1. Grid: from Science to Industry Opening New Market Opportunities
Fabrizio Pacini
Grid R&D Group
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

2. Outline Grid “for” the industry: the potential users
Early Adopters
Target Sectors
Grid “from” the industry: the solution providers
Building blocks manufacturers (HW, middleware, products)
Service Providers (integration, applications, connectivity)
DATAMAT experience
How to build Grid future
Conclusions
Users
Standards
Solutions
Building blocks
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

3. The dilemma of innovator and the ‘early adopters’
The new technology changing the way user works can be considered:
Disruptive
An expensive toy
Innovation must be focused on the user operational context with his actual user needs.
To overcome the chasm between early adopters and more pragmatists or conservatives users, solutions and convenience must be shown beyond the satisfaction of basic needs.
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

4. The “traditional” distributed supercomputing applications
High Performance Technical Computing for:
Automotive
Fluid-dynamics (e.g. Fluent)
Structural analysis (e.g. MSC-Nastran™)
Crash test
Chemical / Pharmaceutical
Bio-molecular simulation integrating existing biological and chemical codes
Design of advanced materials (nano-, catalysts, …
Aerospace
Coupled simulations
EMC
CFD / Structural analysis
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

5. Grid enabling e-collaboration: some examples Collaborative / concurrent engineering
Aeronautics
Distributed design and testing (e.g. AIRBUS with production plants spread all over Europe)
Subcomponents / subcontractors management
Air Transport
Service level management / validation
Space
Distributed Concurrent Design Facility, extension of concurrent engineering approach to following development phases
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

6. The new sectors being explored (1)
Finance
Risk management / portfolio evaluation
Health care
Surgical simulation
Large data bases Screening
Crisis management
Scientific-technical-operational collaboration
Meteo
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

7. The new sectors being explored (2)
Services for SME
Use of shared resources in technological districts (e.g. PEP)
Media, entertainment
Rendering, 3d animation
Telecommunications
Network routing optim.
3G, B3G,…
and more…
e-government, e-learning
Meteo for Tourism , Sport, …
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

8. The solution providers
Hardware, Middleware, Software manufacturers
IBM, HP, NEC, Fujitsu, Intel, Sun, SGI …
UNIVA, Unicore, Platform, …
Nice, Gridxpert, Gridsystems, …
Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, …
IT Service providers (integration, applications,…)
SAS, DATAMAT, Atos Origin, …
Telecom Service providers
BT, Telecom Italia, Telefonica,…
The “Alliances” (more or less sponsored…)
Globus Alliance, EGA, …
The standardisation bodies with industrial participation
GGF, W3C, OASIS, IETF, DMTF, …
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

9. DATAMAT profile
A top player in Italian ICT market with 30+ years experience:
~1,500 young and highly qualified employees
Supply ICT solutions for end users in specific segments of our vertical reference markets:
Bank, Insurance and Finance;
Public Administration and Healthcare;
Telecommunications and Utilities;
Defence, Space & Environment;
through the delivery of: products, systems and integrated services based on specific functional and/or context requirements
Leveraging on:
Strong application expertise (knowledge of client primary processes)
Strong technical and technological competencies (“state-of-the-art”)
Management and organizational capabilities in managing complex and high economic value contractual responsibilities
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

10. SpaceGRID Why DATAMAT in Grid?
Our traditional focus is on innovation, with a long record of international R&D projects followed by successful commercial exploitation.
We perceived Grid as one of the most promising novelties for the ICT market, enabling (data- or computing- intensive) distributed applications, but also emerging context such as e-collaboration.
To acquire a specific knowledge of the technology, to understand its potential business return in terms of application and services deployment, also by applying technology transfer across our reference markets, we decided in 2000 to participate in the first large Grid Project in Europe …
SpaceGRID
… and in the following years to other European outstanding initiatives:
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

11. DATAMAT role in EGEE (1) gLite Services
DATAMAT main task: to provide the interfaces to WMS
User Interface (CLI and GUI)
API’s
WMProxy, the WS interface of WMS
Workload
Management
System
This is the stack of gLite services as defined in the architectural document
CLI Command Line Interface
GUI Graphical User Interface
API Application Programs Interface
gLite Services
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

