The EGEE project Fabrizio Gagliardi EGEE Project Director

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The EGEE project Fabrizio GagliardiEGEE
Project Director
Workshop on Biomedical Informatics Brussels ,
March 18-19, 2004
EGEE is proposed as a project funded by the
European Union under contract IST-2003-508833
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Background

• Networking, commodity computing and distributed
  software tools became ripe for Grid technology to
  start become available at the end of the 1990s
• Many public funded projects (in the US and in the
  EU) launched since

• Grid computing a key activity of the EU
  programmes
• Industrial and commercial Grids have been
  following (see a good sample on the
  www.cern.ch/gridcafe portal and also
  www.gridstart.org)
• Major IT vendors involved in Grid activity

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Prototypes DataGrid

• 9.8 M Euros EU funding over 3 years (twice as
  much
• from partners)
• 90 for middleware and applications
• 3 major applications High Energy Physics, Earth
  Observation, Biomedical
• Total of 21 partners, over 150 scientists,
  engineers and programmers from research and
  academic institutes as well as industrial
  companies
• Three year phased developments demos
  (2001-2003)
• Several improved versions of middleware software
  (final release end 2003)
• DataGrid testbed more than 1000 CPUs at more
  than 15 sites (up to 40)
• Software used by partner projects DataTAG,
  CROSSGRID, GRACE

Successful Final Review in February 2004
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EGEE Why?

• Access to a production quality grid will change
  the way science and business is done in Europe
• Current Grid RD projects run to completion
  within the next few months or next year
• The EGEE partners have already made major
  progress in aligning national and regional Grid
  RD efforts, in preparation for EGEE

• EGEE will preserve the current strong momentum of
  the European Grid community and the enthusiasm of
  the hundreds of young European researchers
  already involved in EU Grid projects (gt150 in EDG
  alone)

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EGEE manifestoEnabling Grids for E-science in
Europe

• Goal
• Create a wide European Grid production quality
  infrastructure on top of present and future EU RN
  infrastructure
• Build On
• EU and EU member states major
• investments in Grid Technology
• International connections (US and AP)
• Several pioneering prototype results
• Large Grid development teams in EU require major
  EU funding effort
• Approach
• Leverage current and planned national and
  regional Grid programmes
• Work closely with relevant industrial Grid
  developers, NRENs and US-AP projects

 
Applications
Grid infrastructure
Geant network
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EGEE Partners

• Leverage national resources in a more effective
  way for broader European benefit
• 70 leading institutions in 27 countries,
  federated in regional Grids

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EGEE Activities
24 Joint Research
28 Networking
JRA1 Middleware Engineering and
Integration JRA2 Quality Assurance JRA3
Security JRA4 Network Services Development
NA1 Management NA2 Dissemination and
Outreach NA3 User Training and Education NA4
Application Identification and Support NA5
Policy and International Cooperation
Emphasis in EGEE is on operating a
production grid and supporting the end-users
48 Services
SA1 Grid Operations, Support and Management SA2
Network Resource Provision
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EGEE Virtuous Cycle
A new scientific community makes first contacts
to EGEE through outreach events organized by
Networking Activities
Follow-up meetings by applications specialists
may lead to definition of new requirements for
the infrastructure
Peer communication and dissemination events
featuring established users then attract new
communities
If approved, the requirements are implemented by
the Middleware Activities
The Networking Activities then provide
appropriate training to the community in
question, so that it becomes an established user
After integration and testing, the new middleware
is deployed by the Service Activities
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EGEE Service Activity (I)

• Create, operate, support and manage a production
  quality infrastructure
• Offered services
• Middleware deployment and installation
• Software and documentation repository
• Grid monitoring and problem tracking
• Bug reporting and knowledge database
• VO services
• Grid management services

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EGEE Service Activity (II)

• Resource Centers

Month 1 10
Month 15 20
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EGEE Middleware Activity

