Mapping ICT accross Sub-Saharan Africa: iMentors

What level of connectivity, types of networks, data infrastructures, e-tools, and projects etc.are currently available for researchers  in Sub-Saharan Africa?  One European FP-7 funded project is starting to map this knowledge in a virtual observatory. 

The idea behind the i-Mentors project was first conceived by the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and Gov2u.  Although Sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed dramatic growth in Information Communications Technology (ICT) access since the mid-1990s, there are still gaps in the knowledge around the status and findings from past and ongoing e-infrastructure projects. iMentors now plans to map the entire e-infrastructure landscape accross Sub-Saharan Africa recording key developments over the past five years. Their goal is to provide valuable insights to policy makers, international investors, educators and researchers. Any gaps and/or progress will be recorded and collated in order to enhance ICT initiatives in the region.

Our project, e-ScienceTalk, is delighted to have just signed an Memorandum of Understanding with iMentors. We are hoping to help increase the visibility of the project's findings and success stories. Check out their Facebook page here and Twitter stream (@i-mentors). 

The project's first step is to gather valuable stakeholder feedback to define the most appropriate criteria in evaluating e-infrastructure projects. So please do help them by filling in their survey (http://bit.ly/YF5GBV).

 

From Galileo to LIGO: Edward Seidel

Galileo's career was marked by many discoveries, multiple inventions and major contributions to physics and observational astronomy. It's difficult to imagine that back in the 1600s, Galileo worked alone. Over the last four centuries (and more notably in the last 15 years), there has been a rapid change in the culture of the way science is carried out. Science is now more collaborative; it is ofcourse also increasingly data-driven and computational.

Astrophysicist Edward Seidel, and Senior Vice President of Research and Innovation at the Skolkova Institute of Science and Technology, gave a thought-provoking keynote at the 10th e-Infrastructure Concertation meeting last week. He provided some recommendations on how best to develop an efficient e-infrastructure ecosystem.

Modern science and society are being fundamentally transformed by data. Seidel's own field, gravitational physics, has been completely transformed from being highly mathematical/ theoretical to being highly computational and data driven.  Gamma ray astrophysics has been for four centuries a relatively small-scale science, but over the last two decades there has been radical change in both data (factors of 1000 per 5 years) and collaborations (e.g. Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory or LIGO). Seidel describes how a new field is emerging called transient data-intensive astronomy, and how the complexity of the universe can only be solved by globally distributed multidisciplinary collaborations involving experts in relatively, hydrodynamics, nuclear physics, radiation, neutrinos etc. Libraries will still remain important for archiving and curating data. The John’s Hopkins Library recently curated 40 terabytes of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

"There is an increasing pressure to make data available in a much more global sense, so different levels of data policy are paramount," said Seidel. "As different instruments (radio telescopes, optical telescopes) are required to understand each fundamental force, any solution will require integration across disciplines end to end. Communities will also need to share data, software, and knowledge in real time".

Seidel also pointed out that open and sharable software environments enable new science that was not possible before, and the software infrastructure is as important as hardware in the e-infrastructure landscape. The Community Einstein Toolkit is an example of this. It is open source software, which is now used by 67 members on 29 sites across 11 countries. It was first developed by the astrophysics network in 2000 to enable Einstein’s equations to be solved more routinely.

There are also a large number of data gathering differences between big science experiments versus the long tail of science. Many big data projects (~1%) are special and highly organised, but data creation in the long tail of science (the other 99%) is more heterogenous, sometimes hand generated, often not curated etc. So the question arises how best do you harness the power of this long tail of data.

Edward Seidel identified five crises/issues/questions that science will have to deal with:

1.    Computing technology –What new models (clouds, grids, GPUs) are available?
2.    Data, provenance and visualisation –What is an international data infrastructure? How do we create data scientists?
3.    Software should be treated as an integral part of e-Infrastructure
4.    Modern science requires new university structures, interdisciplinary in design
5.    How do we educate people in this environment, and help universities in transition? Advances in campus culture and policy on data is just as important as the underlying e-infrastructure.

As grand challenges communities begin to converge to solve complex problems, Seidel's main message is that researchers collaborate and work by sharing data, which places requirements on e-Infrastructure: software, networks, collaborative environments, data etc. This raises so many questions for reproducibility, access, university structures, and changing the paradigm of what a publication is. "E-Infrastructure ecosystem must support computing, instrumentation and data services, but requires strategic thinking not only at the campus level, but from the campus level to the international level", concludes Seidel.

