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Welcome |
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Welcome to this September issue of the EGEE newsletter,
unusually late because of the preparation and submission
of the EGEE-II proposal. As always, you can access an
online version of this newsletter, as well as all back
issues, here.
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Brief
News |
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EGEE-II
PROPOSAL SUBMITTED
After
many weeks of tireless work in all areas of the project,
the proposal for EGEE-II was submitted to the EU at 13:12
on 8 September. Weighing in at some 321 pages, the proposal
lists a consortium of more than 90 partners in 32 countries,
notably including more formal links to partners in the
US, South Korea and Taipei. The Project Director, Fabrizio
Gagliardi, would like to thank all those who helped to
write the proposal, both current partners and those who
are new to the EGEE family. Feedback from the European
Union should be received later on in the year, and will
be passed on to the project members as soon as possible.
NEGOCIATION
PROGRESS FOR EGEE RELATED PROJECTS
Furthering
its role as an incubator for Grid technology and research
infrastructures, EGEE has supported a large number of
related projects to be submitted to the last EU INFSO
RI call in March. The negotiation for these projects has
progressed over the last few months and they have provided
the EU with all necessary material to conclude negotiations
and begin to draft the related EU contracts. These should
be ready by the end of the year, with most projects due
to start early next year. The projects are:
| BELIEF |
EUChinaGrid |
| BIOINFOGRID
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EUMedGrid |
| eIRGSP
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Health-e-Child |
| EELA |
ICEAGE |
| ETICS
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ISSeG |
NEW
PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS: EGEE VIDEO & GLOSSY BROCHURE
The
project will soon have two new pieces of promotional material,
both well suited for use with non-technical audiences.
The EGEE glossy brochure explains the vision of the project,
with views from a number of users, shows the breadth of
the collaboration and highlights key features such as
the gLite middleware. The EGEE video, designed to be screened
at high quality at events or streamed over the web, highlights
the goals and achievements of EGEE through interviews
and computer graphics. Both of these items will be circulated
at the Fourth Conference in October.
COLLABORATION
BOARD QUESTIONNAIRE RESULTS SHOW SUCCESS OF EGEE
At
the third EGEE conference in Athens, the Collaboration
Board carried out a survey to asses the progress of the
project. The results were very positive, with 87% considering
the overall progress of the project Good or Very Good,
and 98% feeling the results of the first review were Good
or Very Good. A set of pdf slides on the results of the
questionnaire, prepared by Collaboration Board Chair Fotis
Karayannis, can be found
here.
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gLite
update: 1.3 in active usem 1.4 in preparation |
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With gLite 1.4 soon to be released for testing, version
1.3 is already being put to work both within EGEE and by
related projects. The GILDA testbed (used for a range of
training, dissemination and testing activities) is using
this latest public release, and perhaps more crucially,
so is the pre-production service. Use on the pre-production
service means gLite is now being used by some key customers
of the EGEE infrastructure, notably CMS (one of the LHC
experiments) and related project DILIGENT (a Digital Library
Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology).
Through
the Pre Production Service, CMS and DILIGENT have access
to some of the large batch systems of the main Production
Service, all through Computing Elements running gLite 1.3
rather than LCG-2. For CMS, this provides gLite based access
to queues reserved for them on the batch systems, as well
as access to Production Service Storage Elements containing
data from previous jobs submitted using LCG-2. These developments
are a another step forward for the gLite team, both in terms
of wider deployment and in building up trust in the middleware
stack.
DILIGENT
have also recently deployed gLite over their development
infrastructure, the first time gLite has been deployed on
an infrastructure other than those managed by EGEE. This
system comprises around 25 machines, across sites in Austria,
Greece, Germany and Italy, with more machines due to be
connected in the near future. Initially running gLite 1.1,
they have recently switched to 1.3, adopting almost all
the foundation Grid services offered by gLite. In the next
month, DILIGENT also plans to install gLite on their smaller
testing infrastructure. These expansions of the community
making use of gLite both demonstrate the value of the stack
and provides a larger community to givefeedback to the developers
and testers, further improving the product. |
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CIC-on-Duty:
spreading the load on infrastructure management |
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EGEE,
along with its sister project LCG, manages the world’s
largest Grid infrastructure – no easy job when this
infrastructure is spread over more than 160 sites in some
27 countries. Just as building such a system requires novel
approaches, managing it also requires innovations. When EGEE
was first launched, the infrastructure was managed centrally
from the Operations Centre at CERN. While this worked quite
well, it also had disadvantages. Troubleshooting such a large
a network is a tiring job, and the experience it generated
was concentrated in one place. To lessen the work load and
to make sure experience with Grid operations was more evenly
spread out, EGEE came up with a scheme where the Core Infrastructure
Centres shared the load. Dubbed CIC-on-duty, this new system
began in October 2004. In
this system, responsibility for managing the infrastructure
passes around the globe on a weekly basis. At first, responsibility
was passed between CERN and the CIC in Lyon. Later the UK
and Italian CICs joined the scheme, and more recently the
Russian CIC. Soon the project hopes to add CICs in the US
and Taipei, giving true 24 hour oversight of the infrastructure.
