Abstract:

e-Infrastructure in Europe has reached a mature state where the GÉANT network forms a communications backbone on top of which a distributed computing infrastructure – the Grid – provides processing and storage services for e-Science research. The South-East European e-Infrastructure initiatives are committed to ensuring equal participation of the less-resourced countries of the region in European trends. SEEREN initiative has established a regional network and its GÉANT connection and the SEE-GRID initiative the regional Grid. SEE-GRID-SCI will leverage the SEE e-Infrastructure to enable new scientific collaborations among user communities.

SEE-GRID-SCI will stimulate widespread e-Infrastructure uptake by new user groups extending over the region, fostering collaboration and providing advanced capabilities to more researchers, with an emphasis on strategic groups in seismology, meteorology and environmental protection.

The initiative thus aims to have a catalytic and structuring effect on target user communities that currently do not directly benefit from the available e-Infrastructures. In parallel, it will enlarge the regional e-Infrastructure to cater for demands of the communities by increasing the computing and storage resources and involving new partner countries in the region. Finally, SEE-GRID-SCI will help mature and stabilise the National Grid Initiatives in the region, allowing them to join the new era of longer-term sustainable Grid infrastructure in Europe. In this context, SEE-GRID-SCI will aim to attract local political support for materializing the e-Infrastructure vision. 

In longer term, SEE-GRID-SCI aspires to contribute to the stabilisation and development of South-East Europe, by easing the digital divide and stimulating e-Infrastructure development and adoption by new user communities, thus enabling collaborative high-quality research across target scientific fields.

Abstract:

Grid infrastructures are one of the key enablers for scientific research and for development of Information Society. In order to ensure that the South Caucasus region would not stay behind in this important area, an appropriate regional Grid infrastructure has to be deployed on basis of Armcluster, which would be accessible, at the same quality level, for all scientists and researchers independently of the physical locations of their institutes. In the long run, the ultimate goal is that any information-technology-related resource or service can be accessible for the South Caucasus region researchers via the Internet, in the same way as the World Wide Web is available for everybody today.

The Project will involve a number of strategic multi-disciplinary regional scientific communities / virtual organizations in various fields of physics (high energy physics, astrophysics, quantum physics) and thus further stimulate the use and expansion of the existing infrastructure and its services, and capitalize on the existing infrastructure human network to further strengthen scientific collaboration and cooperation among participating communities. The project will provide the next-generation Grid infrastructure for the South Caucasus region. The primary objective in this context is to expand the current infrastructure, in order to serve the existing and new user communities. The final objective of the project is to further strengthen and widen the regional and national-level human network. The objective is to reach out to as wide as possible range of user communities in Armenia and Georgia, via strong dissemination and training campaign.

The importance of such an infrastructure is dictated by the following factors: (a) large number of the international scientific programs related to EGEE Grid, require powerful computer means; and (b) researches and technological developments exist in the region for which fast data processing and visualization represent an integral part of investigations. Particularly it is planned to realize the following tasks within this project:

Abstract:

Scientific research is no longer conducted within national boundaries and is becoming increasing dependent on the large-scale analysis of data, generated from instruments or computer simulations housed in trans-national facilities, by using e Infrastructure (distributed computing and storage resources linked by high-performance networks).

The 48 month EGI-InSPIRE project will continue the transition to a sustainable pan-European e-Infrastructure started in EGEE-III. It will sustain support for Grids of high-performance and high-throughput computing resources, while seeking to integrate new Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs), i.e. Clouds, SuperComputing, Desktop Grids, etc., as they are required by the European user community. It will establish a central coordinating organisation, EGI.eu, and support the staff throughout Europe necessary to integrate and interoperate individual national Grid infrastructures. EGI.eu will provide a coordinating hub for European DCIs, working to bring existing technologies into a single integrated persistent production infrastructure for researchers within the European Research Area.

EGI-InSPIRE will collect requirements and provide user-support for the current and new (e.g. ESFRI) users. Support will also be given for the current heavy users as they move their critical services and tools from a central support model to ones driven by their own individual communities. The project will define, verify and integrate within the Unified Middleware Distribution, the middleware from external providers needed to access the e-Infrastructure. The operational tools will be extended by the project to support a national operational deployment model, include new DCI technologies in the production infrastructure and the associated accounting information to help define EGI’s future revenue model.