Request for Input for the eNORIA Task Force on Sustainable Nordic

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Trondheim, January 15, 2009
Input to the eNORIA Task Force on Sustainable Nordic Grid Collaboration
Dear representative or national contact point for the WLCG (LHC) infrastructure,
With this letter, we would like to find out more about your future needs for e-Infrastructure
and (computational) Grids, and how you consider a permanent Nordic collaboration on eInfrastructure and Grid infrastructure could be beneficial for (the Nordic part of) the research
initiative or infrastructure that you are representative for.
In 2006, the Nordic Council of Ministers formed an ad hoc eScience Work Group assigned to
propose a joint Nordic eScience strategy. The Work Group delivered its report in July 2007
[1], emphasizing the need for long term sustainable collaborations within Nordic eScience
infrastructures and proposing new Nordic eScience programmes within research,
infrastructure and education. This initiative was taken further by the research councils of
Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Norway under NordForsk’s NORIA-net instrument,
forming “The Nordic eScience Initiative” (eNORIA). In the course of their work, the
participants of eNORIA were asked by the Nordic Ministers for Education and Research
(MR-U) to propose an action plan to realise the Nordic eScience strategy.
eNORIA produced an Action Plan in November 2008 [2]. The purpose of the Action Plan is
to motivate and describe concrete lines of actions that would be necessary to implement an
integrated Nordic eScience strategy covering higher education, research and ICT
infrastructure.
In October 2008, eNORIA appointed a Task Force [3] to propose a framework for sustainable
collaboration on Nordic Grid infrastructure with start 2010/11. The Task Force is asked what
Nordic-level organization, functions and services and funding may be needed or be beneficial
for coupling digital resources, including computational resources, data repositories and key
research instruments. The proposed functions and services should, by federating resources and
competences, add value to Nordic research communities and to existing national
infrastructure projects and initiatives [4-7]. Furthermore, the Task Force may propose a joint
Nordic framework for resource provisioning and sharing/aggregating national resources,
thereby taking into account progress that Nordic centers/metacenters and research
communities already may have made in this direction.
The framework proposed by the Task Force must contribute to leveraging Nordic areas of
excellence in research and promote closer collaboration between the Nordic countries. The
Task Force should also draw upon existing initiatives and strategy development in the
national, Nordic and European arenas. This includes e.g., the Nordic Data Grid Facility [8],
NORDUnet [9] and European efforts like Enabling Grids for E-sciencE [10] and the European
Grid Initiative [11].
The Task Force must take into account the needs of existing and new collaborative efforts that
involve high performance computing, large-scale data storage, networking, and Grid. In
particular, the Task Force should take stock of existing and planned expensive or large scale
research initiatives (including projects and infrastructures) as described in national and Nordic
strategies and in the ESFRI-roadmap. Also other large-scale European initiatives with Nordic
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participation should be considered, e.g., the World-wide Large Hadron Collider Computing
Grid (WLCG) collaboration.
This letter has been sent to the national and Nordic coordinators of the above-mentioned
research initiatives. Attached to this letter, you find a questionnaire with which the Task Force
would like to find out more about the need (or potential need) for e-Infrastructure and Grid
infrastructure and collaboration within your initiative.
We encourage all coordinators of the initiatives to complete the questionnaire. The national
coordinators in the Nordic countries of a Nordic or European initiative are encouraged to
complete the survey together and involve experts that have a good overview of the needs for
e-Infrastructure in the initiative. A completed survey that covers the total Nordic needs of the
initiative will be appreciated.
Completing the questionnaire will take some time. We believe however that your input is
important for designing a sustainable Nordic collaboration on Grid infrastructure (and eInfrastructure) and related services. We encourage you to provide any additional information
that you think may be of use to us.
We would like you to complete the questionnaire no later than January 30, 2009 and return
your answers to jacko.koster@uninett.no or to one of the addresses listed below. For more
information, any of the people listed below can be contacted.
A workshop is scheduled for February 25/26 in Oslo, where a draft plan by the Task Force
will be presented as well as results of this survey. You will receive more information about
this workshop in due time.
