1. © 2006 STEP Consortium ICT Infrastructure Strand

2. © 2006 STEP Consortium Presentation Marco Petrone Cineca

3. © 2006 STEP Consortium EU Infrastructures Géant network e-Infrastructure has 3 projects: –EGEE: interconnecting small/medium computing facilities –DEISA: network between existing supercomputer sites –OMII-EU extension of OMII-UK; develop middleware for Grid –some Periphery projects taking advantage of the infrastructure

4. © 2006 STEP Consortium Other Issues EuroVo: –integration of off-the-shelf software –procedure for software development to certification quality pyramid structure: –national/local facilities to communicate with European-level facilities to be developed –European facilities should have resources larger than those currently available at HPC sites

5. © 2006 STEP Consortium LHDL started Feb 2006 exemplar for community building/collaboration storage & computing services –professionally managed –looking for sustainable model

6. © 2006 STEP Consortium Questions/Remarks new environments unfriendly to users users should have greater support staff available at supercomputer centre specialised to particular fields recognise that user should feel comfortable –they want the “look” of their familiar software –difficult with specialised software need layer to support more general user EC is currently supporting recent projects to address this problem

7. © 2006 STEP Consortium Presentation Chris Johnson University of Utah

8. © 2006 STEP Consortium Integrated Software Environment data capture imaging modelling simulation interpretation intervention variety of visualisation techniques

9. © 2006 STEP Consortium Questions/Remarks how to ensure that the representation is accurate? little done so far in relation to uncertainty in visualisation – needs work users continue to use outdated algorithms –possibly because later algorithms are more complex making different software modules work together remains a challenge –need common component architecture too much code is produced to low software engineering standards

10. © 2006 STEP Consortium ICT Infrastructure Gordon Clapworthy STEP Consortium

11. © 2006 STEP Consortium The Roadmap Common Objectives Research Challenges Resources Required Ethical, Legal and Gender Issues Impact Analysis Dissemination Models Exploitation Models & Long-term Sustainability Concrete Implementation: recommendations

12. © 2006 STEP Consortium Common Objectives support community building provide user-specific access tools develop production-strength semantic representations of the VPH and of the infrastructure (Semantic Grid) develop robust backend services for: –user authentication –access to VPH resources (data services, simulation services) –publication of VPH Resources –federation of repositories

13. © 2006 STEP Consortium Living Human Digital Library

14. © 2006 STEP Consortium Research Challenges VPH portal (Biomed Town?) frameworks and toolkits for fat clients development semantic resource brokers tools for collaborative maintenance of ontologies software architecture for semantic representation of storage resources software architecture for sharing and reuse of simulation resources toolkits for wrapping of storage and simulation resources into web services

15. © 2006 STEP Consortium Research Challenges /2 VPH Node backend middleware distribution VPH Security model (Challenge) interoperability toolkits (mediators) concrete implementation –direct EC funding for continuous operation of the common infrastructure