An artist, a doctor, and a computational scientist walk into a pub...

The bartender (a retired cop) says...

"You guys are together!?”

Let’s face it. In real life, this seldom happens. If we went out for a drink after work, we would most likely be accompanied by friends who think the way we do, vote for the same candidates, and share the same or a related occupation. 

Most of us gravitate toward careers that align with our aptitude (arguably, opportunity and environment are key factors). While there are many gifted people who possess a wide range of skills and abilities, most of us are best suited for a specific occupation. We tend to be left or right-brained individuals who exist day-to-day in disciplinary silos where we become well-versed with the set of tools that were created specifically for our needs. Familial relationships aside (you might be wed to a right-brainer since opposites are known to attract), the people we associate with at work, and even those who share the same hobbies, tend to be like us. Our native culture, physical make-up, and life experiences shape who we become, the work we pursue, and the people we choose to associate with. Besides, what do artists, doctors and computational scientists have in common?

Humanity.

The global economic crisis affects everyone, albeit some more than others. Our population is exploding and agricultural progress has resulted in a migration from rural to urban areas. Many cities will double in size in the coming decades, while others will shrink. An unpredictable tax base makes it difficult to plan for the future. Since our world is more interconnected and mobile, an economic downturn in one city or region eventually impacts all others. People are more likely to move to another country when they can’t find work. For those who remain, a jobless culture is fundamentally linked to crime and a host of physical and mental health problems—all quality of life concerns for urban planners.

These were themes during a recent interdisciplinary workshop I had the pleasure of attending at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The meeting was hosted by UrbanCCD (Urban Center for Computational Data), in collaboration with the city of Chicago and a wide variety of local and national organizations.

UrbanCCD Director, Charlie Catlett

The meeting was first of a series of interdisciplinary urban sciences workshops that UrbanCCD is supporting through a $600,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to create the Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network (USRCN).USRCN will unite multinational social, economic, health, and computational scientists to develop a research roadmap for data-driven urban sciences.

UrbanCCD Director Charlie Catlett is a senior fellow with the Computation Institute, a joint initiative of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (and one of Argonne's senior scientists). He also collaborates frequently with SAIC faculty and is co-investigator with Doug Pancoast (SAIC) on the USRCN grant work.    

Although I've worked for technology organizations for more than ten years, I am inherently right-brained and have an Arts and Humanities academic background. As TeraGrid's external relations coordinator, which was also a CI project, I noticed that the CI embraces diversity in ways that few technology organizations do. When they invited a visual artist to join their computational think-tank, it demonstrated their appreciation for varied thinking styles. Their philosophy spread organically to one of the nation's premier art and design academies with Catlett's influence. During the kick-off lunch, a display of SAIC student posters provided evidence of the cross-pollination that has taken place. I didn't realize it, but SAIC is one of the few fine arts schools in the nation that offers a sound program where students are encouraged to explore hybrid practices, such as hardware hacking, software development, and instrument building. They also design concepts that consider sound outside of the traditional (music) context. One poster featured the use of sonar for an assistive technology application to help people who are blind navigate urban environments. 

Brett Goldstein
Chicago's Chief Data Officer

The keynote was presented by Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s chief data officer and a former Chicago police officer. Because Goldstein is one of those rare individuals whose aptitude and life experience have bridged disciplines (criminal justice and computational science), he was well positioned to mobilize Chicago’s data effort, and began the process years ago. 

Because urban data is completely heterogeneous with multiple geospatial levels that change with time, Goldstein knew that effective data stewardship must involve access to and thoughtful analysis of records from the past, present, and projected future—very useful to economists, social scientists, and urban planners. Everyone knows that healthy urban infrastructure attracts commerce which makes cities more competitive in a global marketplace. Industry brings jobs and technology brings industry. Meaningfully employed residents of a thriving city are healthier, happier, and less likely to flee.

STEM-Trek Adviser Jiayuan Meng (Argonne assistant computer scientist) also attended the workshop and was eager to learn how social scientists plan to use Chicago’s urban data. 

