1. Virtual Research Communities in CHAIN
CHAIN Interoperability Workshop (EGI TF 2012)
Prague, 19 Sep 2012

2. Outline The VRC WP inside CHAIN Actions (identifying VRCs)
List of VRCs
Updated version of the road-map of services
Conclusions

3. WP in CHAIN CHAIN is an EC (260011) funded project Structured in
~ 1.9 M€
Starting on December 1st, 2010 with a 2-years duration
Structured in
WP 1 Project Management
WP 2 Consolidation of existing state of the art
WP 3 Present and emerging needs of trans-continental scientific communities
WP 4 Modelling the cooperation of European e-Infrastructures with non-European ones
WP 5 Dissemination and Outreach

4. WP in CHAIN CHAIN is an EC (260011) funded project Structured in
~ 1.9 M€
Starting on December 1st, 2010 with a 2-years duration
Structured in
WP 1 Project Management
WP 2 Consolidation of existing state of the art
WP 3 Present and emerging needs of trans-continental scientific communities
WP 4 Modelling the cooperation of European e-Infrastructures with non-European ones
WP 5 Dissemination and Outreach

5. WP3 in numbers 78 PM out of 281.50 (~28%) Partners INFN CIEMAT CESNET
UBUNTUNET
CLARA
IHEP
PSA
ASREN
Third parties

6. WP3 in numbers 78 PM out of 281.50 (~28%) Partners INFN CIEMAT CESNET
UBUNTUNET
CLARA
IHEP
PSA
ASREN
Third parties
Europe

7. WP3 in numbers INFN CIEMAT CESNET UBUNTUNET CLARA Europe IHEP PSA
ASREN
Third parties
Europe
Africa

8. WP3 in numbers INFN CIEMAT CESNET UBUNTUNET CLARA IHEP PSA ASREN
Third parties
Africa
Latin America

9. WP3 in numbers INFN CIEMAT CESNET UBUNTUNET CLARA IHEP PSA ASREN
Third parties
Latin America
Asia

10. WP3 in numbers INFN CIEMAT CESNET UBUNTUNET CLARA IHEP PSA ASREN
Third parties
Asia
Middle East

11. WP3 in numbers INFN CIEMAT CESNET UBUNTUNET CLARA IHEP PSA ASREN
Third parties
Middle East

12. WP3 in DoW WP3 is a SUPPORT Activity
WP3 “Present and emerging needs of
trans-continental scientific communities”
Task 3.1 Scientific communities across the continents
(INFN)
Task 3.2 Proposed road-map of services for communities to be deployed on the e-Infrastructures
(CIEMAT)

13. Objectives & Aim
To provide (limited) support to the existing and well experienced VRC (LHC, Biomed…)
To provide support for communities interested to widen their activities collaborating with other continents
To discover and attract new scientific communities or merging similar ones operating worldwide.

14. Objectives & Aim
Performing a large spectrum investigation on the existing and potential trans-continental communities (T3.1)
Looking for requirements, commonalities, challenges and possible synergies to be gathered and analysed
Then, the results are used for feeding T3.2…

15. WP3 milestones First step: Call for interest for reference communities
It briefly described WP3 aims and objectives
It showed a couple of identified VRC candidates
Based on EGI monitoring systems (CESGA), it provided some info about VO usage for Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America (Feb 2011)

16. WP3 milestones Second step: Shortlist of reference communities ready
It reported on identified VRC candidates
Initiative coordinators agreed on it
All of them with (potential) impact in CHAIN regions

17. WP3 milestones
Third step: Agreements with reference communities signed
WeNMR 21/09/2011
WRF4G 19/09/2011
jModelTest 21/02/2012
LSGC 27/03/2012
INDICATE 28/03/2012
DECIDE 13/04/2012
SuperB (on the way)
Earth Science (ICTP) (on the way)

