus Online, to submit, monitor their data transfers, and share them with other users.
Users, even from a single research community, have very different degrees of programming expertise. Providing a single access point to a distributed infrastructure that suits many communities is a big challenge. DIRAC Project provides a general-purpose framework for building distributed computing systems. There is a large interest from smaller user communities to have a simple tool for accessing grid and other types of distributed computing resources. "DIRAC as a Service" could play this role. To demonstrate accessing facilities of DIRAC, the present tutorial is focused in a portal job management by the final users. The tutorial has a brief introduction and previous dummy tests of every user environment. Then, two blocks of about 1H each, in the first one, participants will launch prepared jobs with previous existing templates, monitor the runnings, getting the outputs using output sandbox. The second block is about advancing job submission using parametric jobs and third-party storage, as well as retrieval of the outputs.
To register to the tutorial, please go to: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2156
This hands-on tutorial will give an overview of how OpenNebula can be used to build and operate private clouds. The attendees will build, configure and operate their own OCCI-compatible OpenNebula cloud compliant to the EGI FedCloud standards.
To register for this training: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2126
Many user groups trying to bring their applications into the cloud choose VM images as the "packaging format". Depending on the structure of the application and the intended use cases that are to be run on cloud resources, there may be alternative ways of packaging the application, thus keeping images small and avoiding problems that may arise from the need to update individual assets within images. This will ultimately lead to optimizations in application delivery and startup, presenting a better experience to the user.
The EGI Applications Database has evolved as the de facto EGI FedCloud Virtual Appliance Marketplace, offering the easiest way to automate distribution of heterogeneous cloud infrastructures for scientists for managing virtual machine lifecylces within the EGI federated cloud infrastructure.
The goal of this contribution is to give scientific end-users users and administrators of e-Infrastructures a hands-on experience with the Globus Toolkit and Globus Online services (GO) for reliable, high-performance, and secure file transfer (http://www.globusonline.eu). Data sharing will also be demonstrated. Moreover, the workshop shows the benefit and usage of preconfigured Globus Appliances.
At the end of the training, the participants are expected to be able to manage their own endpoints with Globus Online, to submit, monitor their data transfers, and share them with other users.
This hands-on tutorial will give an overview of how OpenNebula can be used to build and operate private clouds. The attendees will build, configure and operate their own OCCI-compatible OpenNebula cloud compliant to the EGI FedCloud standards.
To register for this training: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2126