“Each attendee holds a piece of the puzzle. With efficient access, social scientists can identify trends and forecast conditions—but they have encountered physical (paper vs. data) and policy barriers that they can’t control." said Meng. "Policy makers are empowered to affect change, but they may not know what barriers exist. Computational scientists can build the framework and tools, but they must first understand the need, barriers, and policies involved.” 

Many of the brilliant people who solve grand technology challenges aren’t outgoing by nature, whereas social scientists, as a group, are naturally social. I noticed more women and minorities than are typically found at technology events, and a broader range of ages. In addition to scientists, the group included artists, economists, funding agents, engineers, architects, policy-makers (legislators?), urban planners, media representatives, and at least one physician and one lawyer. Everyone opened up during happy hour, whether or not they consumed alcohol--even the ones who had been quiet all day. 

The only problem with the event was that the day was too short. When it drew to a close, many were just starting to navigate the mixed culture, talk freely about ways they plan to use Chicago's data, and swap business cards. I had hoped to at least say hi to each of the participants--more than 80 had come and gone throughout the day--but President Obama was in town and some had been invited to greet him. From a public relations standpoint, it was so much fun (and interesting) that I didn’t want it to end. It's good to know that UrbanCCD plans to reconvene subcommittees that will focus on topics identified during the kick-off.

I covered some of the technical aspects of Chicago’s effort and the USRCN kick-off meeting on the STEM-Trek site. Future meetings and updates will be announced by UrbanCCD.  

By Elizabeth Leake, STEM-Trek with photography by Lloyd DeGrane.

An integrated European e-Infrastructure?

Collaboration has definitely been an overriding theme of the EUDAT conference this week, first between the ESFRI cluster projects, between EUDAT and the Research Infrastructures, and finally between the e-infrastructures themselves. Bearing data issues in mind, where and how do the e-infrastructures see themselves collaborating? With Dire Strait’s ‘Brothers in arms’ playing over the PA system during the break (look it up if you’re over 30), it seemed like we even had a theme tune for the discussions.

Thomas Eikermann of supercomputing infrastructure PRACE reminded us how users gain access to their supercomputing resources through a peer review process, which is open to all researchers in public and private organisations. Using the resources is free of charge once your proposal is accepted. Initially they have offered preparatory and project-based access. Traditionally they have offered 12 month allocations through two bi-annual calls but are now exploring multi-year access to support long term initiatives through the current call. Over 5 calls, they have awarded allocations to over 100 proposals.

One possible area for collaboration is through the PRACE advanced training centres, as these need to be migrated to providing a core infrastructure service rather than relying on EC funding. Tuition in HPC is largely absent from university curricula. So far six have been created since 2012 in Spain, Italy, Finland, Scotland, Germany and France.

The European Grid Infrastructure is aiming to deliver an integrated service to the RIs in the European Research Area through a one -stop service point. Steven Newhouse warned us that financial challenges remain – there is a tension between funding infrastructure vs research and research budgets are under more pressure than ever. However, we need to keep reminding funders that you can’t achieve exciting innovation in research without funding the underlying infrastructure.

EGI’ s proposal is to integrate governance across grid, cloud and data through a digital research infrastructure ERIC.  An ERIC is an organisational structure that combines national funding into a European Research Infrastructure Collaboration. The next step along this route would be to encourage the e-infrastructures and potential member countries to engage and propose a preparatory phase project. Collaboration points could include community and coordination activities such as events, and preparation of the ERIC itself, plus interaction on the operational infrastructure platforms including core activities (accounting, monitoring), cloud (users deploy where they like)  and global services such as file transfer and help desks.

GÉANT provides a huge 50,000 km network infrastructure across 44 routes. Potentially this vast network serves 40 million users, with 8000 institutions connected in 40 countries in Europe and 62 outside Europe. Procurement is underway in southern and eastern Africa to build the network still further through an FP7 project. For Tom Fryor of DANTE, collaboration activities with PRACE include working on a coordinated approach to gathering user requirements. A Memorandum of Understanding is being prepared with EGI on user requirements, dissemination and security and Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud – is working on providing its networking requirements to GÉANT.

Atos is one of the cloud resource providers in Helix Nebula and they are working with other commercial partners, ESA, EMBL, CERN, EGI and others to provide a cloud computing infrastructure for the ERA, starting with a proof of concept. The project is working on policies for trust, security and privacy at an EU level, setting up a lightweight governance structure and concentrating on a short and medium term funding strategy. Their question is how to interact with data service providers in EUDAT. What is the role of public cloud providers in a potential European science cloud infrastructure and will the technology generated by EUDAT be available outside?