18. Actions: Definition VRC1 range VRC1 cover
from a group of researchers working together, sharing means to carry out common investigations, such as distributed resources: instruments, computing, storage and software tools
up to large international well-structured collaborations
VRC1 cover
Small user communities (several groups)
With or without Grid knowledge
Large collaborations
Looking for more computing resources and/or advanced services
1 GISELA D3.1

19. Identified VRC
Identified VRC

20. Identified VRC We-NMR (http://www.wenmr.eu)
Coordinator: Dr. Alexandre M.J.J. Bonvin – Universiteit Utrecht
Structural biology, making use of NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), SAXS (Small Angle X-ray Scattering), computational modelling or other related techniques to study biomolecules

21. Identified VRC
We-NMR partners in red, collaborations in orange

22. Identified VRC We-NMR MoU signed on 21/09/2011
New contacts (WP2 survey)
Burundi
Costa Rica
India
They plan to study the Science Gateway paradigm feasibility
See Dr. Ruggieri and Dr. Barbera presentations about SG during this workshop for a deeper explanation about this framework promoted by CHAIN

23. Identified VRC WRF4G (http://www.meteo.unican.es/es/software/wrf4g)
Coordinator: Dr. Antonio Cofiño – Universidad de Cantabria
Meteorology and other Earth Science related areas willing to enhance their forecasting techniques on Idealized Simulations, Regional and Global Applications, Parameterization and Data Assimilation or Forecast and Hurricane Research
Dissemination within CORDEX project

24. Identified VRC
WRF4G partners in red, collaborations in orange

25. Identified VRC WRF4G MoU signed on 19/09/2011
New contacts (WP2 survey)
Burundi
China
Costa Rica
Cuba
India
SG pending on the development of a SAGA – GridWay actor

26. Identified VRC jModelTest & ProtTest (http://darwin.uvigo.es/)
Coordinator: Dr. David Posada – Universidad de Vigo
Evolutionary biology for the statistical selection of best-fit models of nucleotide substitution and amino acid replacement for a given set of aligned sequences (molecular systematics, phylogenetics, phylogenomics, molecular evolution and/or bioinformatics)

27. Identified VRC jModelTest & ProtTest registered users

28. Identified VRC jModelTest & ProtTest MoU signed on 21/02/2012
New sequential and distributed computing versions available on SG
New contacts (WP2 survey)
Burundi
Costa Rica
Democratic Republic of Congo
Ethiopia
Nigeria
Panama
Sudan
Taiwan

29. Identified VRC LSGC MoU signed on 27/03/2012
One of the biggest Grid users, HEP excluded. According to EGI accounting portal, during last year, there were jobs running in these Regions:
Asia Pacific
Europe
Canada
Latin America (IGALC & ROC_LA)
Russia

30. Identified VRC INDICATE (http://www.indicate-project.org/)
Coordinator: Dr. Antonella Fresa – Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali
These initiatives are working on coordination of policy and best practice regarding the use of e-Infrastructures for digital cultural heritage

31. Identified VRC
INDICATE partners in red, collaborations in orange

32. Identified VRC INDICATE MoU signed on 28/03/2012
Essential since these two VRCs offer much different requirements than those usually demanded by more traditional R&D communities
New contacts to integrate a digital repository in China and Panama by means of the INDICATE e-Culture Science Gateway

33. Identified VRC DECIDE (http://www.eu-decide.eu)
Coordinator: Dr. Fulvio Galeazzi - GARR
Design, implement, and validate a GRID-based e-Infrastructure building upon neuGRID and relying on the Pan-European backbone GEANT and the NRENs. Over this e-Infrastructure, a service will be provided for the computer-aided extraction of diagnostic markers for Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia from medical images

34. Identified VRC
DECIDE partners in red

35. Identified VRC DECIDE MoU signed on 13/04/2012
Science Gateway paradigm adopted
New contacts in Nigeria

36. Identified VRC Climate Change
Conf. Role of e-Infrastructures in Climate Change
List of interested people and projects
4 projects identified & 20 contacts
WRF4G / CAM4G have been promoted inside the VRC
Seismology groups identified in LA, India and Italy (SPECFEM3D)
Conversations to form a VRC associated to the Earth Science group of ICTP
RegCM

