Planning EGEE Phase 2 for the German/Swiss Federation
During the first project phase the following important contributions were made by the
German/Swiss Federation (GSF):
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Successful integration of many resource centres: CSCS, DESY, GSI, FhG, FZK,
University Berlin, University Aachen, University Karlsruhe, University Wuppertal;
these are together already contributing more than 1200 CPUs (only 400 were
requested in the TA at the end of phase 1)
Deployment of a prototype for a Global Grid User Support centre at FZK, an
important function originally not foreseen in the TA
Establishment of a functional distributed ROC between DESY, GSI, FhG, FZK with
rotating support roles; the new partner CSCS is currently being integrated.
Supporting HEP, BioMed, Earth-Science and Astrophysics applications
Extensive and very effective training activity: 180 people trained in 10 courses until
March 2005. Establishment of a Grid summer school in the GSF
Successful dissemination activities: Articles and publications; regular presence at
conferences, exhibitions and workshops with dissemination material and talks;
localisation of dissemination material; press work.
In general we propose to continue phase 2 of the project as smoothly as possible and we
support the plan to have a natural evolution of EGEE.
Federation Recommendations and Requirements
SA1
Besides the ROC, a CIC had initially not been attributed to the GSF operations during the first
phase of the project. However, as the number of client communities and resource centres
grew, the ROC assumed the additional services of a CIC for reasons of efficiency, without
being extra funded. From our positive practical experience in this area we do recommend to
generally merge the corresponding ROC and CIC functions in the phase 2 proposal.
Assignment of FTEs to the federation for the corresponding operations area is requested at the
same level as it will be provided for the other federations.
NA2
In order to expand the ability to do press work, the regional NA2 activity would need to be
increased. Successful press work is crucial for general acceptance of EGEE, and knowledge
transfer only becomes possible as a result of contacts, brokered e.g. by successful
dissemination activities.
NA3
The regional training activities need to be strengthened in EGEE phase 2 in order to
 Help to establish gLite components in the basic services portfolio of the national
GermanGrid integration project and attract the application developers and users in the
corresponding national community grid projects (Common start of all projects:
September 2005).
 Cover the additional and initially not foreseen training needs of Switzerland
NA4
From our experience especially with earth-science applications there is a strong demand for
additional integration and development activity in the area of data management and complex
workflows (And the GSF partners would like to significantly contribute to a corresponding
work package):
In Earth Sciences specific datasets from distributed data centres (often managing petabytes of
data) have to be extracted and moved to grid resources iteratively as a side effect of complex
data analysis activities involving metadata queries. In order to establish those workflows for
complex data analysis on demand on the EGEE infrastructure it is necessary to integrate
existing and evolving community data management procedures with the gLite middleware.
Community specific developments in the future are likely to be based on GT4, applications
will rely on data management approaches like OGSA-DAI and SRB with their metadata
management functionality (MCS and MCAT) as well as federated identity management
solutions (e.g. Shibboleth based). Thus the development of bridging functionality toolkits and
general guidelines are of vital importance for especially the earth sciences and astronomy
communities to be able to bring their complex data analysis activities to the EGEE
infrastructure.