Maurice Bouwhuis of EUDAT summed up some ways and means for e-infrastructure collaboration. Sharing is the key of course, both information about tools, methods and policies but then to share the tools, methods and policies themselves (which perhaps answers the Helix Nebula question). EUDAT itself is planning to pick up on these elements from the existing e-infrastructures and hopes that the community can tackle problems together through co-development and an integrated infrastructure. There are already top level collaborations in place with EGI through the Nagios monitoring tool and the GOCDB  service registry – both of these are tried and tested. Grass roots collaborations are also bubbling up through the MAPPER project and through workshops at the various annual meetings of EGI and PRACE. Together, we need to focus particularly on the needs of communities that use more than one infrastructure – a seamless, simple,  e-infrastructure experience for everyone. Brothers (and sisters!) in arms it is.

Reflecting on e-infrastructure reflection

The e-infrastructure reflection group’s June workshop seems like an age ago now…set in beautiful Copenhagen in Denmark in mid-June, we were blessed with fine weather and stimulating debate.

Science is a collaborative enterprise. e-science even more so: an endeavour built upon transmission of data and distribution of computing capacity across borders. That we are able to do so at all is thanks to the hard work of scientists, engineers and policy specialists who continue to build and support the underlying e-infrastructure that makes this work possible. But as computing infrastructures have sometimes grown disparately out of the needs of the scientists and the science they do, putting together an agreed long-term strategy for building infrastructures to be used by scientists across disciplines and continents is no mean feat. Of course, scientists and those working to build e-infrastructures are not ones to shy away from a challenge – to steal a quote from JFK, ‘We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard’. Debates were heated: should be take a centralised approach, or a decentralised one to how e-infrastructures are developed? How do we ensure that data can be accessed? How do we control access? What about metadata? There were no immediate answers – nobody expected there to be. Meetings like this are crucial, however, for hammering out something that approaches a consensus. The funds for building e-infrastructures aren’t unlimited, and it should be the goal of everyone involved to work together to ensure that we work together to maximise the positive impact they have.

GISELA Latin American Institutions Contributed to it! (Higgs boson)

The CERN Director General has announced this morning (see below) the first observation of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. The news is transforming to a snow ball being rolling all around the world in the TV and radio flashes.

The GISELA Community is particularly excited by the information. Indeed several Latin American Institutions, members of GISELA, such as UFRJ, UNAM, ULA, etc. are using its e-Infrastructure, in the framework of the Computing model of the LHC experiments in which they participate. The figure below shows the use of the GISELA e-Infrastructure by these institutions, for their various computing tasks such as simulation of physics processes, detector data processing and physics analysis. One should emphasize that Grid e-Infrastructures is a must for High Energy Physics experiments which could not otherwise deal with the sophisticated, CPU-consuming treatment of the data provided by their particle detectors. Hence it is really wonderful to observe, on a sensational case, the actual discovery power of Grid e-Infrastructures.

We take out of the event that Latin America made the right choice when investing, since more than 6 years in Grid e-Infrastructures, through the EC co-funded projects EELA (http://www.eu-eela.org), EELA-2 (http://www.eu-eela.eu/) and GISELA (http://www.gisela-grid.eu/). Finally we take the opportunity to underline the urgency to have the Latin American e-Infrastructure operation and its User support consolidated in the long term, to sustain e-Science over the continent, beyond its current outstanding outcomes.

Read the CERN Press Realease!

SIENA Roadmap Working Session “How can eGovernment & DCI projects collaborate for mutual benefit”

Martin Walker and John Borras chaired the SIENA Roadmap Working Session “How can eGovernment & DCI projects collaborate for mutual benefit”. The panel consisted of Ignacio Blanquer, Tim Cowen, Evangelos Floros, Dawn Leaf, Steven Newhouse, Ian Osborne and Alan Sill. There are some statements I want to highlight here.

