European Grid Initiative

Submitted by Monique on 13. May 2009 - 15:23

 Since 2000 the pan-European distributed grid infrastructure has been developed and operated through a series of short term projects such as DataGrid, EGEE and DEISA. It has demonstrated to be successful and to be able to satisfy the needs of thousands of users from a variety scientific domains. The EGI Designed Study  (DS) was partially funded by the EC as a project over 27 months fro

m September 2007 with the aim of bringing about the creation of a new European organizational model, which will be capable of fulfilling this

vision of a sustainable European grid  infrastructure (EGI) for e-Science.

 

The main foundations of EGI are the National Grid Initiatives (NGI), which operate the grid infrastructures in each country. EGI will link existing NGIs and will actively support the setup and initiation of new NGIs.

 See http://web.eu-egi.eu/fileadmin/public/EGI_DS_D5_4_V300b.pdf

 

EGI.org

EGI organisation

EGI.org management structure

 

 

    • UCO: User Coordination Officer
    • CTO: Central Technical Officer
    • CAO: Central Administration Officer
    • COO: Central Operational Officer

ESA, CERN, EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) .... Associate members, they will sign a memorandum of understanding with EGI.org. 

The maintenance, the support, interoperability and development of the middleware will not be a direct internal EGI activity. 

The User Community Services (UCS) teams on behalf of the Specialised Support Centres, representing the various user communities.

  • EGI office will be hosted in the Netherlands as it was decided at the User Forum in Catania.
  • First meeting of the EGI council will be held in july that will gather the representatives of all the NGIs that sign the Memorandum of Understanding.
  • The letter of intend for the MoU is in preparation by EGI-DS; deadline to sign at least before the council meeting.

Specialized Support Centre (SSC)

 Specialised Support Centres (SSCs) will be created to provide continuity, cohesion and cost savings to the user communities currently served by European Grid projects, and establish collaborations with specific ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) projects to set up the relevant services for these communities.

The SSCs fulfill a set of extended support services in the sense that they are endorsed electively by a subset of NGIs (National Grid Initiatives) and have a specific relationship with EGI.org.

More details see

http://knowledge.eu-egi.eu/knowledge/index.php/Specialised-Support-Centres

 

Table 3: SSC Requirements

Req. 1

Must have a European-level existence.

Req. 2

Demonstrate its legitimacy for representing a given sector of the full EGI user community.

Req. 3

Be governed by the user community/stakeholders.

Req. 4

Establish a procedure for the addition and removal of partners.

Req. 5

Have a business plan including how EGI resources will be used and/or provided by the SSC’s stakeholders.

Req. 6

Have a sustainability plan/roadmap.

Req. 7

Have a clear work plan and roadmap with measurable milestones.

Req. 8

Demonstrate how the SSC advances the aims of EGI.

Req. 9

Accept the global EGI policies.

Req. 10

Commit to name people to fill relevant EGI/SSC contact points.