Egi-inspire quarterly report 10 eu milestone: ms121

EGI-InSPIRE

QUARTERLY REPORT 10

EU MILESTONE: MS121

Document identifier:
Date:	05/12/2012
Activity:	NA1
Lead Partner:	EGI.eu
Document Status:	FINAL
Dissemination Level:	PUBLIC
Document Link:	https://documents.egi.eu/document/513

Abstract

This report details the activities of the EGI-InSPIRE project during the 10^th project quarter from 1^st August 2012 to 30^th October 2012.

Copyright notice

Copyright © Members of the EGI-InSPIRE Collaboration, 2010-2014. See www.egi.eu for details of the EGI-InSPIRE project and the collaboration. EGI-InSPIRE (“European Grid Initiative: Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe”) is a project co-funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative within the 7th Framework Programme. EGI-InSPIRE began in May 2010 and will run for 4 years. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, and USA. The work must be attributed by attaching the following reference to the copied elements: “Copyright © Members of the EGI-InSPIRE Collaboration, 2010-2014. See www.egi.eu for details of the EGI-InSPIRE project and the collaboration”. Using this document in a way and/or for purposes not foreseen in the license requires the prior written permission of the copyright holders. The information contained in this document represents the views of the copyright holders as of the date such views are published.

Delivery Slip

	Name	Partner/Activity	Date
From	Steven Newhouse	EGI.eu/NA1	20/11/12
Reviewed by	Moderator: Reviewers:	AMB	28/11/12
Approved by	AMB & PMB		07/12/12

Document Log

Issue	Date	Comment	Author/Partner
1	19/11/12	First draft	Joan Maycock/EGI.eu
2	1/12/12	Second draft	Steven Newhouse
3

Application area

This document is a formal deliverable for the European Commission, applicable to all members of the EGI-InSPIRE project, beneficiaries and Joint Research Unit members, as well as its collaborating projects.

Document amendment procedure

Amendments, comments and suggestions should be sent to the authors. The procedures documented in the EGI-InSPIRE “Document Management Procedure” will be followed:

https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Procedures

Terminology

A complete project glossary is provided at the following page: http://www.egi.eu/about/glossary/.

PROJECT SUMMARY

To support science and innovation, a lasting operational model for e-Science is needed − both for coordinating the infrastructure and for delivering integrated services that cross national borders. The EGI-InSPIRE project will support the transition from a project-based system to a sustainable pan-European e-Infrastructure, by supporting ‘grids’ of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC) resources. EGI-InSPIRE will also be ideally placed to integrate new Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, to benefit user communities within the European Research Area.

EGI-InSPIRE will collect user requirements and provide support for the current and potential new user communities, for example within the ESFRI projects. Additional support will also be given to the current heavy users of the infrastructure, such as high energy physics, computational chemistry and life sciences, as they move their critical services and tools from a centralised support model to one driven by their own individual communities.

The objectives of the project are:

1. 
   The continued operation and expansion of today’s production infrastructure by transitioning to a governance model and operational infrastructure that can be increasingly sustained outside of specific project funding.
   
2. 
   The continued support of researchers within Europe and their international collaborators that are using the current production infrastructure.
   
3. 
   The support for current heavy users of the infrastructure in earth science, astronomy and astrophysics, fusion, computational chemistry and materials science technology, life sciences and high energy physics as they move to sustainable support models for their own communities.
   
4. 
   Interfaces that expand access to new user communities including new potential heavy users of the infrastructure from the ESFRI projects.
   
5. 
   Mechanisms to integrate existing infrastructure providers in Europe and around the world into the production infrastructure, so as to provide transparent access to all authorised users.
   
6. 
   Establish processes and procedures to allow the integration of new DCI technologies (e.g. clouds, volunteer desktop grids) and heterogeneous resources (e.g. HTC and HPC) into a seamless production infrastructure as they mature and demonstrate value to the EGI community.
   

The EGI community is a federation of independent national and community resource providers, whose resources support specific research communities and international collaborators both within Europe and worldwide. EGI.eu, coordinator of EGI-InSPIRE, brings together partner institutions established within the community to provide a set of essential human and technical services that enable secure integrated access to distributed resources on behalf of the community.

The production infrastructure supports Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) − structured international user communities − that are grouped into specific research domains. VRCs are formally represented within EGI at both a technical and strategic level.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The main focus of EGI’s community engagement in PQ10 was the EGI Technical Forum in Prague 17-21^st September 2012 which attracted over 400 people from around the world to an event with over 300 contributions from over 200 speakers. The event brought together work across EGI relating to community & coordination, the operational infrastructure and the establishment of virtual research environments. 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.