12. DATAMAT role in EGEE (2) R&D activities already started in EGEE-I
Participation to detailed design of gLite WMS software
Design and implementation of the Web Services based interfaces to WMS (a.k.a. WMProxy)
Design and development of client tools through the legacy interfaces of WMS and LB and through the WMProxy (CLI, GUI, API)
Design and Specification of the Job Description Language (JDL) and development of its manipulation library
… now continuing with focus on consolidation and adherence to standards
IT Cluster Documentation Management
IT representative in the EMT
DATAMAT has a member in the Industry Task Force Steering Committee
The EGEE-II Industrial Task Force (ITF) brings together the industrial partners of EGEE-II and related projects with industry/business focus assisting them in becoming EGEE-II industry/business success stories (see
WMS Workload Management System
LB Logging & Bookkeeping
PTF Project Technical Forum
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

13. Which kind of collaboration with research institutions?
The collaboration with research institutions, in particular from the computer scientists within the High Energy Physics community (INFN is the foremost example!), resulted extremely profitable.
The cross-fertilization resulting from mixing different backgrounds allowed our teams to improve in terms of:
Flexibility
Teamwork
Openness to innovative ideas
while being able to transfer our traditional development culture in terms of:
Structured approach
Consolidated methodologies for analysis and design
Tight project management (resource allocation, planning, …).
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

14. Positioning our investments
EGEE = “Operational grid”
M/W is available for deployment
We are already using it in ESA and encourage continuity policies
Infrastructure is good enough for industrial test-bedding and demonstration in “closed and well-known environment)
Experiments could set-up a virtuous cycle to overcome present limitations (on security, licensing, legacy, maturity, applications gridification, accepted standards)
NEXTGRID + AKOGRIMO + BREIN + … = “Next grid”
Results will be more “architectures” than “engineered components”
Focus on new requirements coming from e-business models:
SLA, QoS, Dynamic and transient VO’s, Semantic workflows, …
Investigate interaction between Grid and Mobility
large base of users, mobile Internet infrastructures based on IPv6, knowledge-related and semantics-driven services, …
Involvement of Telco Companies
Two parallel paths for our investments
Stable infrastructures (EGEE)
next generation grid architecture definition (with a particular focus on the transition of open services from e-science to e-business); convergence between grid and mobility; exploration of new working environments.
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

15. Our preliminary results
European Space Agency Reference Company for Grid
SpaceGRID
THE VOICE use of LCG/gLite
Grid support to ESRIN use of LCG/gLite
GDCD potential use of gLite
Italian Reference Company for Grid
Italian Rep’s of main IT Vendors (IBM, HP, SUN, Oracle, Quadrics)
also through Industry Forum relationship
partnership on future initiatives (under discussion)
Centre of excellence for Grid within the Finmeccanica group
Other prospects (healthcare, banks, telco)
Datamat is starting to make business with one of its traditional Customer, the European Space Agency,
continuing to support to Grid-enable prototype applications in the field of Earth Observation, where large data sets to be processed for environmental purposes are distributed in geographically distributed facilities,
in the field of concurrent spacecraft design.
Specifically on this matter, Datamat has just been awarded, in open competition, the Grid-based Distributed Concurrent Design (GDCD) contract, aimed at analysing and demonstrating the advantage of distributed concurrent design applied to space projects. For that purpose, a prototype based on Grid technologies and centred on the existing Concurrent Design Facility at ESTEC ( shall be defined, implemented and demonstrated for ESA projects. This environment shall enable the cooperation of ESA with external entities (including industrial prime contractors) on its first phase by providing the necessary tools and services to create Virtual Collaborative Facilities to carry out the projects.
In this respect, Datamat is in the process of negotiating a National research project (PRISMA*Grid) aimed at the application of innovative Grid architectures to the industry (large enterprises and SME’s) with a particular focus on grid applications enabling and on the transition of open services from the e-science to the e-business.
Other industries within Finmeccanica Group (ELSAG, Ansaldo) are participating to the project to understand the applicability of grid to traditional context such as fluid-dynamics or structural analysis as well as to innovative context such as open source intelligence.
PRISMA*Grid is strongly linked to the twin initiative OMEGA, led by INFN and involving all major Italian stakeholders in Grid research (CNR, ENEA, S-PACI, Datamat), more focused on basic research on grids in view of their industrial utilization.
Total investment = 1.2 Million Euro!
Total revenues (ESA) = 2.1 Million Euro!
Subcontractors = large EU Space Industries
PRISMA*Grid test cases
SELEX SI: Air Traffic Control – Complex Systems Interoperability
(Maintenance, QoS, Simulation, CHALLENGE = (Near) Real Time!!!…)
ELSAG: Security – Weak Signals Analysis (pattern recognition, threat analysis, …)
ANSALDO RICERCA: Railways - Numerical models for fluid-dynamics
and structural codes
IDS: Radar Systems – New electromagnetic models
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