• We need to identify how the existing e-Infrastructures can scale out to other sectors like Government.
• Encourage people to experiment more. At the moment we use excuses for not doing anything, the most prominent is security.
• Implementation and deployment need to take place in parallel with the development of standards. Of course there is a level of uncertainty before the development of standards but having a taxonomy and a reference architecture is a good starting point.
• End-users are much more flexible than we think. We have to introduce more of end-user influence.
• How do we integrate cloud in the existing standards like ITIL etc.?
• One of the reason why clouds rely on standards is because clouds are new.

A funny thing happened on the way to the CHAIN Forum…

It’s impossible to come to Rome without feeling like you’ve wandered onto a film set. Having travelled hot foot from CERN last week, and arriving in a hotel right behind the Pantheon, it was hard to resist making comparisons with a certain Dan Brown novel (although vengeful Illuminati assassins were fortunately not in obvious abundance). Taking a stroll round the Colosseum and the Forum after the meeting closed yesterday, references to everything from La Dolce Vita to Gladiator to Up Pompeii pop up at every turn. (Attempting to explain the humour of Up Pompeii’s British comedian Frankie Howerd to colleagues proved to be quite a tricky challenge however). A city as ancient and iconic as Rome really makes you think about the true meaning of ‘sustainability’. Ensuring that international grids stand the test of time for as long as the Colosseum might be a bit of a tall order, but the projects presenting at the CHAIN Launch event today are doing their best.

CHAIN is working with geographical regions that are highly experienced in grids, such as Europe, Asia, Latin America and also with so-called ‘greenfield’ sites where grids are at the exciting stage of getting off the ground, such as in Africa. With 50 countries in this region alone it is mostly an untapped area but although it is widely dispersed geographically, the scientific communities are quite well defined. It’s not too difficult to find the right people to talk to about grids to get new communities on board. As Bruce Becker of SAGrid said, this area could benefit from a great opportunity to avoid the pitfalls that other e-Infrastructures have encountered. Also working with CHAIN and SAGrid are AfricaConnect, which will bring together five countries in Africa for science and education. There are particular challenges in working in Africa of course – Margaret Ngwira of the Ubuntunet Alliance described hosting a meeting on ISABEL with EU colleagues stranded by the Icelandic volcano. Only to see the screen suddenly go black when the cable to Africa was cut, an outage that lasted two months.

Depei Qian of CNGrid in China updated us with some of the HPC and grid applications running in China, for example in the areas of drug discovery, weather forecasting, aerospace research and mining. They have also set up domain application grids, to support simulations in businesses such as the automobile, aircraft and steel industries. The CAS e-Science Programme is also setting up a supercomputing grid - showing that the region has been active in grids and HPC but perhaps still has a way to go in the areas of kernel technologies, applications, multi-disciplinary research and skilled people.

The GISELA project has a long history of working in the Latin American region, through the EELA and EELA-2 projects. GISELA will pick up this work, in collaboration with the CLARA network and is already running the IGALC Regional Operational Centre, that is EGI compliant. They are also actively looking to establish a sustainable basis for the activities in the region, much as EGI itself is already working towards in Europe.

So we may not quite yet have built the e-Infrastructure equivalent of the Colosseum in every country, but to mangle a phrase from Frankie Howerd, there are definitely some interesting things happening on the way to the Forum.

CHAIN Kick Off Meeting, Rome

Today I’m in the beautiful setting of Rome for the CHAIN project kick off meeting. CHAIN (Coordination and harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructure) aims to promote collaboration between worldwide e-Infrastructures. The project brings on board European countries, such as Italy, Czech Republic, Spain and Greece, to work with China, Africa, Latin America, India, Asia-Pacific and the Middle Eastern region. The aim is to take concrete steps towards coordination with projects in these regions, and in particular to help build intercontinental virtual research communities, for example in the areas of environment and climate change.

Yesterday’s discussions took place at GARR and focused on the nuts and bolts of the new project, how they will work together and interact with other projects. Key areas of cooperation with the European Grid Infrastructure for example include operations, MoUs and Service Level Agreements. CHAIN will be working with EPIKH (Exchange Programme to Advance e-Infrastructure Know How) in the area of training, with the first event to be held in Chile. Several workshops are also planned in scientific areas that have or aim to have intercontinental cooperation and e-ScienceTalk will aim to bring you news from as many of these as we can!