Yours sincerely,
The eNORIA Task Force on Sustainable Grid Collaboration,
Michael Grønager, NDGF (gronager@ndgf.org)
Sverker Holmgren, SNIC (sverker@it.uu.se)
Hannes Jonsson, University of Iceland (hj@hi.is)
Jacko Koster, UNINETT Sigma (jak@uninett.no)
Dan-Olof Riska, Helsinki Institute of Physics (riska@mappi.helsinki.fi)
References
[1] http://www.norden.org/avtal/utbildning/sk/nordic_escience.pdf
[2] http://www.notur.no/tmp/Nordic-eScience-Action-Plan.pdf
[3] http://www.notur.no/tmp/Terms-of-Reference-for-Nordic-Grid-Collaboration.pdf
[4] Danish Center for Scientific Computing (DCSC): www.dcsc.dk
[5] Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC): www.snic.vr.se
[6] Notur, the Norwegian infrastructure for Computational Science: www.notur.no (www.norstore.no)
[7] CSC, IT Center for Science Ltd, www.csc.fi
[8] Nordic DataGrid Facility (NDGF): www.ndgf.org
[9] NORDUnet: www.nordu.net
[10] Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE): www.eu-egee.org
[11] European Grid Initiative (EGI): www.eu-egi.eu
[12] Statement of “Advancing Technologies in eScience”, one of the four thematic workshops of “Global
challenges - Regional opportunities: How can research infrastructure and eScience support Nordic
competitiveness?”, Stockholm, 12-13 November 2008: www.vr.se/nordicinfra
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QUESTIONNAIRE
For the seven questions below, the definition for e-Infrastructure is taken from [12] (also
attached to this letter). In short, e-Infrastructure denotes ICT-based technology, virtual
organisations and associated services that support distributed global research collaborations in
a fully integrated manner. The technologies include networks, grids, data centres and
collaborative environments. Using e-Infrastructure, researchers can for example share access
to large data collections, advanced ICT tools for data analysis, large-scale computing
resources and high-performance visualisation. E-Infrastructure must support the needs of all
researchers, whether their research makes intensive use of ICT or not.
The term e-Infrastructure should not be confused with eScience (or eResearch) or the Grid –
these are services and approaches to the research process which use the e-Infrastructure in a
particularly advanced way. eScience is a broad field and the definitions of eScience vary
between different experts and are non-exclusive. eScience is about distributed global
collaboration in key areas of science, using the next generation of infrastructures now
available, like the services available on the Internet. The borderline between eScience and eInfrastructure is not always clear: sometimes the technological tool is also the scientific tool.
Below, the term ‘initiative’ denotes both research projects and research infrastructures.
Questions.
0. Project title and acronym.
1. The names and email addresses of the people that contributed to answering the questionnaire.
2. Describe the scientific objectives of the research initiative (at most one page). Please detail
infrastructures and other science and technology fields that are used at the national and European level
(with relevant links where possible).
3. Describe the needs for e-Infrastructure and Grid infrastructure in your research initiative (at most
one page). This could include a description of the needs for coupling digital resources, computational
processing and analysis of data, collaborative environments, data/work flow, data distribution, data
access and security, data curation and publication/dissemination, relevant processing, storage and
network technologies, and reliability and service requirements.
4. Summarize the time schedule for the use of e-Infrastructure and Grid infrastructure in your initiative
with duration and starting dates. For research infrastructures, please also summarize the time schedule
for construction (tendering, deployment and installation) and operation of the infrastructure.
5. Describe how the national and Nordic contribution to the research initiative is (or should be)
integrated in existing e-Infrastructure and Grid environments. The discussion should include national,
Nordic and European e-Infrastructures (e.g., [4-8]), national and European grid infrastructures (e.g., [8,
10]) and networks (e.g., Geant).
6. Describe how or if a permanent Nordic collaboration on e-Infrastructure and Grid infrastructure
could be beneficial for (the Nordic part of) the research initiative. The discussion may include
organizational, administrative, economical, legal and technical considerations. The discussion could
also address aspects of better/increased use and sharing of resources in existing Nordic and European
eInfrastructure, and better coupling of digital resources, including computational resources, data
repositories and key research instruments.
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APPENDIX. Definition of e-Infrastructure. Statement of “Advancing Technologies in
eScience”, one of the four thematic workshops of “Global challenges - Regional opportunities:
How can research infrastructure and eScience support Nordic competitiveness?”, Stockholm,
12-13 November 2008.
Advancing Technologies in eScience – A Global Multi-Science Challenge
SUMMARY
Continuous development of and support for eScience and major research e-Infrastructures can
dramatically change the way research is conducted, now and in the future. eScience must involve all
research disciplines, from physics and astronomy to medical sciences, earth sciences, biology and
chemistry, social sciences and humanities. At the Nordic level, efforts are already being made to pave
the way for new collaboration in research, education and training. The rapidly increasing energy
demand introduces new economic and environmental challenges, which have to be addressed on a
broad front.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF FIELD
e-Infrastructure and eScience are two inseparable components of research today. eScience is about
distributed global collaboration in key areas of science, using the next generation of infrastructures
now available, like the services available on the Internet. The term e-Infrastructure is used for ICTbased technology, virtual organisations and associated services that support distributed global research
collaborations in a fully integrated manner. The technologies include networks, grids, data centres and
collaborative environments. Using the e-Infrastructure, researchers can for example share access to
large data collections, advanced ICT tools for data analysis, large-scale computing resources and highperformance visualisation.
Major developments in building eScience services are taking place on a national basis, through
national eScience programmes or National Grid Initiatives. At a policy level, these efforts are
coordinated in Europe through the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and
the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG).
The Nordic countries have a long tradition of collaboration between their national research and
education networks in the development and maintenance of a general purpose Internet (NORDUnet).