16. “Grid-business” perspectives
Our target offer
Consultancy
‘Additional’ services such as Certification, training and promotional activities are the keys to introduce Grid based solutions into Customers’ day-to-day business.
Application enabling
Adaptation of existing Problem Solving Environments to enable the use of Grid is based on a combined deep knowledge of customer processes and of the underlying technologies.
Application development
The use of a new and powerful technology to solve new classes of problems requires capability of mastering business needs.
Integration
Our long experience in integration is the enabler for a smooth combination of the different technological aspects in a transparent way for the end-user.
Furthermore, it is important to underline the potential role Grid can play as “enabling technology” for Virtual Organisations and Collaborative Environments.
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

17. A convergence of middleware on Grid for business…
From an industrial viewpoint, it is mandatory that middleware technologically converges on solid business models and shared architectures to be exploited on Grid Infrastructures.
As Grid is about dynamic sharing and collaboration across multiple administrative domains, this means to enhance and standardise all technological aspects such as:
Security, e.g. Trustworthiness, Integrity, Confidentiality, Identity Identification, Privacy, Reliability, …
Service orientation, e.g. QoS, SLA, fault tolerance, …
Grid economics, e.g. Accounting, Payment, Compensation...
plus
Certification (as a result of an industrial level engineering process)
In few words, to support a next generation of Grid technology to move the focus from e-Science to e-Business.
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

18. … in a coordinated way
To ease sharing of developed solutions and technology take-up (in particular for SME’s), and start building value-added services, it makes sense that public and private research institutions commit themselves in setting up initiatives aimed at:
Promotion, integration, validation and packaging of platforms and solutions,
Repository of certified component / solutions
Education, Training, “after-sales” support
This would allow to complement on going initiatives, such as gLite development in EGEE, or next generation grid architecture definition in NextGRID, by long-lasting foundations, not just bounded to a single (or a series of) project(s).
It is reasonable to ensure it at the global level, taking into account, harmonising, and federating on-going efforts at continental and national level (e.g. US NMI, UK OMII, IT c-OMEGA,…).
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

19. Conclusions
Considering growing interest of industrial user community (GGF/EGA, EC FP6 IP’s, ETP “NESSI” FP7, …), initial expectations on Grid are going to be fulfilled.
Initial enthusiasm is now being replaced by consciousness of the actual potential and risks, in terms of business and ROI, adequately steering strategic technical choices (e.g. web services-grid convergence).
From an industrial viewpoint, to make profit out of technology, it is fundamental to achieve the needed stability and continuity, focusing new initiatives on bridging research and industry.
DATAMAT, while confirming its commitment in on-going and future innovation activities, believes that Grid community should push stakeholders to:
Put in action a long-living global Grid infrastructures deployment plan (migrating towards new models, e.g. DANTE)
Ensure the support to the technological convergence of middleware on Grid for business
Put in place promotion, education, certification, repository, technology transfer activities to widen Grid culture diffusion and favour uptake in new application contexts.
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania

20. MANY THANKS FOR YOUR KIND ATTENTION
…and thanks to EC and ESA institutional websites and EGEE, EUROGRID, SIMDAT, CROSSGRID, SPACEGRID, GRIA, HEALTHGRID… project websites, useful sources of images and information
MANY THANKS FOR YOUR KIND ATTENTION
06 December December 2018
EGEE Industry Day - Catania