Today’s presentations will focus more on how the different areas of the e-Infrastructure world can work together to support the user communities. Looking forward to hearing more…

Quantifying Value

There have been many projects presenting at the e-concertation event (Thursday 4th - Friday 5th November 2010) and so far, what has stood out for me are projects that aim to express a tangible impact of their work. One such presentation was from a representative of the ESPRC
(Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) from the UK.
They stated that they added £16 million of gross-added value to a UK regional economy. Another example of positive results of their funding strategies was savings of £760 million for Quantum Montecarlo simulations, which cost £100,000 pounds to implement.
The ESPRC presenter finished by saying when starting any project, one of the most important elements is that you should know your user. This will help shape a project's requirements to that specific user/users. It appears that whether you are a science communicator or e-science project manager the audience is ‘key’.
There was more content that caught my attention at the event, but one thought I will leave you with was a statement from a panel member: “e-infrastructure projects are not just about hardware, software and people; in fact, the technology is just a means to an end. What is important is that the e-infrastructure project should connect the researchers involved, people outside that project’s concentric circle of individuals and wider society at large”.

Adrian Giordani

Workshops in India: global science up close

(Posted for Bob Jones, EGEE project director)

Last week I had the opportunity of observing global science from the other side of the globe. I was in New Delhi attending two workshops: the EU-INDIA workshop hosed by the Indian National Science Academy and the EU-IndiaGrid2 Kickoff Workshop at the Indian Institute of Technology.

At these meetings representatives from European and Indian research compared approaches to building and maintaining e-Infrastructures and sought areas ripe for collaboration.
India and the European Union have cooperated on science and technology through formal agreements for the last 10 years. India currently has links to CERN, is a member of ITER—the fusion research project—and is invited to be involved in the Research Infrastructures defined in the ESFRI roadmap (learn more about the roadmap in 25 November 2009 edition of International Science Grid this Week).

To increase the capacity of its current e-Infrastructure, India is establishing a National Knowledge Network (NKN), which is essentially an upgrade of the network backbone that will be extended to all the research and education establishments across India. Its roll-out has started and the existing EGEE and GARUDA (the national grid infrastructure) sites will be migrated to NKN. The plans for the EC co-funded TEIN3 network link to Europe were also presented. In terms of supercomputing, India assembles its own clusters using commercial off the shelf components but has no equivalent of DEISA/PRACE (the European supercomputing infrastructure).

At the close of the day the Indian National Academy and EC representatives summarised briefly the areas for future collaboration and said they would be submitting a written set of recommendations to their superiors. The most likely areas for collaboration are solar energy and fusion research.

At the second workshop, the one day EU-IndiaGrid2 kick-off meeting the project coordinator Alberto Masoni highlighted that the project will not build an infrastructure itself but act as a bridge between the Indian and European infrastructures. A roadmap milestone is scheduled for the first quarter of the project which should outline how India will interact with EGI.

Watch this space for more updates.

(Image of the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib Sikh Temple in New Delhi courtesy of youngrobv. All rights reserved.)

Guest posting from Bob Jones - EC-Brazil workshop part 1

The state university of Sao Paulo played host to a recent EC-Brazil workshop held on 8-9 September. Bob Jones, the project director for EGEE, gave us this report on the days' events:

The goal of this workshop was to find opportunities for Brazil and the EC to work closer together on ICT subjects. The outcome of the workshop was to be used for a high-level meeting in Brasilia later in the week. It was structured as plenary sessions including three concurrent parallel sessions on specific topics such as e-Infrastructures, simulation software, microelectronics, supercomputing, network embedded intelligence and future-internet. At the end of the sessions were a couple of wrap-up panels, charged with establishing a list of suggestions on how to foster collaborative initiatives between Brazil and the EU. There were approximately 70 people present at the workshop.

A number of suggestions on collaboration concerning e-Infrastructures were collected during a panel session in which I was involved. The suggestions can be summarised as follows:

• There is already on-going collaboration between Europe and Brazil at the networking and grid infrastructure layers. This willingness to collaborate needs to be reconfirmed during the transition from EGEE to EGI and EELA to LGI. Reinforcing the inter-operation of e-Infrastructures between Brazil and Europe will allow e-Science to flourish in Brazil and permit the creation of multi-disciplinary teams spanning the continents.


• Brazil is unique from a bio-diversity (e.g. Amazon basin) and astronomical environment (hosting observatories due to climatic conditions and population distribution) standpoint, which means it is a key partner with whom Europe has to work in these areas.


