Egi-inspire quarterly report 10 eu milestone: ms121

1.10.Issues and Mitigation

1.10.1.Issue 18: EMI to stop producing release.xml for EMI version 2.

Description: During the 9th TCB meeting EMI announced that they would cease providing release.xml artefacts for software provisioning, beginning with the publication of EMI-2 (planned in April 2012).

Actions: At the F2F in December 2011 SA2 decided to develop a small web based tool that will assist with generating a release.xml for all technology providers. This tool should be able to extract valuable information such as release notes from the Technology Providers information feed (e.g. RSS). Being deployed during PQ9, this tool now is a regular component of software provisioning activities.

Status: Resolved.

1.10.2.Issue 20: Scattered "known problems" documentation.

Issue: This kind of documentation which points at general issues and describes workarounds, is rather scattered among technology provider resources, issues identified and described during the staged rollout, and those found and described by DMSU.

Actions: Integration of this documentation at the release notes pages in EGI repository was proposed, details have to be discussed. No progress has been made in pursuing this issue since regular software provisioning activities took precedence.

Status: Open

1.11. Plans for the next period

4. 
   Quality Criteria
   

The Quality Criteria definition team will publish new revised public drafts following recommendations from the technology providers and including criteria for QosCosGrid products. A new roadmap for the following document releases will be produced during PQ11.  

5. 
   Criteria Verification
   

SA2.3 team is still working on EGI Fedcloud images provisioning task. The new SA2 testbed images are generated by qemu utilities like qcow2 and are ready to be started by KVM hypervisor. In PQ11 it will be release a new automated mechanism to publish the new verified images into EGI Fedcloud Marketplace.

6. 
   Support Infrastructure
   

TSA2.4 team continues to work on performing regular UMD releases while we continue the development of the WebStatistics tool to tackle the following issues:

• 
  Map repository web logs with UMD products (it is a many to many relation)
  
• 
  No geolocation information for IPv6 addresses
  
• 
  Use hadoop as calculation engine to improve the time needed to process the apache logs.
  

The software provisioning process will have to adapt also to be able to handle the multiple technology providers that will be offering the products we currently use when the European projects EMI and IGE end (April 2013).

7. 
   Federated Private Clouds
   

The overarching goal for the next 6 months is to prepare the testbed so that it can be made available for regular early-access usage to the general EGI community. Parts of that goal are the next steps in the next three months as follows.

First support for VOMS proxies in OpenNebula and OpenStack is planned for early December, ready for the next OGF Cloud Plugfest. EGI Cloud resources will be published as OCCI/CDMI resource types in GOCDB, making them available for generic EGI monitoring and Availability/Reliability calculations by the EGI monitoring infrastructure. The necessary probes will be pushed into one of the next SAM updates enabling site admins to enable Cloud resource monitoring through standard EGI production-level means. The transition to the production accounting portal using a dedicated cloud section is part of that activity list. As the future of BDII is unclear at the moment, an alternative solution employing the EMIR service coming from the EMI project will be investigated.

Higher-level services such as Brokering will be investigated as required, and possibly sourced in from participating user communities where possible. Feedback to standardisation bodies will be provided where applicable (e.g. Usage Records, GLUE2).

4. Community Engagement

1.12.Summary

The main focus of EGI’s community engagement in PQ10 was the EGI Technical Forum in Prague 17-21^st September 2012 attracted over 400 people from around the world to an event with over 300 contributions from over 200 speakers. The event was co-located with GlobusEurope and featured a meeting with the European Commission relating to the future development of DCIs in Europe. The EGI Champions scheme was launched in Prague with a call for applications. EGI Champions will be experts from within the research community that will help EGI with reaching out to new user communities and improving support within the production infrastructure for their needs.

In preparation for the EGI Council meeting in Prague in September, a report was prepared on how the ERIC legal model could impact EGI and its activities. Following input from various NGIs, a proposal for a Digital Research Infrastructure ERIC was prepared that could bring together different e-Infrastructures and the services needed by individual research infrastructures under coordinated governance. Following feedback at the Council meeting the report was revised and a plan proposed to the Council meeting in November 2012 for endorsement.

Following on from the September Council meeting two policies were developed for discussion and decision at the November meeting. These related to demonstrating excellent science on EGI resources by defining a pool of resources from across the NGIs that could be allocated to user communities following peer review, and an exercise to see how resources from within the EGI could be made available to users willing to pay for access. Alongside these activities the first EGI Compendium was released providing an overview of EGI activities across Europe in 2011.

The Virtual Team activity has continued with several entering the final phases of their activity by consolidating their achievements into their final reports. These include SPEECH on the Grid, Science Gateways in EGI, GPGPU on EGI and Inter NGI Usage. The Scientific Repository VT completed and its outputs were used within the policy documents presented to the EGI Council. The EGI Champions VT’s outputs were used and presented at the EGITF 2012. The Environment and Biodiversity, and ELIXR VTs have both been in their startup phase during PQ10.