INFSO-SSA International Collaboration to Extend and Advance Grid Education OGF User Forum Boston, USA, 23 th – xx th February 2008 tInfrastructure Roberto Barbera, Marco Fargetta, Emidio Giorgio Giuseppe Andronico INFN Catania 23 February 2008

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Outline Introduction Training experiences – GILDA – P-GRADE – Others Summer School Multi-Middleware Coexistence Academics Gap Analysis and Recommendation Future Work

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Introduction Users have problems to follow and understand Grid evolution Grid efforts mainly focused on implementation – low interest in knowledge dissemination Dissemination should be seriously considered for the future of Grid – The success of a technology depends also on the ability to spread its knowledge among users Results of past training and dissemination activities should be evaluated to understand how to improve the quality of Grid education

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Training Experiences Several projects carried out training and dissemination activities as part of their goals Recently, some private companies started to provide professional training services customised to the needs of customers Some of these experiences have been analysed to understand common problem on Grid training

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA GILDA ( GILDA activities started in 2004 in the context of INFN Grid and EGEE Projects Its purpose was to create a testbed entirely dedicated to training and dissemination – Based on gLite middleware GILDA provides important facilities to users, such as Certification Authority Virtual Organization Membership Service Monitoring systems Support systems More than 200 training and dissemination events have been supported so far and many participant · years of training have been delivered – Support spreads from the simple release of certificates to the full use of the grid resources available in the testbed

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA GILDA: problems and solutions Loose identification procedures for hosts and personal user certificates – Beginners are discouraged from the strict identification required from a real Certification Authority – GILDA CA requires only to fill a web form. This practice has clearly increased the number of new certificates released (about 11,000 until now!). – Risks are mitigated by the small scope (time and resources) of these certificates (usually 2 weeks) Use of generic certificates and accounts – Participants to training events tend not to follow preliminary procedures (certificate request, VO subscriptions, etc.) – Using GILDA, trainers have just to specify the number of participants foreseen for the event they are organizing system accounts, including generic certificates are created on the User Interface machines a generic certificate is not bind to any specific identity

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA GILDA: problems and solutions Use of wiki page for on-/off-line training – Transparencies are not effective as training material. They offer a limited space for long text such as option commands or command outputs They are hard to be kept updated with new features. GILDA provides a wiki site that can be easily updated (). The wiki site fosters and enhances the collaboration among trainers Use of virtual machines for training – Virtual machines are very effective instruments for installation tutorials where lots of machines are installed from scratch. Use of real machines would be a pain because of reinstallation times. – Virtual machines are effectively used for dissemination, since they can be customized and made available to users willing to play with them

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA GILDA Interface: GENIUS GENIUS is a web portal aiming to provide users with an environment where they can easily learn Grid Many beginners are discouraged from the complex interface of grid middlewares – Mostly because of Unix command line, hostile to users with no computer science background GENIUS offers a graphical, simple and intuitive interface accessible from a common web browser – This is very effective in introducing Grid concepts users do not have to check commands syntax and can abstract easily their meaning Sites having outgoing firewall overcome it because all traffic is through the https port

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA P-GRADE The P-GRADE Portal is developed by MTA- SZTAKI (Hungary) and has been made available in GILDA since December 2006 Serves as a demonstration, dissemination and learning environment for everybody who is interested in the usage and capabilities of GILDA, the EGEE grid middleware and the P- GRADE Portal itself It provides graphical environment – Allows certificate management, job submission, file transfer, information system browsing, application monitoring on GILDA and high level tools extending gLite capabilities such as workflow manager and others As a result the learning time required for grids can be significantly shortened by the tool

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA P-GRADE based courses Attendees of P-GRADE courses are provided with pre-defined exercises that introduce the general concept of parallel Grid application Based on the examples students can understand and distinguish the generic Grid concepts from implementation details P-GRADE and gLite developers can collect feedback from potential Grid users Having a permanent training environment is very beneficial for users that can continue their P-GRADE studies after the course – However, as the generic certificates expire these people must obtain new, personal, GILDA certificates and register to the GILDA VO again

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Others: OMII-UK and Synopsis OMII-UK works with Grid tools and provides documentation and training on them – OMII-UK trainers experienced that: Students should be able to select not just suitable middleware for his or her task, but portals, services, etc. Accessing and using a t-Infrastructure must be very simple A t-Infrastructure should support multiple technologies t-infrastructure protects real infrastructures from students Synopsis runs commercial training courses on its t-Infrastructure – Synopsis team experienced that: It is vital that the student experience is satisfactory Resources they provide must only be used for training Commercial training there may be some specific requirements relating to student monitoring

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Summer Schools Summer schools have been essential to promote the Grid technology around the world The Grid infrastructure, where students do their assignments, has an important role in the learning process – A frustrating experience at the school can produce a very negative impact on Grid adoption Implementation of a valuable infrastructure requires an analysis of location, number of students and nature of the school – The evaluations can be complex and require a relevant part of the time spent to organise the school A standard model for the training infrastructure can improve the quality of the school

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Multi-Middleware Coexistence Many Grid courses are not related to a single middleware but show how a Grid work in general, independently of the middleware deployed on it Create an t-Infrastructure for each middleware requires a huge number of resources The ICEAGE project has started an activity which aims to create a Multi Middleware (e/t)-Infrastructure – A single hardware infrastructure where different middlewares coexist side by side (middleware coexistence) The goal of this approach is the harmonisation of interactions among the middlewares Users can use the same resources with different middleware (the one they already know! No more waste of time learning new middlewares)

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Multi-Middleware Coexistence Users have to access the infrastructure only with a single, personal, certificate – Middlewares have to share the users database and share the access policies – In ICEAGE several solutions have been found to export the VOMS information to other middlewares Resource usage information has to be coherent among the middlewares – this is easy if there is a single local scheduler An infrastructure based on Multi-middleware coexistence has been deployed in the context of the ICEAGE project and it is the infrastructure that is being bused for IWSGC08

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Academics Grid computing has been introduced in the curricula of many universities courses Recently it has become the topic of dedicated courses and not just a part in other subjects Courses are influenced by the specific middleware/implementation they have to use The standardisation of a training infrastructure is crucial to make the courses more independent – especially for courses outside computer science area where Grid has to be just a tool the students have to learn – the GILDA t-Infrastructure is a good example

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Gap Analysis and Recommendation The proliferation of Grid computing outside its original scope is quite limited It is important for Grid itself to promote new and more efficient training activities – These should also involve the universities which are the most important places for the creation of knowledge Grid Organisations should set up policies and standards for training and induction – The discussion on policies and standards has to be carried on by official bodies (i.e., ETTF and OGF) Students need to exercise continuously – Public authorities should be encouraged to consider the training as a vital part of a Grid project and finance the creation of a permanent multi-middleware training infrastructure

OGF User Forum, Boston, tInfrastructure, Giuseppe Andronico, 23/02/2008 INFSO-SSA Future Work Looking at experiences of various parties in providing training infrastructures an effort has been done to identify common problems faced and best practices for solutions So far, only some tentative recommendations have been done based on the best practices identified Further work is required to determine the policy implications of these best practices and to formulate these for dissemination to the relevant decision-makers