The DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project aims to deploy e-Infrastructure for new scientific communities, where, on the one hand, the ICT technology is still not present at the

appropriate level, but, on the other hand, it is demanded to empower its daily work. We deal with a group of scientific users, and this is a reference for DORII, with experimental equipment and instrumentation that are not integrated or integrated only partially with the European infrastructure.

The DORII is focusing on the following selected scientific areas:• Earthquake community, with various sensor networks• Environmental science community• Experimental science community, with synchrotron and

free electron lasers.

The list of partners: Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center, PSNC Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, CSIC Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le

Telecomunicazioni, CNIT Sincrotrone Trieste SCpA, ELETTRA European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering, EUCENTRE Johannes Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, LMU Universität Stuttgart, USTUTT-HLRS Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, OGS Ecohydros SL, ECOHYDROS Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., GRNET Universidad de Cantabria, UC.

The DORII consortium is well-balanced. It consists of infrastructure stakeholders (CSIC, GRNET, PSNC, USTUTT-HLRS), application experts and integrators (ELETTRA, EUCENTRE, OGS, ECOHYDROS, UC), Grid middleware and networking experts (CSIC, CNIT, ELETTRA, LMU, USTUTT-HLRS, GRNET, PSNC), as well as SME representatives (ECOHYDROS). This consortium provided a wide area of expertise, starting from remote instrumentation and applications, remote visualizations, interactivity, parallelization, Grids and networking, and also other engineering and scientific areas.The scientific communities represented by the project are well- recognized and organized. The scientific partners are representatives of bigger consortia which perform research on a European level in order to improve the usage of experimental environments.

The project ended in July 2010, however several activities are still ongoing, especially the exploitation of the results at OGF (Open Grid Forum), OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) or e-IRG (e-Infrastructure Reflection Group). The project will still organise its own conference INGRID, which is focusing on instrumentation and sensors. The DORII middleware is planned to be used in forthcoming national and international projects like MADBAG (Monitoraggio Ambientale Distribuito  BAsato su Grid, distributed environmental monitoring based on grid  technologies), NFFA ( Nanoscience Foundries and Fine Analysis), partners at the MOON (Mediterranean Ocean Observing Network) consortium, WLIT (New Technologies in Nature Science Teaching – Virtual Laboratory of Interactive Teaching), KIWI – Virtual Laboratory.

DORII recognised the following strategic goals and objectives: To adopt e-Infrastructure functionality across selected areas of science and engineering To deploy and operate persistent, production quality, distributed instrumentation integrated with e-

Infrastructure To generalize and deploy a framework environment that can be used for fast prototyping.

The pilot e-Infrastructure of Mediterranean Sea Observing NetworkThe pilot infrastructure was built on top of the existing e-Infrastructure. It has been using international (GEANT2/3) and national connections (NRENs) as well as the infrastructure built up by the EGEE project and National Grid Initiatives (NGIs).

DORII recognised the following strategic goals and objectives: To adopt e-Infrastructure functionality across selected areas of science and engineering To deploy and operate persistent, production quality, distributed instrumentation integrated with

e-Infrastructure To generalize and deploy a framework environment that can

be used for fast prototyping.

An efficient use of remote instrumentation goes far beyond facilitating networked access to remote instruments. Services for remote instrumentation should offer a solution to fully integrate instruments (including laboratory equipment, large-scale experimental facilities, and sensor networks) in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where users can operate instruments in the same fashion as the computing and storage resources offered by the traditional Grid or better to say distributed computing environment, as DORII was also refering HPC (high performance computing) resources.

Conceptual view of the Remote Instrumentation e-Infrastructure. The instrument element (IE) becomes the standard element abstraction of the Grid, in addition to computing (CE) and storage (SE) resources.

Practical attempts to close numerous gaps between the Grid and scientific domains which provide and utilize remote instrumentation services were performed within the DORII project. Among the main goals addressed by the project the following are of special interest for the e-Infrastructure for remote instrumentation: To provide a set of standard capabilities to support remote instrumentation in a Grid environment, including

a suitable abstraction of remote instrumentation, in order to make it visible as a manageable Grid resource To adopt remote instrumentation across e-Science domains To design a service-oriented Grid architecture that enables the integration of instruments as services To set up a flexible problem-oriented middleware architecture, which not only provides users with services

for remote instrumentation, but also enables full-fledged user-level tools for promoting the e-Infrastructure to the end-user and application developers, hiding the complexity of the underlying Grid technology

To generalize and deploy a framework environment that can be used for fast prototyping.

DORII publications (contribution to e-IRG white paper, CMST special issue and conference proceedings from INGRID 2008 ad INGRID 2009; INGRID 2010 is under publication)

Project web site: http://www.dorii.eu

The DORII project received funding from the EC Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211693 (Feb. 2008 – July 2010).