ACHIEVING GLOBAL SCIENCE Grid-powered solutions from EGEE and Collaborating Projects Introduction A globally distributed computing Grid now plays an essential role for large-scale, data intensive science in many fields of research. Global virtual communities are getting organised and equipped to fully exploit the potential of the Grid, today demonstrated with scientific results from a wide range of disciplines. The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project and collaborating projects are cooperating towards the provision of a world class, coherent and reliable international Grid enabling scientific excellence in many domains. TABLE OF CONTENTS EGEE ........... 1 AssessGrid ........... 2 BalticGrid-II ........... 3 BEinGRID ........... 4 BELIEF-II ........... 5 COMPCHEM ........... 6 D4Science ........... 7 DEGREE ........... 8 DORII ........... 9 EDGeS ........... 10 EELA-2 ........... 11 EGI_DS ........... 12 ETICS 2 ........... 13 EUAsiaGrid ........... 14 EUChinaGRID ........... 15 EUFORIA ........... 16 EU-IndiaGrid ........... 17 EUMEDGRID ........... 18 g-Eclipse ........... 19 GridCOMP ........... 20 GridPP ........... 21 GridTalk ........... 22 Health-e-Child ........... 23 neuGRID ........... 24 NGS ........... 25 OGF-Europe ........... 26 SEE-GRID-2 ........... 27 EGEE http://www.eu-egee.org/ The EGEE Grid is a unique and powerful resource for international science, allowing researchers in all regions to collaborate on common challenges. Numerous collaborations extend its reach to other geographical areas and application domains. Building on the pan-European network GÉANT2, the third phase of the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) project, EGEE-III, has two clear objectives that are essential for research infrastructures: to expand, optimize and simplify the use of the worldwide lar- gest production Grid by continuous operation of the infrastruc- ture, support for more user communities, and addition of further computational and data resources; to prepare the migration of the existing Grid from a project-based model to a sustainable federated infrastructure based on Na- tional Grid Initiatives. By strengthening interoperable, open source middleware, EGEE-III actively contributes to Grid standards, and work closely with busi- nesses to ensure commercial uptake of the Grid, which is a key to sustainability. Federating its partners on a national or regional ba- sis, EGEE-III also has a clear structuring effect on the European Research Area. EGEE operates today a Grid infrastructure with over 250 sites, pro- viding access to more than 70,000 CPUs. It has consolidated the grid operations and middleware for use by a wide range of scientific communities, such as astrophysics, computational chemistry, earth and life sciences, fusion and particle physics. Strong quality assu- rance, training and outreach programmes contribute to the success of this production Grid infrastructure. EGEE works together with a range of other projects and initiatives. The EGEE Collaborating Projects Liaison Office is a point of contact for projects which are collaborating with EGEE, and facilitates the relationships between those projects and the EGEE activities. For many projects, the first step to collaboration is receiving a Letter of Support from EGEE to accompany their proposal. Other projects have drawn up a Memorandum of Understanding, stating explicitly what they will need from EGEE and what they will offer in return. Collaborative activities range from technical work on interoperability to community activities such as organising joint training events and dissemination material. Depending on the issue at hand, different forms of co-operation might be appropriate and EGEE is open to suggestions and initiatives from any project that wants to help move Grid computing forward. Contact: [email protected] 1 AssessGrid http://www.assessgrid.eu/ AssessGrid, Advanced Risk Assessment and Management for Trustable Grid, focuses on the es- tablishment of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for commercial and academic grid users. The main objective of AssessGrid is to address obstacles to a wide adoption of grid computing by bringing risk ma- nagement and assessment to this field, enabling use of Grid technologies in business and society. The AssessGrid platform introduces risk assessment and management on all grid layers: end-users, brokers, and resource providers. It is the goal of this European Commission co-funded project to overcome providers’ and brokers’ inhibitions to accept specific Quality of Service (QoS) requests. Since SLAs are becoming increasingly important to people involved in grid technology, including to EGEE project participants, AssessGrid’s results can be used by