15 EGEE Project

During the whole year 2005, CESNET Association participated in the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) project, part of the 6th Framework Programme of the European Union. The main goal of this two-year project is to establish a persistent stable (operational) pan-European Grid infrastructure, which should serve as a basis for a global Grid. This project is coordinated by CERN and provides a platform for joining efforts of 70 partners from almost all European countries including Russia, as well as several non-European partners (from the USA) and associated partners from Korea.

The properties of the Grid being built by EGEE reflect primarily the requirements of the community that initiated the project - high energy physicists. The basic building blocks of the EGEE Grid are clusters of computers with processors compatible with the IA-32, IA-64 or AMD64 architecture with the Linux operating system together with vast data storage (the expected aggregated capacity is in the order of petabytes). The hardware cost is not part of the project funding. About one fourth of the total project budget (35 millions of Euro) is used to support the development of project specific Grid middleware called gLite, about one half is used to operate the infrastructure and the rest is used, apart from project management, to user support including training and dissemination. The project combines national, regional, and application-oriented or thematic grid activities that provide their own hardware and manpower resources. The cluster-based EGEE Grid is fully compatible with the goals of the MetaCentre activity within the CESNET research plan.

Project partners are organised around administrative domains called "federations" that are based on geographic proximity. Czech Republic is part of the so-called Central European (CE) Federation together with Poland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and - since December 2005 - also Croatia. CESNET is the only Czech institution participating in the project - this is fully compatible with the "One country - one representative" principle that is expected to be used within the 7th Framework Programme for building the pan-European Grid infrastructure. Each federation has one representative in the Project Management Board, Luděk Matyska from CESNET became the CE federation representative in January 2005. This way, CESNET is not only directly participating in EGEE project management, but also got an opportunity to take part in the preparation of the consecutive EGEE II project.

The work within the EGEE project has been split into several activities - research, operation (support), and integration (networking). CESNET is the only partner from the CE federation (in fact, one of a handful among all project partners) participating in all three activity groups.

The Joint Research Activities, JRAs, target middleware development (JRA1), quality assurance (JRA2), security (JRA3), and networks (JRA4). CESNET is a member of the so-called Italian/Czech cluster within the JRA1 activity and is responsible for the development of the Logging and Bookkeeping Service (LB). This service monitors the flow of individual jobs through the Grid environment and reconstructs job state from events sent by individual middleware components. CESNET is also responsible for the Job Provenance, a persistent data repository that stores information about all jobs being run on the EGEE Grid.

Among the major results achieved in the year 2005 is the interest of American colleagues to include the LB service into their VDT system. VDT is a special repository of certified high-quality Grid-related middleware components that are used in many Grid project in the USA and world-wide. The inclusion of LB code into the VDT system is an acknowledgement of its quality and value.

During 2005 we also closely cooperated with the JRA2 activity and used data collected by LB for generating statistics about EGEE Grid use and reliability that is part of quality assurance evaluation. We provide the so-called "Job History Record" containing all the relevant information about important events that have happened during the job processing within a Grid. The data management group within JRA1 also expressed interest in using the LB service for monitoring large dataset transfers between individual Grid components (especially between computing and storage elements). CESNET also represents the Italian/Czech cluster in the JRA3 (Security) activity and participates in further development of the MyProxy server - a user certificate repository providing time-limited proxy certificates.

The SA1 activity - grid operation, management and support - is yet another activity with a strong CESNET participation. Apart from the routine activities of the CE Regional Operating Centre (ROC), CESNET is responsible for the setup, management and operation of VOCE, Virtual Organisation for Central Europe. As the EGEE Grid is application-oriented, end users must be able to find an appropriate virtual organisation to join (otherwise they have to create a new one, not an easy task) before they can use the EGEE Grid. However, this is not a convenient approach for new users with very specific applications or for groups of "small" users - managing their own virtual organisation is too big an overhead for them.

VOCE is an application-neutral virtual organisation intended precisely for users without easy-to-determine membership in some "large" official virtual organisation. CESNET runs all the VOCE-related services, operates the User Interface machine and is also responsible for end-user management (for this purpose, the Perun system developed as part of the MetaCentre activity is used). VOCE resources are the contributions from individual CE federation partners, as VOCE is primarily intended to be used by end users from this region. However, other countries such as Italy expressed interest in joining VOCE. Currently, the VOCE concept is considered and evaluated as a model approach for EGEE II.

NA3 (Training) and NA4 (Application Support) are two integrating activities in which CESNET is also involved. As part of our NA3 work, we organised two user training events during 2005 and maintain an EGEE-specific portal as a part of the broader MetaCentre portal. Our application support is oriented partly on the community of high energy physicists - in particular, participating scientists from the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Science - and partly on the community of computational chemistry (these researchers are also major VOCE users). CESNET developed the Charon system - a command line interface for an easy preparation and manipulation with large jobs. The Charon system has been successfully demonstrated during the 2nd EGEE conference in October 2005 and during the November training event for Czech users.

The EGEE project will end in March 2006, the first half of 2005 thus marked an extensive preparation of the consecutive project named EGEE II. This project will start in April 2006 to guarantee a smooth transition between both projects. EGEE II is also planned as a two-year project, to span the time remaining till the start of the 7th Framework Programme. With 80 partners expected to join and total budget of over 50 million Euro (from which 38 million Euro is the planned contribution from the EU), it is even larger than the current EGEE project.

In EGEE II, CESNET will remain involved in all the activities mentioned above for EGEE, and its JRA1 participation even gained a status of an independent Czech cluster for which an increase in total manpower is planned. All in all, the overall budget of CESNET will increase by some 20 %. The European Commission confirmed acceptance of the EGEE II proposal as submitted in December 2005, which means a substantial financial contribution for CESNET and its participation in international grid activities. CESNET now assumes the position of the largest partner from the CE federation and it is also one of medium-sized partners project-wide. This fact reflects the quality of the ongoing work that CESNET contributes to the development of the grid infrastructure at the national and international levels.

More detailed information about the EGEE project is available through both our portal (http://egee.cesnet.cz/) and the main portal of the project (http://www.eu-egee.org/).

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