• Collaboration with Europe on training of and dissemination to Brazil’s 160,000 strong research community would encourage the knowledge and use of e-Science techniques

Below are more details of the contents of the workshop:

An opening session with Brazilian representatives and Mario Campolargo for the EC set the scene. I participated in the parallel session on e-Infrastructures for which the highlights are shown below. There were about 50 people in the audience which is a lot since there were 3 parallel sessions.

Bernard Marechal presented EELA-2 and plans for LGI – A Latin American equivalent of EGI.

I presented EGEE and EGI. My slides are here.

There were then 3 presentations by Brazilian computer scientists (Antonio Tadeu Gomes – LNCC, Mario Dantas – UFSC, Philippe Navaux - UFRGS) covering theories for resource allocation, system of systems studies etc.

Gerry Devine from Reading University described the work of the METAFOR project (Common Metadata for Climate Modelling Digital Repositories). It has 11 partners, EC funding of 2.2Meuros, started March 2008 and will last 3 years. They are working on CIM – Common Information Model for climate data and will produce a UML model to be used for CMIP5 (from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change).

Soraia Musse presented the work of PUC in Brazil on visualisation for different fields. This talk concentrated on crowd simulation and the detection of usual behaviours. It has technology links to gaming and security industries with complex simulations requiring important computing resources.

After this there was a video presentation with people from Barcelona as part of the Master Class series. The video was a short film called “spread through the air” produced by Brazilian students at the arts school that had won a critics award at the Cannes film festival.

The afternoon session was dedicated to network subjects and the future internet, during which Michael Stanton presented RNP the Brazilian NREN. RNP has links to Europe via RedClara (goes to Madrid) and the USA via ALICE. Upgrades are planned (RedClara2 & ALICE2). Cross-border fibres to neighbouring countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) are foreseen for 2010.

They hope to have the 24 regional capitals in Brazil linked by 10G in 2010.

GLOBAL e-Infrastructure Networking Event I

The EU-Infrastructure Unit and the GLOBAL Project invite you to participate in the "GLOBAL e-Infrastructure Networking Event I " to be performed on June 23rd as a distributed event over the Internet with participants from Latin America, Caribbean Region, North America and Europe.

The event will be an excellent opportunity to give a high visibility to your institution, as well as to create new contacts and links, especially valuable for the forthcoming FP7 Calls.

Find out how to participate here.

Sustaining the software (cyber/e-) infrastructure

A few weeks ago I was present at a Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability Workshop organised by Indiana University for the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was mainly composed of academic from the USA, with a scattering of people from Europe and even further afield.

The NSF supports an Office of CyberInfrastructure which has as its remit:

coordinates and supports the acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to the conduct of 21st century science and engineering research and education.

Frequently, cyberinfrastructure (in the USA) is generally equated with e-infrastructure (in Europe). While this is broadly true...e-infrastructure generally focuses (in my view) on the provision of capability and the software needed to access it. Cyberinfrastructure on the other hand encompasses e-infrastructure, but also looks at the more application oriented tools and libraries needed to support computation and data analysis. This is a much broader remit!

Anyway, with this broader remit NSF has understandably a larger software base that they need to maintain and support. How to best do this was the primary subject of the workshop, and of interest to the EGEE community as it looks to see how its various software outputs could be sustained.

A collection of position papers prepared by the participants before the workshop are available online. While all endorsed the open source model... it was recognised as not being a solution in its own right. The need to have dedicated staff contributing to open source development was seen as essential. In addition, it was recognised that software in different stages of its life (prototyped vs. developed vs. sustained vs. maintained) needs different approaches and effort.

All of this work needs to be guided and prioritised by the community it is being devised to server (see for example this recent announcement from the Globus Alliance). Other more direct models were discussed during the breakout sessions - including a model used within the UK HPC community (amongst others) where investigators are given the ability to 'spend' allocated credits with designated support units. Another issue raised at the workshop was how should (mostly academic) providers from large multi-site projects to smaller single site development teams be incentivised and rewarded?

Moving beyond the mechanics of keeping the software running... the issue as to what software to keep running came up. There seemed to be a strong consensus on having a defined 'platform' with a declared roadmap that would provide a basis for the community to build upon - both for tool and application developers. The issue as to what to sustain was a can of worms we decided not to open! Decomposing the desired functionality into areas, prioritising these areas, and then making sure that areas at the bottom of the stack are sustained before the upper layers are filled was one approach that was discussed - going up the stack as far as the budget would stretch!