EGEE. Independent from the risk-awa- re components, the AssessGrid negotiation mana- ger can be integrated in EGEE solutions. It is the first worldwide solution for negotiating SLAs accor- ding to the WS-Agreement specification in a Globus Toolkit environment. The prototype can be used in EGEE and colla- borating projects which need an automated SLA negotiation process. It supports SLA negotiations between end-users and providers as well as end- users and brokers. Furthermore, a quote mecha- AssessGrid is contributing to Commercial Grid Uptake by providing nism has been integrated which enables the user risk-aware SLA support to ask for non-binding agreements. Since this quote mechanism has been accepted by the GRAAP working group at OGF, the extension might also conform to the next WS-Agreement specification. In addition to the usage of the negotiation manager in EGEE and other projects, collaboration activities will focus on the definition of concrete SLA terms. Today no repository of common SLA requests is available. In order to achieve a good risk assessment and management, AssessGrid aims to use SLA requests as these will be generated in a commercial grid environment. Hence, the variety of SLA requests, as it exists in a large grid, certainly reflects the requirements in a commercial grid. In particular, the ratio of a job’s earliest start time, latest finish time, and execution duration should be evaluated. AssessGrid can benefit from experience and requirements of the large EGEE community in order to de- fine accurate key QoS requests for the test environment. Contact: [email protected] 2 BalticGrid-II http://www.balticgrid.eu The main objective of the BalticGrid-II project (second phase of BalticGrid) is to establish the pro- ject’s grid infrastructure as a part of a European Grid Infrastructure. The project’s infrastructure will support and help scientists of the Baltic States and Belarus in fostering the usage of modern computation and data storage systems. They will in thus gain the knowledge and experience to help them work in the European Research Area and participate fully in common research projects. The e-Infrastructure of 26 clusters built in five countries during BalticGrid’s first phase is envisaged to grow, both in the capacity and capability of its computing re- sources, and will be fully interoperable with the pan-European e-Infrastructure established by EGEE. The overall strategy of BalticGrid-II is to ensure reliable network connectivity for a grid infrastructure in Estonia, Latvia, Lithua- nia and Belarus, as well as to ensure optimal network perfor- mance for large file transfers and interactive traffic associated with Grid. The main applications areas within BalticGrid-II are: high energy physics, material science and quantum chemistry, fra- mework for engineering modelling tasks, bioinformatics and biomedical imaging, experimental astrophysical thermonuclear fusion, linguistics as well as operational modelling of the Bal- tic Sea ecosystem. Spatial distribution of time averaged sensitivity to green The research activity in BalticGrid-II will comprise: algae maximum growth parameter in the Curonian La- goon (Baltic Sea) for five most sensitive state variables. the introduction of advanced services enabling user-friendly and intuitive access to a grid environment; visualisation of specific computing results; the development of the Gridcom tool - especially important in networking cooperation between people. The most intensive and diverse collaboration is planned with EGEE in the framework of e-Infrastructure interoperabi- lity, as well as on dissemination and educational matters. BalticGrid-II will: participate in EGEE events and provide input for relevant EGEE-initiated dissemination activities; investigate options to support UNICORE and ARC middlewares, in addition to the current gLite-based middlewa- re, which have user bases in the immediate vicinity of the Baltic States as well as some user communities using these middlewares within the Baltics; investigate the requirements of joining the global European monitoring infrastructure of the EGEE project - NPM (Network Performance Monitoring). Contact: [email protected] 3 BEinGRID http://www.beingrid.eu The mission of BEinGRID is to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of grid technolo- gies across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid tech- nologies. BEinGRID, Business Experiments in GRID, is the European Union’s largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research programme, part of the European Union’s sixth Framework Programme (FP6). Grid technology is in a critical transition as it moves from research and academic use to wider adoption by business and enterprise. The commercial exploitation of grid