EGEE
From EGI Knowledge Base
The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 240 institutions in 45 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day. Conceived from the start as a four-year project, the second two-year phase started on 1 April 2006, and is funded by the European Commission.
Expanding from originally two scientific fields, high energy physics and life sciences, EGEE now integrates applications from many other scientific fields, ranging from geology to computational chemistry. Generally, the EGEE Grid infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research especially where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures.
The EGEE Grid consists of over 36,000 CPU available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in addition to about 5 PB disk (5 million Gigabytes) + tape MSS of storage, and maintains 30,000 concurrent jobs on average. Having such resources available changes the way scientific research takes place. The end use depends on the users' needs: large storage capacity, the bandwidth that the infrastructure provides, or the sheer computing power available.
| Project homepage | www.eu-egee.org |
|---|---|
| No. of Partners | 161 |
| No. of Countries | 32 |
| Start Date | 2008-05 |
| Duration (Months) | 24 |
| Cost (€ per Year) | 23,445,000 |
| EU Funding (€ per Year) | 16,000,000 |
| FTEs (per Year) | 182.2 |
Contents |
[edit] EGI Functions Mapped onto EGEE Activities
[edit] Operation of a reliable Grid infrastructure
This is the main function of SA1: Grid operations, Support & Management. For a detailed overview of EGEE SA1, see EGEE II DSA1.5: Grid Operations Cookbook.
The tasks that are particularly relevant to the Operations function are the following:
- TSA1.1: Grid Management (~50 FTE)
The main actor in this task is the OCC (Operations Coordination Centre), which is based at CERN and which coordinates a number of teams and activities:
- the ROC (Regional Operations Centre) managers group
- the SA1 technical team
- weekly operation meetings
- GOoD (Grid Operator on Duty) (this might have been reallocated to CNRS (ROC-FR) - need to check)
- Resource Allocation Group (joint NA4-SA1)
- User Support Advisory Group (ex ESC)
- Operation Automation Team
- Coordination with related infrastructure projects.
The OCC would appear to map well onto a coordination-type role in EGI.
- TSA1.2: Grid Operation & Support (~78 FTE)
This includes the subtasks having to do with operations "proper":
- GOoD (Coordination by CNRS +contribution by the ROCs)
- Oversight and management of Grid Operations (presumably this is at the regional level - otherwise it looks like a duplicate of the previous task)
- First line support for operation problems
- running production and pre-production services
- middleware deployment and support (each ROC coordinates the deployment and related support to its sites of the Middleware release produced by SA3 (see below); in rare cases this task may also perform regional certification, outside of the activities expected under PPS and SA3
- interoperations - local, regional, international
- monitoring tools to support Grid Operations (e.g. SAM, activity coordinated by the Operations Automation Team from task 1.1 above)
All these subtasks are basically operated by the ROCs, so they would map well as NGI-level (or federation-level) responsibilities.
- TSA1.4: Grid Security (305 PMs)
This includes the following coordination groups:
- Operational Grid Security Coordination Team (OSCT, under the dorection of the EGEE Security Officer)
- Grid Security Vulnerability Group (GSVG, coodrinated by ROC UK/I)
- Joint Security Policy Group (JSPG, coordinated by ROC UK/I)
- Authentication Coordination (coordinated by ROC NL, which manages communications with IGTF and EUGridPMA)
These tasks would appear to map well onto a coordinating role by EGI.
SA1 ia also responsible for Service Quality Definition. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are defined by the ROC managers group from task TSA1.1. These also include agreements for the support of applications and user communities. However, in the EGEE-III proposal it is expected that under the EGI/NGIs model SLAs will be defined at the NGI level with respect to the individual NGIs' sites, and at a higher level between the NGIs and EGI. The SLAs defined by the EGEE ROC managers will then serve as a model for SLAs internal to the future NGIs. The SLAs are verified by the Grid Operations monitoring tools (e.g. SAM).
[edit] Coordination of Middleware development and standardization
This is the main function of JRA1: Middleware Reengineering, in particular under the following tasks:
- TJRA1.1: Middleware support (603 PMs)
This is essentially an operational task, which includes
- bug fixing,
- the GGUS support team,
- addressing short and medium term requests and needs by the applicazions and operations,
- internal testing,
- definition - with SA3 - of the gLite release,
- documentation
- TJRA1.2: R&D and standardization (243 PMs)
This consists of the following subtasks:
- development of demonstrative protoypes with new functionalities, to eventually pass on to task 1.1 to be converted into products
- implementation of existing standards (e.g. XACML, SAML, SRM, GLUE, BES, JSDL) and guide to standardization processes via active participation in OFG etc.
The JRA1 activity is distributed among partners, which are clustered into 4 groups based on their middleware-related expertise. Thus, if one the one hand the INFN+Datamat and CESNET clusters could map well onto the Italian and Czech NGIs respectively, the CERN+STFC and UH.HIP+CSC+FOM+UvA+SWITCH+UNIMAN clusters are clearly not coextensive with single NGIs. Keeping in mind that EGI will have to support different middleware stacks, there does not appear to be a clear mapping between the JRA1 activities and the operational or coordination roles currently envisioned for EGI. Un ruolo di coordinamento potrebbe invece averlo, anche in EGI, il task di SA3 TSA3.4: Interoperability & Platform support (132 PMs) che si propone, dal lato interoperability, di collaborare con altri progetti grid di infrastruttura al fine di convergere su standard comuni per rafforzare l'interoperabilita'.
