Speaker
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
Since the establishment of the GridAUTH technical support team we
have come across a number of scenarios
regarding the gridification of several applications. We have
collaborated with a number of research teams coming
from various scientific disciplines, such as the atmospheric
physics, earth sciences, gravitational physics, and
computational chemistry groups. These teams participate actively
in the Earth Science Research VO, the Gaussian
VO and the South Eastern Europe VO.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
Through our experiences with the aforementioned research groups
we have come to understand a great deal
regarding the researchers' needs both in terms of
{hard/middle/soft}ware components and in terms of Grid
services. Unfortunately, the Grid has not yet reached the state
of functionality it deserves.
Thus, there are still many issues to be overcome regarding the
existence of commercial software and regarding the
availability of services towards the users.
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
The distributed and ubiquitous computing model, that the Grid has
to offer, matches the modern needs of complex
research project activities. Thus the available computational and
storage resources make the Grid an exceptional
environment for large scale computing. In addition, the global
character of the Grid makes it easy for distant
scientific groups to collaborate by sharing data and resources at
the same time.
One such collaboration our team is a part of is the CECILIA
project, a multinational collaboration which primarily
aims to model climate changes in the Central and Eastern European
region. Our involvement in this project is,
together with the atmospheric physics group, to design and
implement a functional workflow on the existing EGEE
infrastructure using the available computing tools and APIs.
Other collaborations, with the earth sciences and computational
chemistry groups, have been established and the
results of our workflow implementations are already on the way.
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
Until now our line of work and approach towards the gridification
of a given algorithm has been following the "top-
down" paradigm. The first steps are to understand the
researchers' needs in computer hardware and software
components and then implement a simple test case into a basic
workflow. Our aim is to build upon that simple test
case and produce a practical and functional workflow covering
both the set-out criteria and the needs of the project
at the same time.
In the meantime we try to encourage the groups to participate in
the local Grid community though our web based
forum and the weekly user group meetings we organize. We have
found that open discussion of technical issues
can be beneficial to all the research groups and can lead to the
extraction of interesting workflow patterns that could
be applied successfully in multiple use cases.
