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Schedule

European Grid Conference, February 14 -16 2005, Science Park Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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EGEE - Enabling Grids for e-Science in Europe - session 1: General introduction
time: 10:15 - 11:45
Chair:

Summary

Introduction

EGEE (http://www.eu-egee.org) is a project that aims to integrate current national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, in order to create a seamless Grid infrastructure for the support of scientific research. EGEE provides researchers in academia and industry with round-the-clock access to major computing resources, independent of geographic location. The infrastructure supports distributed research communities, which share common Grid computing needs and are prepared to integrate their own computing infrastructures and agree on common access policies. Mostly funded by EU funding agencies, this project has a world-wide mission and receives important contributions from the US, Russia and other non EU partners.

The EGEE Project involves more than 70 leading organisations from around 27 countries, federated in regional Grids, with an ultimate combined capacity of over 20,000 CPUs -the largest international Grid infrastructure ever assembled. The EU is funding €32 million towards the project, with a similar level of funding from the partners.

EGEE aims to have 3000 users active on the Grid infrastructure from at least five disciplines by the end of the second year of the project. Two pilot applications areas have been selected to guide the initial implementation and certify the performance and functionality of the evolving Grid infrastructure. One is the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG), which relies on a Grid infrastructure in order to store and analyse petabytes (1015 bytes) of real and simulated data from high-energy physics experiments at CERN. The other is Biomedical Grids, where several communities are facing equally daunting challenges, for example for data mining of genomic databases, and the indexing of medical databases in hospitals, which amount to several terabytes of data per hospital per year.

This workshop would describe the EGEE project, discuss its application areas in more detail, and include two demonstrations showing Grids in action: the GILDA Grid Dissemination Laboratory; and the LCG graphical monitor.

GILDA

GILDA (Grid Infn Laboratory for Dissemination Activities, https://gilda.ct.infn.it) is a virtual laboratory to demonstrate/disseminate the strong capabilities of grid computing.

GILDA consists of the following elements:

  • the GILDA Testbed: a series of sites and services (Resource Broker, Information Index, Replica Location Server, Monitoring tool, Computing Elements, and Storage Elements) spread all over Italy on which the last version of the INFN Grid middle-ware (fully compatible with LCG middle-ware) is installed;
  • the Grid Demonstrator: a customized version of the full GENIUS web portal, jointly developed by INFN and NICE, from where everybody can submit a pre-defined set of applications to the GILDA Testbed;
  • the GILDA Certification Authority: a fully functional Certification Authority which issues 14-days X.509 certificates to everybody wanting to experience grid computing on the GILDA Testbed;
  • the GILDA Virtual Organization: a Virtual Organization gathering all people wanting to experience grid computing on the GILDA Testbed;
  • the Grid Tutor: based on a full version of the GENIUS web portal, to be used only during grid tutorials;
  • the monitoring system: a versatile monitoring system completely based on GridICE, the grid monitoring tool developed by INFN;
  • the GILDA mailing list: gilda@infn.it, also archived on the web here.

The demonstration shows how to do grid computing using the GILDA dissemination grid testbed and the GENIUS grid portal developed by INFN and NICE srl in the context of both the Italian INFN Grid Project and the European EGEE Project.

During the demo, job submission, data management, and grid monitoring will be shown as well as how to join the GILDA testbed to test users' own applications.

GILDA is an activity of the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN, http://www.infn.it) carried on in the context of both the Italian INFN Grid (http://grid.infn.it) and European EGEE Projects.

The LCG graphical monitor

The LCH Computing Grid (LCG, http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/) is the largest functioning Grid in the world. Covering 87 sites worldwide, it has more than 8,000 CPUs and nearly 4,000 TB of storage. LCG is being built to analyse data from the next generation of particle physics experiments, which will run on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently under construction at CERN in Geneva. LCG will scale up to over 100,000 CPUs over the next three years, but it is already running as a functioning Grid, processing more than 4,000 jobs simultaneously

This demonstration lets people follow the current status of jobs being submitted to LCG in real time, as they move geographically around the Grid. Jobs are submitted to central Workload Management (WM) nodes. These then match the job's needs to the sites available and submit the job to the most suitable site. After the job has completed, the small output files from the job are transferred back to WM ready to be collected by the user. Moving blocks represent the jobs' location as they travel round the LCG, in Europe, the USA and Asia, while the block's colour gives the status of the job.

There are options to identify which particle physics experiment the jobs are from, and to look at the output of the different WM nodes. The demonstration can be seen at http://www.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/~mp801/applet/

The LCG graphical monitor was developed by members of GridPP (http://www.gridpp.ac.uk), the UK particle physics Grid, at Imperial College London.

10:15 - Session 1. General introduction (45 minutes) - Mike Mineter,

National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

  • the EGEE project
  • progress to date
  • user communities
  • middleware

11:00 - Session 2. High Energy physics - the Large Hadron Collider

Computing Grid (1 hr 30 mins) - Dave Colling, Imperial College, London

  • the LHC and the need for a Grid
  • applications for LCG - the four LHC experiments
  • current status of LCG
  • progress of a job through the LHC, and demonstration of the LHC

graphical monitor

14:15 - Session 3. GILDA - a Grid dissemination laboratory (2 hrs) -

Roberto Barbera, INFN, Universita' di Catania

  • The GILDA Project
  • Experience of porting new scientific applications on GILDA and EGEE
  • Live demo "GENIUS and GILDA: an easy way to test the potentiality

of grid computing"

16:45 - Session 4. Summary (1 hr) - John Dyer, TERENA, Amsterdam

  • the prospects for EGEE
  • getting involved
- questions and answers, round table discussion including all speakers

© Schedule