UC-EUMEDGrid-integration
From EGI Knowledge Base
Use Case title: Integration of Applications into the e-Infrastructure.
Short description:
Actors involved: Scientific Communities and application support teams
Related Requirements: The set up of a dedicated surveys is, so far, the criteria adopted to collect technical information and requirements about new users’ applications and new scientific communities that need to quickly join the Grid. Filling the questionnaire the applications coming from the various partners will be ranked by the TB and selected to be ported on the official Grid Infrastructure following the conditions specified in the previous section. Here after follows several aspects that will be take into account during the selection of new applications:
- Technical criteria (e.g. need for large computing resources, requirements in terms of CPU, storage, organization of data and network needs);
- Expected benefits for the research field and also the possible impact in the Mediterranean area;
- Prospective need of new Grid services which require the interaction with the Joint Research Activity;
WP4 will also take care to provide a common procedure by which additional communities could be interested to use the EUMEDGRID Infrastructure. Every time a new community is selected a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is establish in order to specify the details of the collaboration and plan future works.
Steps: To speed up the porting of new applications on a Grid environment, full-immersion events like the Grid school arranged in Egypt will be adopted. Only in these special events researchers have more chances to keep in touch with Grid experts and work with them to the integration of their personal applications. Anyway, since it is not always feasible arrange big events such as Grid school, due to the high cost requested in terms of budget and humans' resources, an easy way to continue the support and the integration of new applications coming from new communities or support the existing ones, without affect the limited budget of the partners involved within the project, is to establish a pool of grid experts dedicated to the integration porting. The purpose of these pool of experts is to provide all the technical support and assistance to researchers/communities who have applications to be integrated on the official EUMEDGRID Infrastructure. This pool of experts will be composed by FTEs of all the partners involved in the project. The training of the pool will be achieved through the organization of dedicated training events. With the help of these grid experts the integration plan to gridify a new application can be described using the following workflow:
- New users' applications are selected by Technical Board (TB) taking into account all the technical requirements collected using the questionnaire for new users’ applications distributed by the project.
- The promoters of the selected applications contact the pool of experts asking for a technical support.
- The pool of experts start a feasibility study in order to understand how to follow the integration process of the application and assess its suitability.
- In case of positive assessment, the pool of experts will establish a dedicated task force to support the integration of the application. This task-force will support the integration of the application visiting the application experts. Alternatively, if a limited budget will be assigned to each partners, new users’ applications could be supported giving to application's experts the possibility to visit the pool of experts for some technical consultation. The following figure resume what has been described so far.
All the work requested to support the integration of a new application must be carried out by the grid experts in close collaboration with the experts of the proposed application. If needed, a strong interaction with Joint Research Activity will be set up in order to develop all the additional grid services that might be needed by the application to run on a Grid environment. This new proposed approach to speed up the integration of new applications is largely based on the successful experience gained during the Grid School arranged by the EUMEDGRID project. During this event, thanks to the collaboration of grid experts coming from different countries, 9 different scientific applications of different scientific domains were helped to be deployed on the official EUMEDGRID Infrastructure.
Another possible way to speed up the integration of some other users’ applications, without affect the budgets, is to establish a sort of virtual teams. A team composed of two, three experts headed by an application leader who will take care to follow up step-by-step the integration of the application remotely interacting with the application experts via conferences. In both ways we can support the scientific growth of some existing applications and on the other hand, enrich their number demonstrating the importance of the Infrastructure for the researchers and communities involved in the Mediterranean area.
Post-conditions: The application will be supported and deployed on all the EUMEDGRID sites and in collaboration with WP2, a Virtual Organization for the new scientific community will be established. Both activities will be pursued in parallel and with a strong interplay between each other.
Application(s): Several are the applications have been successful ported on the EUMEDGRID Infrastructure. A specific attention has been devoted to two kinds of applications: the first set has been deployed to validate the pilot Grid Infrastructure (LHC experiments already supported by EGEE). The second have been chosen because of their regional relevance (ArchaeoGrid, CODESA-3D) and by selecting them trough web questionnaire and subsequent deployment during a dedicated School for Application Porting (EGSAP-1) in Cairo. The pilot infrastructure was also made available for the Data Challenge of WISDOM.
