International Computing
e-Infrastructures: Past, Present and
Future...
Fabrizio Gagliardi
EMEA Director
Technical Computing
Microsoft Corporation
Outline of the talk
Some personal introductory remarks
Definition of e-Infrastructures
Need for e-Infrastructures
Recent past history
Current situation, accomplishments and
challenges
Outlook for the future
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Definition of e-Infrastructures
Infrastructures to support wide geographically
distributed communities which share problems
and resources to work towards common goals
Leveraging international network
interconnectivity
Based on safe AAA architecture
Need persistent software middleware (S/W is
integral part of the infrastructure)
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‘Grids’: A Catch-All Marketing Term
‘Grids’ mean many different things to many
different people/companies:
P2P desktop cycle-stealing
Linked Supercomputer Centers
Managed virtual distributed clusters
Internet access to giant, distributed repositories
Virtualization of data center IT resources
Out-sourcing to “utility compute centers”
Sharing resources distributed among different
administrative domains (Ian Foster)

For Microsoft, Grids are about Data
Management as much as Compute Cycles
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Need for e-Infrastructures
Science, industry and commerce are more and
more digital, process vast amounts of data and
need massive computing power
We live in a “flat” world:
Science is more and more an international
collaboration and often requires a multidisciplinary
approach
Need to use technology for the good cause
Fight Digital/Divide
Industrial uptake has become essential
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Recent past history
Meta-computing and distributed computing
early examples in the 80’ and 90’ (CASA, I-Way,
Unicore, Condor etc.)
EU-US workshop in Annapolis in 1999 on large
scientific data bases:
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/euus/
EU FP5 and US Trillium and national Grids
EU FP6, US OSG, NAREGI/Japan…
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Chronology
IGO-----ETICS/EGO----
EDG start 2001
CHEP2000
EGEE-II start 2006
EGEE start 2004
EGEE-XX 2008?
We are here
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ARCADE 2002
Barcelona, 14th February 2002
“Unlimited” bandwidth, breaking
the frontiers of computing: the
path in Europe from FP5 to FP6.
Antonella Karlson
Research Networks Unit, DG INFSO, EC
antonella.karlson@cec.eu.int
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"The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission"
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GRIDs - IST projects (~36m Euro)
An integrated approach
Applications
EGSO
CROSSGRID
Middleware GRIP EUROGRID
& Tools
DAMIEN
GRIDSTART
GRIA
GRIDLAB
DATAGRID
DATATAG
Underlying
Infrastructures
Industry / business
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Science
9
GRIDs:
Examples of large testbeds
 DATAGRID, CROSSGRID
• 17 European
countries
• Collaboration
of more than
2000 scientists
Application requirements:
• Computing > 20 TFlops/s
• Downloads > 0.5PBytes
• Network speeds at 10
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Gbps
GRIDs:
Examples of large testbeds
 DATATAG (cross-Atlantic testbed)
(2Gbps)
Links with US projects
(GriPhyN, PPDG, iVDGL,…)
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Current situation: accomplishments
and challenges
Many Grids around the world, very few
maintained as a persistent infrastructure (best
example is the “secret” Google Grid)
Need for public and open Grids (OSG, EGEE
and related projects, NAREGI, and TERAGRID,
DEISA good prototypes)
Persistence, support, sustainability, long term
funding, easy access are the major challenges
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Projects in Europe (I)
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
• Access to IT-resources (connectivity,
computing, data, instrumentation…) for
scientists:
– Providing e-Infrastructure




Géant2
EGEE
DEISA
SEE-GRID
– Benefiting from e-Infrastructure





DILIGENT
SIMDAT
GRIDCC
CoreGRID
GridLab
– Concertation: GRIDSTART, GridCoord
– Grid mobility: Akogrimo
INFSO-RI-508833
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Projects in Europe (II)
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
• Sample of National Grid projects:
– Austrian Grid Initiative
– DutchGrid
– France:
 e-Toile
 ACI Grid
– Germany
 D-Grid
 Unicore
D-GRID
– Grid Ireland
– Italy
 INFNGrid
 GRID.IT
– NorduGrid
– UK e-Science
 National Grid Service
 OMII
 GridPP project
INFSO-RI-508833
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Policy Forums
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
• The e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (eIRG)
– Mission: study and promote policies for easy and cost-effective shared
use of electronic resources in Europe
– 25 countries (government-appointed representatives), EU: 2 members
– White Papers
• European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI)
– Role: to support a coherent approach to policy-making on research
infrastructures in Europe, and to act as an incubator for international
negotiations about concrete initiatives
– representatives of the 25 EU Member States, appointed by Research
Ministers and a representative of the European Commission
• ESFRI + eIRG: European roadmap for new research infrastructures
of pan-European interest (10-20 years)
INFSO-RI-508833
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Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
Géant2
• GÉANT2 is the 7th generation of the pan-European research and
education network, successor to the multi-gigabit research
network GÉANT.