• Hardening and re-engineering of existing
  middleware functionality, leveraging the
  experience of partners
• Activity concentrated in few major centers
• Key services Resource Access
• Data Management (CERN)
• Information Collection and Accounting (UK)
• Resource Brokering (Italy)
• Quality Assurance (France)
• Grid Security (Northern Europe)
• Middleware Integration (CERN)
• Middleware Testing (CERN)

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EGEE Networking Activity

• Dissemination and outreach
• Lead by TERENA
• User training and induction
• Lead by Unv Edin. (NeSC)
• Application identification and support
• Two pilot application centers (for high energy
  physics and biomedical grids)
• One more generic component dealing with longer
  term recruitment and support of other communities
• Policy and International cooperation
• Establish Grid policy forum
• Coordinate relations with other projects (EU and
  beyond)

map points indicate federations and are not
geographically precise
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EGEE Applications

• EGEE Scope ALL-Inclusive for academic
  applications (open to industrial and
  socio-economic world as well)
• The major success criterion of EGEE how many
  satisfied users from how many different domains ?
• 5000 users (3000 after year 2) from at least 5
  disciplines
• Two pilot applications selected to guide the
  implementation and certify the performance and
  functionality of the evolving infrastructure
  Physics Bioinformatics

Application domains and timelines are for
illustration only
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The pilot applications

• High Energy Physics with LHC Computing Grid
  (www.cern.ch/lcg) relies on a Grid infrastructure
  to store and analyse petabytes of real and
  simulated data. LCG is a major source of
  resources, requirements and a hard deadlines with
  no conventional solution available
• In Biomedics several communities are facing
  equally daunting challenges to cope with the
  flood of bioinformatics and healthcare data. Need
  to access large and distributed non-homogeneous
  data and important on-demand computing
  requirements

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LCG

• LCG
• a collaboration of
• The LHC experiments
• The Regional Computing Centres
• Physics institutes
• Mission
• Prepare and deploy the computing environment that
  will be used by the experiments to analyse the
  LHC data
• Strategy
• Integrate thousands of computers at dozens of
  participating institutes worldwide into a global
  computing resource
• Rely on software being developed in advanced grid
  technology projects, both in Europe and in the
  USA

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Biomedical Projects and EGEE

• Lessons learnt from the DataGrid prototype
• Need to create a large users community from
  Biomedical sciences (like in High Energy Physics)
• Inter-application forum in DataGrid was very
  useful experiences and needs can be compared to
  produce a common set of prioritized requirements
• Need for technically competent teams to help
  deploy biomedical applications
• Biomedical sites must contribute computing
  resources to the grid to gain practical
  experience
• Need to identify large scale applications (like
  LHC) that a united community can buy into and
  which can act as a vehicle for pushing grids in
  the biomedical domain

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EGEE and Industry

• Industry will benefit from EGEE in several ways
• as partner
• through collaboration with individual EGEE
  partners, participate in specific activities
  where relevant skills and manpower are available
  ? increase know-how on Grid technologies
• as user
• specific industrial sectors will be targeted as
  potential users of the Grid infrastructure for
  RD applications
• particularly attractive to high-tech SMEs (major
  computing resources within grasp)
• as provider
• long-term maintenance of established Grid
  services (call centres, support centres and
  computing resource provider centres)

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Conclusions

• EGEE is expected to deliver a production Grid
  infrastructure for scientific applications in
  Europe
• Important to have early adopters and applications
  representatives in all phases of the project
• Biomedical and physics are the pilot applications
  domains that will lead the exploitation of the
  EGEE Grid infrastructure
• Biomedical applications seem to share with
  Physics and other data intensive sciences a
  number of computing problems which can ideally
  benefit from the EGEE Grid infrastructure

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Further Information
To know more EU EGEE www.eu-egee.org EU
DataGrid www.eu-edg.org Other Grid projects
www.gridstart.org