Introduction to e-Infrastructure: Enabling the Research of the Future

Wednesday 22 Feb 2006, 09:30 → 16:30 Europe/Zurich

University College London

Clare Gryce

Research is increasingly carried out by collaborations enabled by the Internet. These collaborations may be within a University, between institutes within a country, or be international. A typical feature of such collaborative research enterprises is that, by building with the infrastructure and software of grid computing, they share very large data collections and very large scale computing resources.

e-Infrastructure is the term used for the technology and organisations that support research pursued in this manner. It embraces networks, grids, data centres and collaborative environments and includes the supporting operations centres, certificate authorities, training and help-desk services.

A range of e-Infrastructure developments is maturing: grid computing is increasingly used as a basis for the computation and data management required by collaborative research, and JISC investments such as in virtual research environments are now being adopted. Production services, notably the National Grid Service and the international EGEE grid are being established, and at the same time new technologies are poised for deployment. A kaleidescope of possibilities results, one which is becoming ever more colourful. The technologies are increasingly being applied in many domains, far beyond the bounds of the early adopters who were in a few scientific disciplines.

This event is presented jointly by UCL and the National e-Science Centre. It will:

• Inform decision makers, researchers and systems management about the possibilities that are arising.
• Support UCL in building its communities of those adopting or considering adopting e-Infrastructure.

To achieve these goals the talks seek to give:

• An overview of initiatives within UCL
• An understanding of the concepts, promise, and status of e-Infrastructure
• An outline of major initiatives at the scales of University, UK and internationally.

Target Audience: This event is aimed at researchers, IT systems managers and decision makers in research-active institutions. Attendees from UCL, London and the South East more generally are all welcome.

Registration: It is necessary to register to attend the event. Please follow this link

There is no charge for this event.

The following agenda may be subject to minor modification.

09:30 → 09:40 Welcome and Introduction

09:40 → 10:20 Overview of e-Infrastructure

The concepts of the different aspects of e-Infrastructure are explained, including networks connecting resources of data and computation; Grids that enable these resources to be perceived as "virtual computers" that support collaboration. The impact that e-Infrastructure is beginning to have on research is described with emphasis on the enabling of collaboration. The talk sets the context for the remainder of the day, which explores e-Infrastructure at different scales - the campus, nationally and internationally.

Speaker: Mike Mineter (NeSC training team)

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10:20 → 11:00 Campus grids: e-Infrastructure within a University

Many UK universities and institutes have already deployed e-Infrastructures. Their motivations, methods, problems and opportunities are summarised. Current emphasis is often on the better use of computational resources - so for example, teaching laboratories with many PCs can be used overnight as a high-throughput resource for computation. The potential for e-Infrastructure to contribute more widely is explored, for example through the sharing of data and in support for multi-disciplinary research.

Speaker: Mike Mineter (NeSC training team)

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11:00 → 11:20 COFFEE

11:20 → 11:50 The eMinerals project and the UCL Condor Pool

The eMinerals project has been active in use and development of the UCL Condor Pool: * how has Condor benefitted the project and what results have been enabled? * current and future Condor development activity by eMinerals

Speaker: Professsor John Brodholt (UCL)

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11:50 → 12:35 UK-wide e-Infrastructure

UK e-Infrastructure comprises the networks (JANET, SuperJANET, UKLight), the National Grid Service and the supporting organisations such as the Grid Operations Support Centre and the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII). An introduction to these is given. Related developments emerging from JISC are also summarised.

Speaker: NeSC training team

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12:35 → 13:20 LUNCH

13:20 → 13:50 Grid Service Orchestration using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Modern scientific applications often need to be distributed across grids. Increasingly applications rely on services, such as job submission, data transfer or data portal services. We refer to such services as grid services. While the invocation of grid services could be hard coded in theory, scientific users want to orchestrate service invocations more flexibly. In enterprise applications, the orchestration of web services is achieved using emerging orchestration standards, most notably the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). We describe our experience in orchestrating scientific workflows using BPEL. We have gained this experience during an extensive case study that orchestrates grid services for the automation of a polymorph prediction application. Using this example, we explain the extent with which the BPEL language supports the definition of scientific workflows.We then describe the reliability, performance and scalability that can be achieved by executing a complex scientific workflow with ActiveBPEL, an industrial strength but freely available BPEL engine.

Speaker: Professor Wolfgang Emmerich (UCL)

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13:50 → 14:20 International e-Infrastructure

Many research collaborations are international. These can be empowered by an international e-infrastructure. Examples are given. The major European initiatives that integrate national initiatives in networking (GEANT), high performance computing (DEISA) and grid computing (EGEE) are described. The implications of international e-Infrastructure are summarised with reference to emerging standards and interoperability between grids that support many reseach communities.

Speaker: NeSC training team

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14:20 → 14:40 TEA

14:40 → 15:20 Web Services based Environments for Computational Science on Grids

We present two lightweight web-services based middleware schemes developed to facilitate easy access to distributed resources and grids for computational science. WEDS (Web services based environment for distributed simulations) is a WSRF-compliant hosting environment ideal for deploying applications onto "grids" limited to a single administrative domain. WEDS is written in perl and uses WSRF::Lite as its middleware. WEDS is easy to install and run in user space. The Application Hosting Environment (AHE) extends the WEDS philosophy to enable application deployment across administrative domains in the true "grid" sense. The AHE uses WSRF::Lite as its middleware and GridSAM as its interface to grid resource managers like Globus. The AHE client is written in java and designed to be lightweight with the ultimate objective of deployment on thin clients including PDAs. In our approach, the computational scientists are far-removed from the complexity of grid middleware, queuing systems, resource management, etc. and have easy access to grid resources for launching their applications .

Speaker: Professor Peter Coveney and Dr Radhika Saksena (UCL)

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15:20 → 15:40 Nurturing e-Research at UCL: Past, Present and Future

Speaker: Professors Roland Rosner and G David Price (UCL)

15:40 → 16:30 Closing discussion