The Nordic Data Grid Facility (NDGF) has continued this approach to make possible Nordic
participation in computational challenges of a scope and size beyond the reach of national research
groups alone, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN.
In 2006, the Nordic Council of Ministers set up an ad hoc eScience Work Group, with the task of
proposing a joint Nordic eScience Strategy. The Work Group delivered its report1 in July 2007,
emphasising the need for long-term sustainable collaborations among Nordic eScience infrastructures
and proposing new Nordic eScience programmes within research, infrastructure and education. This
initiative was taken further by the Nordic research councils under NordForsk’s NORIA-net instrument,
forming The Nordic eScience Initiative (eNORIA). In the course of their work, eNORIA participants
were asked by the Nordic Ministers for Education and Research to propose an Action Plan to
implement the Nordic eScience Strategy. The purpose of the Action Plan is to describe and justify
tangible courses of action to implement an integrated Nordic eScience Strategy covering higher
education, research and ICT infrastructure.
TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES
The term e-Infrastructure should not be confused with eScience (sometimes referred to as eResearch)
or the Grid – these are services and approaches to the research process which use the e-Infrastructure
in a particularly advanced way. e-Infrastructure must support the needs of all researchers, whether
their research makes intensive use of ICT or not. However, the borderline between eScience and eInfrastructure is not always clear: sometimes the technological tool is also the scientific tool.
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On a European scale, there are a number of major e-Infrastructure projects that are constructing the
service layers for eScience. These European projects, financed partly by the European Commission
and mostly by the member states, constitute the European e-Infrastructure for research with eScience
applications:
• DEISA, Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications;
• DRIVER, Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research;
• EGEE, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, (in transition to the European Grid Initiative (EGI));
• PRACE, Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe;
• GÉANT, multi-gigabit computer network to create a single global research network,
dedicated to research and education.
Building major new e-Infrastructures is challenging in a variety of ways. Major new challenges are
introduced by environmental restrictions. The rapidly increasing consumption of energy in eInfrastructure environments, by computers, disks and networking devices, has become a bottleneck in
terms of both funds and availability. New, more environmentally and economically feasible ‘green
computing’ approaches have to be introduced and applied on a broad front. These are challenges
which Nordic collaboration, too, has to tackle.
NORDIC POTENTIAL AND COMPETITIVENESS IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
The Nordic eScience Strategy emphasises the need for long-term sustainable collaborations to
maintain and develop Nordic eScience infrastructures, such as computer networks, high-performance
computing resources and Grid infrastructure. The following is based on findings and results presented
in that document, bearing in mind that a separate eScience Action Plan is being developed, with the
aim of implementing the Strategy.
A basis for Nordic eScience collaboration exists in the Nordic national computer networks and the
high-performance computing infrastructure. Collaboration is already taking place between the national
service providers and this type of activity was also foreseen in the Grand Challenge Survey conducted
in 2007. On the Nordic scale, it is of great importance to work towards an interdisciplinary eInfrastructure with eScience applications crossing the thematic boundaries between the different
ESFRI Roadmap projects. Here, Nordic collaboration can serve as a good example.
VISIONARY OUTLOOK
A well-planned and monitored Nordic eScience programme could in a 5-year perspective offer a welldeveloped virtual system for sharing eScience resources, knowledge and competences. eScience
technology expertise should be clearly integrated into the work of research groups across all fields of
science, to make possible seamless research collaborations across national and thematic boundaries.
Education programmes in eScience at university level would further reinforce this process. In a 10year perspective, the Nordic countries could be seen as unparalleled internationally when it comes to
virtual organisations and sharing of eScience resources. Nordic industry would have access to skilled
technology experts of the 21st century, with the advanced computing technologies framework that is
the foundation for service-oriented business models and a knowledge-based industry. However, it is
already clear that major research e-Infrastructure advantages can dramatically change the way research
is conducted, now and in the future.
In 2007 the Nordic eScience Work Group proposed the establishment new programmes to promote
Nordic eScience research, infrastructure, and education:
• A programme to resource computational ‘grand challenge’ research.
• A programme to establish a Nordic infrastructure for databases and data repositories.
• A programme for Nordic eScience collaboration with the Baltic countries, Europe and
beyond.
• Nordic master’s and PhD programmes on eScience technologies.
At the European level, the ERA Expert Group recommended in their report Developing World-class
Research Infrastructures for the European Research Area (ERA):
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• A coherent and managed layer of scholarly and academic research resources (including
research outputs and data) by bringing together Europe’s research repositories and
significantly increasing the number and quality of the knowledge resources available. The
possibility of establishing a programme of research and coordination to help member states
address the issues of establishing, managing and joining up research repositories should be
explored.
• A trustworthy management system to provide seamless access to shared resources of all
types (computers, networks, data, instruments, applications etc.).
• An adequate and coordinated high-performance computing provision ecosystem with ready
access to its services.
1
http://www.norden.org/avtal/utbildning/sk/nordic_escience.pdf
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