A worldwide computing grid at a user’s fingertips.

One project that caught my attention was the CHAIN Science Gateway. It the first time that anyone with access to the web can easily submit a job, run scientific applications,  or use tools and data repositories with a choice of many grid e-infrastructures around the world. All they need to do is register with a user name and password; they can even use their Facebook credentials. “What matters for users in the end is that they want to run their applications in as many places as they can. With our tool, users can run anywhere they’re authorised to run,” said Roberto Barbera, technical coordinator of the project.

The CHAIN Science Gateway connects e-infrastructures in Europe, China, India, Brazil and America, and does away with the process of making a user manage grid security certificates. It uses robot grid certificates instead. These automated certificates are pre-installed at various sites on the network. When a user signs up, all they need to do is get authenticated and authorized. Authentication is managed by the SAML standard of the federated identity services. The Science Gateway's identity federation uses the Shibboleth implementation of the SAML standard.

A number of research communities are already running working with CHAIN including WeNMR, WRF4G, jModelTest, ProTest, LSGC, INDICATE, DECIDE, SuperB and Earth Science.

More information about the project can be found in a video interview below with Roberto Barbera.

Roberto Barbera from Chain

Chain is allowing scientists access grids all over the world...wherever they are!

GISELA-CHAIN Conference Starts!!

GISELA-CHAIN Conference Principal Table during the Opening Session (Right to Left: Federico Ruggieri (Italy), Luis Mier y Teran (Mexico), Felipe Brancho (Mexico) and Bernard Marechal (Spain and Brazil, GISELA Coordinator)

In the middle of a beautiful nature environment, in the Jardines del Pedregal at UNAM Campus in Mexico City, the 2012 GISELA-CHAIN Conference starts. Open keynotes are around the social impact and the important role of information, collaboration and technology - as Grid Computing - in the advanced of the quality of life.

Researchers, Scientists, Engineers and users of 25 countries of LatinAmerica and Europe join this year to discuss about advances and challenges in the context of Grid Initiative Collaboration between  the two continents.

This year, the forum is addressed to treat two main subjects:

• Present outstanding results obtained by Scientific Communities using e-Infrastructures with focus on the advent of the new VRC-driven Science Gateway (SG) and their first outcomes;
• Discuss policies and plans for the long-term sustainability of SG-based Advanced Computing Services, with special emphasis on Latin America and under the auspices of RedCLARA.

You're never alone when you're a clone

The EGI Technical Forum has gotten under way today here in Lyon, and this is the first of a few posts which I'll be giving. I was asked to provide a different perspective than what could usually be expected, one from an "African" point of view. Indeed, this TF has a large (compared to previous EGEE/EGI meetings) African participation, thanks to the EUMedGrid User Forum, which is co-located, but the continent is still extremely under-represented in these spheres. My work over the last couple of years has been to a large extent trying to change this, focussing of course on my own country, where i coordinate the national grid, but including as well the 20-odd institutes working on the HP-funded, UNESCO run "Brain Gain Initiative". 

But first let me explain the meaning behind the title of this post. I'm attending the meeting with a few hats (as I'm sure most of my colleagues are) : 

1. Coordinator of SAGrid, to sign the MoU for resource infrastructure providers between South Africa and EGI.eu
2. member of the CHAIN project, representing the Sub-Saharan region (we have a closed project meeting on Tuesday)
3. Coordinator of SAGrid, presenting to the CHAIN workshop (overview of SA scientific applications)
4. finally, I'll be at the EUMed User Forum, presenting some of the work we've done in the human language research domain. 

ouch.

So, I really feel like there's not enough time and not enough "Bruce" to go around. As an aside, this is a strategic issue which is being resolved in South Africa, via the CHAIN project, to develop a sustainable support and development strategy, by specifying more concrete and refined roles, and resources assigned to the people involved in the project. During this time, when the final touches are being put into place for AfricaROC, we have a lot of work to do to keep up with developments in Europe, and make sure that our work in Africa is coherent with the rest of the world. 

I'm very proud to be able to represent my country in this meeting and look forward to meeting old colleagues and new. What is more, I'm extremely excited about the enthusiastic researchers in Africa who are wanting to jump on the grid. We're working hard to remove barriers to entry, and ensure that they have access to the biggest and best infrastructure possible.

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…

Lemons

"when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade".

So the saying goes. Well, life gave me a FinnAir strike, so I won't be making to the conference. I am of course greatly disappointed by this setback, since there were many things I had been planning to do in Helsinki. Indeed, this conference was shaping up to be one of the most inspirational, indeed exciting of the year, we have all been looking forward to it for months now. An infrastructures conference for Africa - just when AfricaConnect and CHAIN are starting... At a time when EPIKH is producing rivers of great results after two years of work with SAGrid. We had many great things to present here, and a working meeting with the Brain Gain Initiative, to start work on porting of some applications which are being used in places like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe...

The launch of the CHAIN project which we're working with through a partnership with UbuntuNet is next week in Rome, which has as one of its goals the creation of a Regional Operations Centre for Africa, to allow more streamlined collaboration at a technical level of African e-Infrastructures with EGI and others. Work has already begun, since July actually, on http://roc.africa-grid.org

I has really looking forward to a visit to CSC in Espoo as well, which will have to wait until another time - perhaps combined with the EGI User Forum in Vilnius next year.

So, this is not the first or last time that air traffic has created a change in plans. We all remember very well the effect that that unpronouncable volcano had on our plans just after EGEE-UF5 in Uppsala. If one were superstitious, one might begin to suspect that Scandinavia had it in for us...

Of course, I'm not superstitious (except when it comes to it comes to putting bread upside down on the table) - and this is but a minor setback. There is so much work going on, and so many people involved that I'm very glad to say that my personal absence makes absolutely no difference.

Alla prossima,

Bruce