– Official start: 1 September 2004, Duration: 4 years
– Funding: EC, national research, education networks
– Managed by DANTE
• Goal:
– To connect 34 countries through 30 national research and
education networks (NRENs)
– using multiple 10Gbps wavelengths
• Status:
– Equipment and services currently in operations (officially
inaugurated by Commissioner Reding last June)
– Transition from GÉANT network to GÉANT2 gradually
completing, started in the first quarter of 2005
INFSO-RI-508833
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EU Grid technology & infrastructure (I)
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
New Grid Research Projects in FP6
EU Funding:52 MILLION - Start: SUMMER 2004
GRIDCOORD
Building the ERA in Grid research
K-WF Grid
inteliGRID
Knowledge based
workflow &
collaboration
Semantic Grid based
virtual organisations
Grid-based generic enabling
application technologies to facilitate
solution of industrial problems
OntoGrid
SIMDAT
UniGridS
Extended OGSA
Implementation based
on UNICORE
EU-driven Grid services
architecture for businesS
and industry
NextGRID
Mobile Grid architecture
and services for dynamic
virtual organisations
Akogrimo
HPC4U
Fault tolerance,
dependability
for Grid
Knowledge Services
for the semantic Grid
European-wide virtual laboratory for longer term Grid
research-creating the foundation for next generation Grids
CoreGRID
Specific support action
Integrated project
Network of excellence
DataminingGrid
Datamining
tools & services
Provenance
Trust and provenance
for Grids
Specific targeted research project
From a talk by Ulf Dahlsten, Den Haag, Nov 2004
INFSO-RI-508833
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EU Grid technology & infrastructure (II)
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
Building the European eInfrastructure for research
2000
2001
TEN 155
network
2002
2003
2004
GÉANT network
2005
2006
2007
2008
GÉANT network (FP6)
IPv6 testbeds
IPv6 actions
Grid testbeds
Grid enabled Infrastructures (EGEE,
DEISA, SEE-GRID,…)
(other) testbeds
(other) testbeds
FP5
FP6
FP7
Complementary to National infrastructures
From a talk by Ulf Dahlsten, Den Haag, Nov 2004
INFSO-RI-508833
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EU Grid technology & infrastructure (III)
GRIDCC
MUPPET
DILIGENT
Flexible
Quality of
Service
Assurance
Optical
solutions for
Grid
infrastruct.
