Deliverable template

5.2training

As stated earlier in our description of the virtuous cycle, training is a key element in the integration of new communities. The following organisation was adopted:

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  To foster collaboration between NA3 and NA4, NA3 has allocated resources to follow specifically the biomedical and generic application sectors to be able to react promptly to emerging training needs in these sectors;
  
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  The same environment, the GILDA platform, is used for training and dissemination and for new users to take their first steps on a grid.
  

Regular training sessions are organized on GILDA under NA3 supervision. From April 1^st to October 31^st 2004, 17 tutorials were organized. A continuously updated list of the tutorials given using GILDA is available at https://gilda.ct.infn.it/tutorials.html.

5.3Joint NA4/SA1 group to address resources and services deployment

For new scientific disciplines, the transition from GILDA to the EGEE production infrastructure requires creating a new Virtual Organisation and deploying its services.

Each new Virtual Organisation requires the following services:

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  a VO administration service
  
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  a Resource Broker
  
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  a Replica Location Service
  
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  a list of sites providing resources
  

The VO is administered by a VO manager who is a member of the associated scientific community. He is in charge of

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  managing the list of VO users
  
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  monitoring the VO services and informing the VO users of their availability
  
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  monitoring the resources available to the VO users
  

The NA4/SA1 joint group is very close in scope to the EGEE Grid Operations Advisory Group (OAG) described in the EGEE Technical Annex [1]. Its mandate is as follows:

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  Define the creation of new VOs associated with new communities joining EGEE;
  
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  Assist in negotiations between the partners, together with the Operations Management Centre, to reach an agreement on the level of resources that will be made available to the new applications community;
  
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  Follow up that the full services of the infrastructure, including the operational and user support provided by Core Infrastructure Centres and Regional Operating Centres, will be available to the VO;
  
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  Negotiate the agreements between the Resources Centres that are necessary to operate the Grid, such as agreement on policy issues, access policies, acceptance of certificate authorities and so on;
  
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  Broker for existing applications. For example, there are a number of VOs currently supported within an EGEE region. The group would negotiate access to a wider set of resources on behalf of those applications;
  
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  Ensure that the new VO demonstrates a commitment to the project in order to justify the investment on behalf of EGEE to bring a new VO online;
  
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  Try to convince many sites to provide a slice of their resources for NA4 applications to make test usage in order to encourage applications to join EGEE.
  

The NA4/SA1 joint group is made up of representatives of the applications groups (VO managers) and representatives of the Resource Centres together with the managers of the ROCs and CICs.

As soon as a new community joins EGEE, its representative (VO manager) participates in the NA4/SA1 joint group. In addition NA4 and SA1 can nominate one or more of their managers to participate in meetings according to the agenda.

5.4collaboration AMONG applications

After presenting the relationship between NA4, NA3 and SA1 for issues related to training and operations, we will focus on NA4 internal organisation to address the needs of new user communities. Indeed, it is important to provide them with an environment where they can find technical support as well as information channels to receive and send information to other project activities such as middleware, operation, dissemination, management, etc. For most of the new users communities, the first step is the allocation of personnel to support development and production use of some applications on the EGEE infrastructure. Beyond this first step, it is important:

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  to monitor the integration process, to assimilate and evaluate records of the work
  
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  to develop and disseminate appropriate information proactively addressing the needs of new user communities, to optimize cross-application fertilization
  
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  to define common application interfaces and tools and provide information to the dissemination, middleware and management activities.
  

5.4.1NA4 monitoring of integration process

The integration process of new disciplines will be supervised partly by EGEE Generic Applications Advisory Panel. Indeed, EGAAP hears regular reports from the deployed applications on the EGEE infrastructure.

From a technical point of view, monitoring of the integration process will take advantage of the quality measurement metrics set up by NA4 for its evaluation. Among the metrics described in NA4 quality plan [3], the following list highlights the metrics which will evaluate the success of the integration process:

1. 
   Number of federations and partners involved
   
2. 
   Number of users and percentage of new users during the period
   
3. 
   Number of Virtual Organisations
   
4. 
   Number of external projects in the integration process
   
5. 
   Number of projects / applications in each discipline
   
6. 
   Number of projects filling questionnaires on NA4 web site
   
7. 
   Number of projects evaluated by EGEE Generic Applications Advisory Panel
   
8. 
   Number of European projects using EGEE services
   
9. 
   Percent of projects coming from industry
   

The following metrics will contribute to the follow-up of new user communities:

1. 
   Number of countries (or federations), global and per VO
   
2. 
   Number of users and percentage of new users during the period, global and per VO
   
3. 
   Number of nodes and resources per VO
   
4. 
   Number of processors (with type) and available storage per VO
   
5. 
   Number and sizing (duration, CPU, I/O, resources, etc. ) of jobs, global and per VO
   

Beside these metrics providing a quantitative estimate of the deployment scale for a given user community, community integration will be evaluated also by its contribution to NA4 tasks such as requirement collection and application layer definition and its participation to NA4 open meetings. As an example, about one third of the 70 participants to NA4 open meeting in Catania July 15-16 2004 (http://egee-na4.ct.infn.it/na4_open_meeting/) were coming from new user communities.

5.4.2Cross-application fertilization

Cross-application fertilization is a crucial issue to speed up integration of new communities. It is also a crucial issue for the pilot application areas and therefore all NA4 groups to involve representatives from each application area (High Energy Physics, Biomedical and Generic):

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  the Application Working Group (AWG), in charge of NA4 technical coordination, has 2 representatives from each application area. For all issues handled by AWG – edition of technical documents, definition of requirements, high level interface and virtual organisations, interaction with other project activities and external projects - , the specific needs and concerns of new application sectors are expressed through the generic application manager and his deputy.
  
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  As soon as a new community joins EGEE, its VO manager is invited to participate to the NA4/SA1 joint group set up to advise the EGEE management on VO deployment and practical issues of getting new resources into EGEE (see 5.2).
  

Finally, it is foreseen to set up a generic technical team on the model of the HEP and biomedical technical teams to foster exchanges between new application developers. This generic technical team would gather application developers from the new communities who would volunteer to act as user support.

5.4.3Information flow from new disciplines to the rest of the project

Pilot HEP and biomedical applications are expected to play a major role in feeding back their experience to the other project activities. Contributions from other application areas are also important to enrich this feedback.

Already at the requirements level, each new application area is invited to contribute to the requirements database on NA4 web site. This contribution can also include addition of use cases to the database.

New scientific communities are also represented in the Project Technical Forum. The Project Technical Forum (PTF) is in charge of

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  merging requirements and use cases from the application, security, and operations groups
  
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  managing the evolution of the requirements and use cases
  
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  prioritizing the requirements and verifying if (and how) the defined use cases are satisfied by the EGEE middleware architectural design
  
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  review the grid service specifications and control changes to those specifications and external interfaces
  
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  seek and promote common solutions where commonalities exist in the middleware or application domains
  
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  promote convergence with other grid projects by incorporating requirements from external projects using (or hoping to use) EGEE software and by discussing the EGEE design with other projects
  

Two representatives of generic applications participate to PTF where they can express their specific issues and concerns.