So bringing this back to EGEE and the provision of a sustainable e-infrastructure within Europe? A group made up from the leading grid middleware providers in Europe (gLite, ARC and UNICORE) have been meeting regularly since December to understand how middleware will be provisioned within the EGI (European Grid Infrastructure). Working from the framework given within the EGI_DS Blueprint we are filling in the details as to how the software will be integrated from the middleware providers and moved through to being installed onto the National Grid Infrastructures.

The issue as to what needs to be maintained from the current software base and where are their areas that still need development are critical questions that still need to be answered.... but splitting up maintenance and development activities as two clear distinct activities is one option that has been discussed. As is defining which components need to be maintained as part of a core European software distribution... and which do not!

More discussions on this are taking place later this month... watch this space!

Production e-infrastructure

There was a recent (heated) discussion within the Production Grid Infrastructure Working Group within the Open Grid Forum with a thread started by Laurence Field.

In reality, what resource providers would class as a production grid, most users are beginning to treat as e-infrastructure. So, what are the characteristics define e-infrastructure?

1. They can span multiple organisations
Physical resources (e.g. computers, storage, instruments, data, ...) that are owned by organisations are made available to collaborators within the same organisation (e.g. within a single legal entity such as campus), between different organisations (but within the same legal jurisdiction such as a country) or internationally across legal boundaries. The potential span of the collaborators within the e-infrastructure has a direct impact on the policies governing the e-infrastructure.

2. They allow teams to collaborate
Any e-infrastructure must be able to support individuals from different organisations to work together in teams (or virtual organisations). These teams should be easy to form and be able to support roles/groups within the team. Access to the resources within the e-infrastructure should be governed by the identity or role/group and individual has within a particular team.

3. They have a scalable decentralised authentication scheme
For the uptake of e-infrastructure to scale an individual must be able to obtain locally an identification token that can be used to identify themselves to remote resources. Currently, many deployments use X509 certificates rooted in Certificate Authorities issued from the International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) to identify an individual. These are then frequently used to obtain an X509 Proxy Certificate (as a means of encapsulating an identity with additional information that can be used for authentication) from VOMS. Alternatively, institutional based authentication schemes such as Shibboleth are beginning to see deployments.

4. They have a reliable scalable service based infrastructure
Service oriented architectures (SOA) have become the defacto standard model for building distributed computing infrastructures, regardless as to if they are implemented using web service specifications or some other technology. By definition, a SOA needs a scalable information system that allows services to publish information relating to their capability and interface, and mechanisms by which clients can discover such information and select the desired service(s). The underlying infrastructure needs to be reliable and able to scale to meet the needs of its service providers, the number of services within the system, its user communities, and its workload.

Perhaps the biggest difference here and earlier 'grid' definitions is the focus in e-infrastructure on reliability and scalability.

What is e-Infrastructure - and why would we want to sustain it?

So let us start with a small quick detour!

Buying a car is expensive. You have the initial capital cost of buying the car and then the operating costs of petrol/diesel/electricity, insurance, maintenance, etc. as you use it. OK - no surprises on the tradeoffs around making such an investment decision. But what would your decision be if at some point within the next two years all the roads, garages, petrol stations, (i.e. the supporting infrastructure) that you use in your area were going to be removed? You might rethink your decision to buy a car.

A similar situation is facing researchers. In the past, in order to do research you need infrastructure - a roof over your head, access to a library, a laboratory, an office, a desk, etc. Increasingly, you need e-infrastructure - access to a computer, the internet, software, possibly a high performance computer or two, data sources, data storage, etc. We don't realise how much we have become to depend on such e-infrastructure until it goes away!

So, if you are using e-infrastructure as part of your work, you want to know that its going to be there and that its going to work! Research grants generally only have funding that lasts between 3 and 5 years - even if it is part of a longer research programme. Making a decision as to which e-infrastructure resources you are going to use and depend on for your research becomes a critical decision.

E-infrastructure can be seen to therefore have several components:

• the software that you use locally to access your e-infrastructure resources
• the software deployed on physical resources to expose them as e-infrastructure resources

The quality, reliability, scalability and sustainability of e-infrastructure are big issues for further discussion...