New user
communities
using Grids –
Digital
Libraries
eInfrastructure –
Testbeds
Real time
Grid for
remote
control of
instruments
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
EUQoS
IPv6TF SC
IPv6 Task
Force
support
Courtesy of
Specific Support Actions
K. Baxevanidis, EU
INFSO-RI-508833
EUROLABS
LOBSTER
Experimental
testbeds
Traffic monitoring
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EU Grid technology & infrastructure (V)
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
• eInfrastructure – achievements
• Connectivity service
•
• Computing, storage service •
•
GÉANT network: 10Gbit/s, IPv6 enabled,
3900 Research Centres connected
EGEE: production quality, >10000 CPUs, >5PB
storage, training, coverage of 27 countries
DEISA: Supercomputer network, reaching
40 Tflop/s
• Testbeds
•
Rich set of technologies tested/ verified (IPv6,
Grids, Optical, End-to-End QoS, Security,
Mobility…) and communities involved
(scientific, industry)
• International links
•
USA, Russia, Mediterranean, Asia, Latin
America...
From a talk by Ulf Dahlsten, Den Haag, Nov 2004
INFSO-RI-508833
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Outlook for the future
Outlook for the future
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Supercomputing Goes Personal
1991
1998
2005
System
Cray Y-MP C916
Sun HPC10000
Shuttle @ NewEgg.com
Architecture
16 x Vector
4GB, Bus
24 x 333MHz UltraSPARCII, 24GB, SBus
4 x 2.2GHz x64
4GB, GigE
OS
UNICOS
Solaris 2.5.1
Windows Server 2003 SP1
GFlops
~10
~10
~10
Top500 #
1
500
N/A
Price
$40,000,000
$1,000,000 (40x drop)
< $4,000 (250x drop)
Customers
Government Labs
Large Enterprises
Every Engineer & Scientist
Applications
Classified, Climate,
Physics Research
Manufacturing, Energy,
Finance, Telecom
Bioinformatics, Materials
Sciences, Digital Media
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The Continuing Trend Towards
Decentralized, Networked Resources
Grids of personal &
departmental clusters
Personal workstations &
departmental servers
Minicomputers
Mainframes
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Leverage IT Industry’s Existing R&D
Parallel applications development
High-productivity IDEs
Integrated
debugging/profiling/tracing/analy
sis
Code designer wizards
Concurrent programming
frameworks
Platform optimizations
Dynamic, profile-guided
optimization
New programming abstractions
Digital experimentation
Collaboration-enhanced Office
productivity tools
Structure experiment data and
derived results in a manner
appropriate for human
reading/reasoning (as opposed
to optimizing for query
processing and/or storage
efficiency)
Enable collaboration among
colleagues
(Scientific) workflow
environments
Distributed systems issues
Web Services & HPC grids
Automated orchestration
Visual scripting
Provenance
Security
Interoperability
Scalability
Dynamic Systems Management
Self (re)configuration & tuning
Reliability & availability
RDMS + data mining
Ease-of-use
Advanced indexing & query
processing
Advanced data mining
algorithms
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Scientific Information Worker:
Past and Future
Past
Buy lab equipment
Keep lab notebook
Run experiments by hand
Assemble & analyze data
(using stat pkg)
Collaborate by phone/email;
write up results with Latex
Metaphor:
Physical experimentation
“Do it yourself”
Lots of disparate
systems/pieces
Future
Buy hardware & software
Automatic provenance
Workflow with 3rd party
domain packages
Excel & Access/SQL-Server
Office tool suite with
collaboration support
Metaphor:
Digital experimentation
Turn-key desktop
supercomputer
Single integrated system
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Where Grids will be in 5 years?
Like in the past ES, AI, networking, OS they will disappear from the
hot research (and hype) space and become mainstream technology
Major Grids already work in production (EGEE: 18’000 computers,
Google: 100’000 computers?...)
Major IT vendors will integrate Grid middleware in their standard
products (industrial uptake)
Computing and data resources will become commodities on the
Internet
ISPs will offer a wide range of services Grid based, a full mature
market will develop for these services
The result will be a tremendous computing and data processing
power which will enable a new set of scientific applications and
generate large revenues for business applications
A potential leveler for a worldwide science and economy => digital
Divide could be moderated
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… And time will tell how wrong we are in our
predictions now
See you back here next year!
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