EGI – Organisation overview and outreach

Catherine Gater

EGI.eu

Netherlands

What is EGI?

• Why build a European Grid Infrastructure?

“Infrastructure is the basic physical and organisational structures needed for the operation of a society or

enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function” (Wikipedia)

The Enterprise is the European Research Area

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What is a grid?

• A grid consists of distributed resources, controlled by separate organisations.

• These resources can be used systematically and securely by users external to that organisation.

• Resources can include:– Commodity or HPC clusters– Disk or tape storage– Instruments– Data Archives or Digital Libraries

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What does a grid look like?

ArcheologyAstronomyAstrophysicsCivil ProtectionComp. ChemistryEarth SciencesFinanceFusionGeophysicsHigh Energy PhysicsLife SciencesMultimediaMaterial Sciences…

What does a grid do?

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What does a grid do?

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EGI Collaboration

NGI

NGI

NGI

NGI

ResearchCommunity

ResearchCommunity

ResearchCommunity

ResearchCommunity

EIRO

EIRO

EGI.eu

ResearchCommunity

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EGI.eu

• EGI = European Grid Infrastructure• EGI.eu = Stichting European Grid Initiative

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• EGI.eu– 21 members of staff– Based on the Science Park– Director is Steven Newhouse– Governed by an Executive Board

day-to-day– Overseen by a larger Council with

representatives from 33 countries / EIROs

– Celebrated our first birthday on 8th February!

EGI-InSPIRE

Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe

• A 4 year project with €25M EC contribution– Project cost €72M– Total Effort ~€330M– Effort: 9261PMs

Project Partners (47)

EGI.eu, 37 NGIs, 2 EIROs

Asia Pacific (8 partners)

Funded

Un-Funded

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Aims of the project

• Continue towards a sustainable production infrastructure– With infrastructure providers in Europe and around

the world – With new Distributed Computing Infrastructure

technologies as they mature

• Provide support to current structured international research communities– Sustain current domain specific services – Attract new user communities (e.g. ESFRI)

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EGI means innovation• Deploy Technology Innovation

– Distributed Computing continues to evolve• To include: Grids, Desktops, Virtualisation,

Clouds, …• Enable Software Innovation

– Provide reliable persistent technology platform• Tools built on gLite/UNICORE/ARC/Globus

• Support Research Innovation– Infrastructure for data driven research

• Support for international research (e.g. ESFRI)

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Supporting users• Support User Communities

– Researchers in International Collaborations– National Research Collaborations through the NGI– Scale up from the single Virtual Organisation to a

community• Provide a federated Helpdesk linking:

– Discipline specific support (e.g. Bio Apps)– National Grid Infrastructures– Generic services (e.g. Training)

• Provide core services to support users– Manage VOs, Application Database, Training

Database

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And more…• Dissemination

– With NGIs, VRCs and other projects

• Support for Heavy User Communities– General and community specific

services

• Events– Two Annual meetings:

User and Technology Forums

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Dissemination in EGI• Global task

– 96 PM in the Global task for EGI.eu• NGI International task

– 37 partners– 31 funded European partners– 6 unfunded non-European partners

(Taiwan, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines

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Target audiences• Primary audiences:

– New user communities (social sciences, environmental sciences, materials sciences etc.)

– Existing user communities (life sciences, physics, earth sciences etc.)– Journalists– General public– National Grid Infrastructures (NGIs) and European International

Research Organisations (EIROs)– Resource providers– Collaborating projects– Decision makers– Governmental representatives

• Secondary audiences– Secondary schools, educational institutions– Local communities in the partner countries

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Reaching new users

Self-sustainableuser

communities

EGI dissemination

EGI infrastructure

services

EGI User

Support

Users

End users

Grid application developers

System administrators

Representatives of scientific

communities

Success stories

Lessons learnt

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Top level messages• What the project is about;• Which resources, infrastructure and services the project can provide;• Which applications/scientific fields are already using the EGI;• Benefits for potential users;• Comparison of grids, cloud computing and other distributed computing

infrastructures;• The project’s potential to revolutionise the way scientists work;• How to get involved;• Major developments such as:

– New applications;– Key milestones;– Key events;

• Who is involved in the project;• The future beyond EGI-InSPIRE for a sustainable infrastructure.

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Publications

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Website and wiki

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Events

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ISC, Hamburg, June 2010

eChallenges, Warsaw, October 2010OGF30/GRID2010, Brussels, November 2010

Social media

http://twitter.com/egi_inspire

http://www.youtube.com/europeangrid

http://www.flickr.com/photos/european_grid_initiative

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.linkedin.com

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Collaboration

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• Working with e-ScienceTalk to communicate the success stories of e-Infrastructures to policy makers, general public, scientists and students

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The future…

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