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Experience at EGI Community Forum 2014
by Juhani Toivonen and Lirim Osmani
The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a federation of research organisations that provide computational resources and services to European researchers and their partners around the world. It consists of National Grid Initiatives, one of which is in Finland (http://fgi.csc.fi) and is managed by an organisation called EGI.eu.
In the 21st week a five-day EGI Community Forum was organised in the main building of University of Helsinki by the EGI.eu, together with the University of Helsinki and CSC - IT Centre for Science. A group of 15 students in computer science and physics from University of Helsinki volunteered and participated in the event as conference assistants. I'm writing about my experience as one of them.
The event consists of a diverse number of presentations and workshops on grid-computing related subjects, with topics ranging from how to manage the grid, how to do it securely, what sort of science is done using grids, and what to do with the data once the scientific task has been done.
The distinction between a grid and a cloud has been under debate for quite a long time. The underlying infrastructure can be quite similar, especially now that you can buy cloud Virtual Machines (VMs) that can provide things more traditional to grids than to clouds, such as accessing GPGPU-hardware. Furthermore, there is the EGI Federated Cloud, which is an effort for federating resources from cloud platforms to provide a virtualised grid. The main distinction between a grid and a cloud now seems to be whether the computing resources are sold as a service by a business, or whether they were provided through co-operation initiatives in a free-at-the-point-of-use fashion.
Grids are generally used for computing batches of jobs. A researcher prepares the data, chooses what must be done to it, sends it to a grid either directly or through a batch queuing system, and waits for result-data to come back. This involves middleware for managing and securing the transfers of data and other workings of the system. A well represented example at the event was the NorduGrid's ARC middleware, which combines a collection of other open source toolkits such as OpenSSL, SASL and the Globus Toolkit to build a reliable and scalable grid management middleware.
A hot topic at the event concerns Open Science and Data Preservation, archiving data and making the archives accessible to others. Once a data set was collected, it can be catalogued, stored and shared with others. This can save a huge amount of effort from others who work on topics that need such data, and can be essential for repeating and verifying the process of how some research results were achieved. Lots of work on how to do this has been done for example by the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The examples of such infrastructures include the OpenAIRE and EUDAT B2.
Overall the event went well. The sessions, posters and other presentations were divided into three floors in a sensible way, and the schedules were mostly kept. The lunches and the reception event on Monday offered lots of social interactions. The food was great too. There was also a dinner event in the spacious glass roofed courtyard of the restaurant Wanha Satama, where the food was great and service was good and swift.
For a student, this opportunity to be part of the event was interesting. It taught us many practical matters in organising these sort of community events. For aspiring young to-be-researchers it opened up our eyes a bit to what sort of support infrastructures for research are out there, and finally it enabled us to network with the participants through all the social events.
Photos copyright CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd (2014)
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