1. eInfrastructures: Usage Policy
Mike Garrett
Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe
(JIVE, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands)
eInfrastructure meeting, Dublin, April 2004.

2. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions

3. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions

4. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions
Custom built (single-purpose) Supercomputer:
Equivalent ~ 10-20,000 CPUs

5. (e)VLBI – an (e)Infrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions
A Telescope
> 2000 km Across
0.5 Degrees
VLBI provides a resolution equivalent to seeing features as small as 1 meter on the surface of the moon!

6. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions
Current recording data rates limited to 1 Gbps per telescope.

7. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions
Tapes have reasonable bandwidth (~ 512 Mbps) but high error rates and shipping delays.
Reduces quality and timeliness of astronomers data…
Reliability & performance of telescope network affected too.
Reduced flexibility of instrument…

8. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions

9. eVLBI Network Topology
Onsala Sweden
Gbit link
Chalmers University of Technology,
Gothenburg
Network
North-West
150Mbit link
Cambridge UK
Jodrell
Bank
MERLIN
Microwave link
DwingelooDWDM link
Westerbork Netherlands
Gbit link

10. Onsala/Cambridge/Westerbork
256Mb/s
Onsala/Cambridge/Westerbork
128Mb/s

11. 160 Mbytes/second
Terrabyte scale data sets from 12 hours of observations!
Embarassingly Parallel application…

12. General Policy Issues Some general thoughts:
eInfrastructures are not just distributed, networked computer clusters… (see also St.Arnaud)
eInfrastructures can be distributed (multi-disciplinary) sensor networks (e.g. LOFAR, Square Km Array:).

13. Other General Policy Issues
Access to some eInfrastructures will occur via the traditional process of peer-review.
Low-level of external use of some GRID projects is not healthy.
Researchers could be directly supported at these infrastructures by other researchers, experienced in this specific area (e.g. EGEE).
Access should be flexible, response immediate – otherwise this kind of distributed computing will always remain a “niche activity”.
Global policy required beyond EU borders (USA, Asia, China, South Africa)

14. Usage Policy
“ The main areas that the AUPs cover are… admissable use & possibly some exceptions or extreme cases (disasters) ” – eIRG White Paper, Sec. 6.6, p. 40.
eVLBI might (currently) be one of these “disaster” cases…
Currently could muster 16 Gbps flowing across GEANT into the NL for sustained periods of 1 month (3 times per year), plus unpredictable, random short observations (1 day) throughout the year.
The “last mile” problem currently limits us from this “disaster” scenario.

15. Usage Policy But… “Technology is far ahead of the applications…”
Good funding opportunities for pushing networking technology
Not enough being done to stimulate and support those applications that can take great advantage of pan-European high-speed networks/computing.
High bandwidth (research) applications (e.g. currently eVLBI) could make use of unreliable (best efforts) “research” (non-production) networks (e.g. as proposed in GN2).