Starting with a simple agreed-upon procedure, the system
has developed through discussion and collaboration between
the CICs and the CERN Operations Centre. On example of this
is the CIC Dashboard, a web based overview of the state
of the infrastructure, first suggested by the Lyon CIC and
now used by all the centres in their daily work.
Already
the CIC-on-duty scheme is proving worthwhile. While it seems
that the number of bugs which the CICs have to deal with
each day has stayed roughly constant, the number of sites
they manage has grown immensely, as has the number of ‘good’
sites. When the CIC-on-duty scheme began, only around 45%
of sites passed their daily Site Functional Tests, but now
this figure is closer to 80%. The approach taken in this
scheme reflects the collaborative nature of the EGEE project
in general, and the successes that such an approach can
provide. |
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Third
International Grid School attracts students from Seventeen
Countries |
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Students
from all over the world attended the Third International
Grid School in Vico Equense, Italy, to extend their knowledge
of Grid Computing. Numerous EGEE staff were involved in
the planning and delivery of the programme, including Fabrizio
Gagliardi, Erwin Laure, Roberto Barbera, Malcolm Atkinson
and David Fergusson. Participants consisted of young researchers
from technical industries, research laboratories and academic
environments who were interested in using or developing
Grid technologies.
During
the two-week school, the 67 students received an in-depth
introduction to Grid technologies and applications and
were exposed to principles, research challenges, and capabilities
of existing tools as well as expert views on the potential
of general-purpose e-Infrastructures.
Professor
Miron Livny, Chair of this year's Programme Committee
commented: "Once again the international summer school
demonstrated the power of openness, sharing and collaboration,
which are the pillars of Grid computing. Students and
instructors with a broad spectrum of interests and expertise
came together to get exposed to new ideas, share requirements
and collaborate on addressing the challenges we face in
translating the concepts of distributed computing into
dependable tools."
The
school was endorsed by the Global Grid Forum and sponsored
by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics
(INFN), the Institute for High Performance Computing and
Networking (ICAR-Napoli), Institute for Composite and
Biomedical Materials (IMCB), the SPACI consortium, the
FIRB Grid.it Project, the Condor project and the EGEE
project.
For more information, please visit the ISSGC05
website. |
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Register
Now for Fourth EGEE Conference |
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We are
soon approaching the fourth EGEE conference in Pisa, Italy,
24-28 October. This high profile event will feature keynote
speakers from the European Union and Italian government
as well as leading international figures in science and
technology. The theme of the conference will be creating
and managing knowledge in the scientific community and building
solutions which can be exported to industry and commerce.
A
series of workshops will bring together delegates from
many different countries, providing them with the opportunity
to share knowledge, experiences and discuss the future.
The conference will also give members of the project the
opportunity to evaluate their achievements, prepare for
the last EU review and plan for the next phase of the
project.
Delegates
also have the opportunity to propose topics for a special
'Panel Plenary' taking place on the morning of Tuesday
25 October. The panel will there to address questions,
queries, worries or wishes relating to any aspect of the
project and its future. To post a question, fill-in this
simple
webform.
Click
here
for more details about registration, to view the programme,
venue, hotels and local attractions.
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Training
News |
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS
For
full event listings, see
here
EGEE
Demonstrators – All Hands Meeting, Nottingham, UK,
19-22 September
For
further details, see
http://www.allhands.org.uk.
Induction
to Grid Computing and the NGS, Edinburgh, UK, 29-30 September
For
further details, see
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/563.
Tutorial
at Grid@work Event, Sophia Antopolis, France, 10 October
For
further details, see http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/upcoming/grid/Conf_tutorials.htm.
EGEE
Fourth Conference Training Day, Pisa, Italy, 23 October
For further
details, see
http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a055598.
Induction
events at the annual Austrian Grid symposia, Hagenberg Austria
, 1-2 December
For
further details, see http://www.austriangrid.at/symposium/.
FURTHER
EDUCATION
MSc.
in e-Science, University of Edinburgh
This course will begin at the start of the next academic
year. For further details, see http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/degrees/msc_escience.html.
GRID
SUMMER SCHOOL
GirdKa
Summer School, FZK, Karlsruhe, Germany, 26-30 September
This
event will feature tutorials on gLite Introduction and Installation,
Application Development and ROOT/PROOF.
TRAINING
MATERIAL
A great
deal of training material can be found in the NA3 Training
Material Archive at: http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk/trgmat/index.html.
Current
course material is available in:
- EGEE
Induction
-
Globus Toolkit
- LCG2
APIs
- LCG2
Installation and Administration
- UML
for developing web services
- Web
Services
We expect to be adding the first gLite material in the
coming months.
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Endnotes |
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If you have comments on the newsletter, or any submissions
for future issues, please contact owen.appleton@cern.ch.
Thanks for reading, and see you in Pisa! |
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Interested
in reading more? Please refer to the other
newsletters |
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