37. Identified VRC
SuperB
SuperB will be a heavy flavour accelerator that will provide complementary information to LHC, looking at rare decays with a very high luminosity electron-positron asymmetric collider
Potential contacts world-wide by means of LHC collaborations
New contacts provided by CHAIN to be considered as associated
Groups belonging to 23 countries have been identified
MoU discussed within its Board; suggestions to be received

38. Identified VRC
Road-map of services

39. Road-map of services Second version of the road-map of services
Complete version in D3.4 (to be submitted in the next month)
Brief summary in the CHAIN Wiki page (to be published)
First version in D3.2 (
Study of the current status of DCIs in what VRCs concerns
73 Recommendations for existing and emerging e- Infrastructures for Virtual Research Communities
Technical (49)
Training, administration and use (14)
Collaborative scenario (10)

40. Road-map of services Special thanks to CHAIN meetings and workshops
EGI’s role for 2020
Contributions received from:
The identified VRCs
The National representatives (first and second release of the VRC part of the WP2 survey)

41. Road-map of services
Summary of the recommendations to DCIs for their own running (1/2)
To settle a consolidated domestic NGI
To progress from JRU model to a legal body
To draw instruction up about how to set-up and manage fully pledged ROCs
To analyse sustainability for the ROCs and to make a dissemination plan about its sustainability
To ensure a service quality by means of SLA and SOP

42. Road-map of services
Summary of the recommendations to DCIs for their own running (2/2)
The use of GGUS
The organisation of training activities
The implementation of standards
To coordinate the security related efforts
To form VRCs

43. Road-map of services
Summary of the requirements to DCIs (Technical, 1/3)
Adoption of standards
Interoperation and interoperability between Grid, HPC, Cloud…
Queues for a great variety of submission and scheduling of jobs
Readiness for interactive jobs
Smoothly run those multiple queues
Computing Elements and Working Nodes should provide
2GB RAM/core minimum
Working space larger than 10 GB
Availability for MPI clusters
Increasing request for GP-GPU clusters

44. Road-map of services
Summary of the requirements to DCIs (Technical, 2/3)
Storage should provide
At least 1 TB
Short Term storage to long term preservation
Backup capabilities
Bandwidth for the Data
Huge data transfers
New visualization tools
Useful metadata and search (semantic) engines
Migration, decommissioning, cleaning... for the management of files

45. Road-map of services
Summary of the requirements to DCIs (Technical, 3/3)
Plans for scalability issues
Accurate information about the sites should be published as well as their working rules
Counting on up-to-date middleware and certificates
OLA and SLA to be agreed where possible
Simple mechanisms to deal with troubleshooting and monitoring
Provision of intellectual property rights (when some data/information demand it) and secure mechanisms for the data transmission

46. Road-map of services
Summary of the requirements to DCIs (Training, administration and use)
VO sustainability and agile administration
There are still communities and/or groups of researchers who are not sufficiently ICT-skilled
Specific community training events are an asset
Implementation of user friendly front-ends for the submission of jobs (Science Gateways)
More accessible authentication and authorisation methods (Identity Providers)
Drawing-up of best practice Handbooks, Technical References and Wikis

47. Road-map of services
Summary of the requirements to DCIs (Collaborative scenario)
Promotion of collaborative environments (community building)
VRC-VRC, VRC-DCI, VRC&DCI-Funding Agencies
Agreement on future strategies
Dissemination and outreach activities
Public information about:
Regional and/or national database of applications
List of software and services
Open and periodic calls for promoting and (if possible) funding e-Science

48. Conclusions
CHAIN is much focused on the VRCs coordination and promotion
CHAIN has identified several communities
Trans-continental presence
Different scientific domains
Different level of maturity
CHAIN promotes SG paradigm
A new road-map of services has been produced

49. Thank you!
Rafael Mayo (CIEMAT)