Second Concertation Workshop on eInfrastructure: A win-win situation for participating FP6 projects
Representatives of various FP6-funded research infrastructure, grid and broadband technologies projects gathered in Bordeaux on 14 December 2005 for the 2nd Concertation workshop on eInfrastructure, to discuss topics of common interest and to explore synergies in tackling them.
Organised by DANTE on behalf of the GÉANT2 project, the event offered an opportunity to bring to fruition the European Commission's eInfrastructure Concertation initiative, which is aimed at stimulating cooperation and knowledge exchange between members of FP6-funded projects.
In his opening speech, Enric Mitjana from DG-INFSO of the European Commission stressed the importance of cross-project cooperation to foster coordination and maximise the impact of the projects in their quest to advance their offering to the research community. “Concertation requires obviously active participation and commitment”, he said, “which in turn will however increase the visibility of a project, bring research results to deployment and allow a fruitful exchange of best practices.”
The idea behind the workshop was to offer a forum to allow participants to collectively address topics in areas where it was felt that projects could benefit from an integrated approach. Consequently, the workshop was structured around four parallel sessions, each focussing on a particular topic. Each session was assigned a facilitator:
- Monitoring & Performance Enhancement (Facilitator: Maurizio Molina, DANTE)
- Resource Management/Allocation (Facilitator: Victor Reijs, HEAnet)
- Security and AAI (Facilitator: Diego Lopez, RedIRIS)
- Interoperability and Interface Issues (Zoran Jovanovic, AMREJ)
The sessions saw lively interaction and debate; the discussion findings were presented by the respective facilitators in the closing plenary session.
In the area of monitoring and performance enhancement, the main points and conclusions emerging from the discussion were as follows:
Firstly, delegates saw the need for better defined operational procedures and a clearer ‘chain of command’ in case of a fault. In that context, it was recommended to further promote the GÉANT2 PERT service (Performance Enhancement and Response Team) among the projects.
Concerning the issue of how to fill the 'last mile' gap, evolving from edge to edge to end to end, it was recognised that grid applications are already gathering end site and system information. However, this information needs to be filtered, stamped as trusted, made more application independent, and information flow automated. Maurizio Molina also stressed the need for network monitoring infrastructures to be extended to accept 'event driven' data coming from the ends of the network.
Privacy relating to sharing and accessing monitoring data was another topic of debate. There are dangers of user information being revealed via monitoring data, raising discipline-specific issues and increasing the risk of security attacks via the network. The value of sharing data was clearly recognised, however, coordination of respective policies is clearly needed.
Finally, participants called for a repository of existing monitoring tools to avoid losing these valuable tools once a project comes to an end.
Victor Reijs summarised in his report issues related to resource management and allocation. He stressed the need for adequate means of prioritising traffic to be developed, based on feedback from real usage experiences and suggested that configuration lead times be specified in SLAs.
Three areas of synergy were identified where new initiatives would be beneficial to a number of projects:
- Advance reservation (activity to compile a list of requirements and to be led by Victor Reijs. Interest in participating expressed by: SEEGRID, BalticGrid, EGEE, Juniper, MUPBED, GN2-JRA3)
- Multi-domain services (activity to look into how to evolve from edge to edge to end to end. Interest in collaborating expressed by Juniper, EGEE, MUPBED, BalticGrid, MUSE, HPC4U, GN2-JRA3, EXPRes, 6DISS/EUQoS/Eurolabs. Activity to be led by Martin Potts from 6DISS/EUQoS/Eurolabs)
- Saleable solutions including the commodity internet (activity kickstarted by Jean-Marc Uze from Juniper and to investigate how to sell services to the users and ensure that they are used. Volunteers from Juniper, EGEE, 6DISS/EUQoS/Eurolabs, MUSE, BREATH, SEEGRID).
In the Security and AAI Session there was general agreement that simple, seamless, globally interworking AAI is a basic infrastructure service which we should aim to achieve. Killer applications, such as mobility and digital content, are valuable to stimulate takeup. Diego Lopez added that scalability problems an
d legal issues (privacy) persist.
He also emphasised the need for campuses to be kept in the loop. For this to succeed, simple management processes and user friendliness are both key.
There was general agreement on full single sign-on to avoid redundant authentication to be the ultimate goal.
There was a general willingness across the projects present to contribute to a globally interworking AAI in the form of coordination and experimentation. A collaborative space to share information could initially be populated by session attendants.
In his wrap-up, Zoran Jovanovic summarised the essential interfaces between the various stakeholders in the network-grid application community with the aim of improving inter-working and increasing transparency. This session identified a number of important issues: these included the recognition that grids have not, by and large, been created to operate on IPv6 networks. EUChinaGRIDS needs to connect the Chinese IPv6 network and this calls for action. Expertise from network and grids would be required in such an initiative which could be performed within the IPv6 forum.
GÉANT2 and EGEE have jointly developed an API for GÉANT2 to provide BoD through grid application interfaces. This works would need to be standardised for implementation by other networks.
Regarding the grid interface to network resources, the need for standardisation of network trouble tickets and grid trouble tickets was agreed.
In terms of coordination of network resources with grid resources, there has been good cooperation between EGEE and GÉANT2. Europe leads the world in this area but interaction with partners across the globe is required to develop globally interoperable standards.
Zoran Jovanovic concluded that coordinated cooperation betweeen partners worldwide in tackling the numerous compatibility issues would be extremely valuable in order to achieve globally interoperable services.
In his closing remarks, Bernhard Fabianek from DG INFSO welcomed the constructive project contributions during the workshop. To keep the positive momentum, he encouraged the projects to continue to stimulate progress after Bordeaux. To facilitate this exchange, it was suggested to use the portal of the BELIEF project as a discussion forum and repository for all documentation produced during the eConcertation workshop.