The EGI Council meeting discussed a report on a proposed Digital Research Infrastructure ERIC that could bring together different e-Infrastructures and the services needed by individual research infrastructures under coordinated governance. From these and other discussions policy proposals related to demonstrating excellent science on EGI resources by giving user communities access to a pool of resources following peer review, and an exercise to explore mechanisms that would allow users to pay for access to EGI resources were developed. Alongside these activities the first EGI Compendium was released providing an overview of EGI activities across Europe in 2011.

Following issues over the summer with security alerts around unsupported software, a decommissioning campaign of the unsupported gLite 3.1 and 3.2 software deployed across EGI started following the definition of a software retirement policy. A survey on NGI operations sustainability and performance of the EGI global operations services was conducted in September and the evolution of several operations tasks was discussed in a sustainability workshop at EGITF 2012. The impact on the EGI operations assets introduced by the end of EMI and IGE in April 2013 affecting software provisioning, support and technical coordination were assessed and EGI.eu operations have been collaborating with the TCB for the definition of a mitigation plan. Resource Centres are being encouraged to publish user Distinguished Names (DNs): this is needed in order to improve the accuracy of NGI usage reports, which rely on user DN information for summarization of accounting information per Certification Authority (CA). Updates to the operational infrastructure provided improved support for Globus, ARC, UNICORE and Desktop Grids and included support QCG/MAPPER.

EGI consolidated its collaboration with EUDAT and PRACE with a workshop at EGITF 2012 to foster the operations integration and attendance at the EUDAT Conference in Barcelona. With the end of the GISELA project the federated operations centre denominated IGALC (Iniciativa de Grid de America Latina – Caribe) started its decommissioning in August 2012. Production Resource Centres are being migrated to the second operations centre functioning in the region (the Latin America federated operations centre).

UMD releases continued with support for multiple OS platforms with the provisioning process having become a truly independent service. A total of seven UMD releases were published with three updates to UMD-1 and four to UMD-2. The updates to UMD-2 continued to add in components coming from the first EMI-2 release, interweaving with EMI-2 updates as these were published. EGI’s activities federating private institutional clouds have already started to prepare for the upcoming demo at the EGICF 2013 by integrating Accounting, Monitoring, and Information Discovery Capabilities related to a federated cloud into EGI’s operation infrastructure.

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 VT, and ELIXR VTs have both been in their startup phase during PQ10.
Table of contents

1.Operations 11

1.1.Summary 11

1.2.Main achievements 15

1.2.1.Security 15

1.2.2.Service Deployment and Integration 17

1.2.3.EGI Helpdesk & Support Activities 18

1.2.4.Infrastructure Services 29

1.2.5.Tool Maintenance and Development 33

1.3.Issues and Mitigation 41

1.4.Plans for the next period 41

2.Domain Specific Support and Shared Services & Tools 44

1.5.Summary 44

1.6.Main achievements 44

1.6.1.Dashboards 44

1.6.2.Tools 47

1.6.3.Services 48

1.6.4.Workflow & Schedulers 51

1.6.5.SOMA2 52

1.6.6.MPI 52

1.6.7.High Energy Physics 52

1.6.8.Life Sciences 57

1.6.9.Astronomy and Astrophysics 57

1.6.10.Earth Sciences 61

1.7.Issues and Mitigation 62

1.8.Plans for the next period 63

1.8.1.Hydra service 63

1.8.2.GReIC 63

1.8.3.LSGC dashboard 64

1.8.4.MPI 64

3.Software Provisioning 66

1.9. Summary 66

1.9.1.Support Infrastructure 68

1.10.Issues and Mitigation 75

1.10.1.Issue 18: EMI to stop producing release.xml for EMI version 2. 75

1.10.2.Issue 20: Scattered "known problems" documentation. 76

1.11. Plans for the next period 76

4.Community Engagement 79

1.12.Summary 79

1.13.Main Achievements 80

1.13.1.Marketing & Communication 80

1.13.2.Strategic Planning & Policy Support 82

1.13.3.Community Outreach 86

1.13.4.Technical Outreach to New Communities 89

1.13.5.Community Activity 97

1.14.Plan for the next period 107

5.Consortium Management 110

1.15.Summary 110

1.16.Main Achievements 110

1.16.1.Project Management 110

1.16.2.Milestones and Deliverables 111

1.16.3.Consumption of Effort 111

1.16.4.Overall Financial Status 125

1.17.Issues and mitigation 129

1.17.1.Issue 1 129

1.18.Plans for the next period 130

6.Project Metrics 131

1.19.Overall metrics 131

7.ANNEX A1: Dissemination and Use 134

1.20.Main Project and Activity Meetings 134

1.21.Conferences/Workshops Organised 134

1.