METACentre

Building and management of the basic eInfrastructure, i.e., the distributed computing and storage environment, development of the corresponding services and application support are the METACentrum long term goals. Research in subjects necessary to reach these goals is a natural associated activity. The METACentrum activities could be divided in the following areas:

1. operation and development of the proper infrastructure, including its monitoring,
2. user support, including portal management, and support of selected applications,
3. security of the distributed environment, and
4. planning and scheduling in this environment.

In 2008, METACentrum main goal is a continuation of the consistent virtualization of the distributed grid environment. Our focus will be primary targeted to the support of interactive work and the associated gradual increase of the offered infrastructure services directly manageable by end users. Specifically, in year 2008 the end users will be allowed to use different virtual machine images best suited to their needs and requirements. We will also continue to support the IPv6 deployment and the full use of the L2 infrastructure, built in 2007 and connecting all the METACentrum sites. Gradually we will support VLANs at the end nodes, up to the user managed use of the virtualized networking environment (QinQ). Concurrently, we will study also other aspects of the IPv6 infrastructure, namely those interesting from the point of view of the METACentrum primary goal. This will include IPv6 mobility.

Virtualized interactive environment supports better integration of end user's own computing and storage resources. We will continue in the direction followed in the few last years, integrating the end user's clusters and in the same time offering them the creation and use of the appropriate virtual machine images. We will also continue to study the scheduling problem in the virtualized environment, with a special emphasis on interactive use of this infrastructure. In the security area, we will focus on the consistent use of the Single Sign On principle, relying on federative approaches. We will also introduce the authorization service.

Another aspect of the METACentrum work will be further extension of computing and storage resources. During 2007, we decided about the appropriate implementation for /home and /scratch storage areas. In 2008, this decision will be put under production stress tests. We plan to use the NFSv4 protocol and PVFS or Lustre. The user support provided on this eInfrastructure will be another very important aspect of our work.

Indispensable part of the METACentrum activities is also participation in international grid activities. In 2008, we will continue in our work as part of the EU EGEE II project, since May 2008 we expect a continuation within EGEE III. METACentrum is actively involved in the grid management (where it is the second largest and most important site in the Central Europe), middleware development (with responsibility for Logging and Bookkeeping and Job Provenance services), training and application support (e.g., through the development of the Charon system). Besides EGEE II/III, METACentrum will participate in the other 7FP EU projects: the EGI_DS, with a goal to propose a framework for a sustainable European grid infrastructure, and EUAsiaGrid, targeting a transfer and support of gLite middleware, developed within the EGEE projects, in the Asia Pacific region. METACentrum is also part of the national MediGrid project, whose goal is to build a specific grid infrastructure that supports workflows and includes semantical description of grid services (ontology based) for medical community. In all cases we plan to use extensively the newly built virtual environment of the METACentrum.