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UNICORE 2020 - Strategic options for the future
Abstract
International e-Infrastructures offer a wide variety of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services that federate computing, storage, networking and other hardware in order to create an 'innovative toolset' for multidisciplinary research and engineering. UNICORE services are known to be secure, reliable, and fast providing researchers all over the world with powerful software that enables the use of those e-Infrastructures as a 'commodity tool' in daily geographically distributed activities. As key technology provider of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), UNICORE is available as part of the Unified Middleware Distribution (UMD) serving the needs of researchers that require mainly High Throughput Computing (HTC). On the other end of the scale, UNICORE offers specifically optimized resources within the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) today. Beyond Europe, UNICORE installations are emerging more and more such as within the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) US multi-disciplinary e-Infrastructure (aka Cyberinfrastructure) offering both HTC and HPC resources. The grand challenges in science, engineering, and in society that need to be solved towards 2020 and beyond will increasingly require both geographical and intellectual collaboration across multiple disciplines. International e-Infrastructures are considered to be one key toolset to tackle those grand challenges and this contribution will outline several options how UNICORE can remain one 'technology of choice' towards 2020. A strategic roadmap is presented that illustrates the role of UNICORE alongside the European Commission's (EC) vision for Europe in 2020, including the opportunities that arise for UNICORE in the context of the Digital Agenda for Europe. The roadmap also includes how UNICORE can play a role to tackle, or perhaps rather contribute with processing to the avoidance of 'big data waves' arising from a wide variety of e-Infrastructure users emerging from the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRIs).
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The paper presents an overview of the current research and achievements of the DEISA project, with a focus on the general concept of the infrastructure, the operational model, application projects and science communities, the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, user and application support, operations and technology, services, collaborations and interoperability, and the use of standards and policies. The paper concludes with a discussion about the long-term sustainability of the DEISA infrastructure.
Many production Grid and e-Science infrastructures have begun to offer services to end-users during the past several years with an increasing number of scientific applications that require access to a wide variety of resources and services in multiple Grids. Therefore, the Grid Interoperation Now—Community Group of the Open Grid Forum—organizes and manages interoperation efforts among those production Grid infrastructures to reach the goal of a world-wide Grid vision on a technical level in the near future. This contribution highlights fundamental approaches of the group and discusses open standards in the context of production e-Science infrastructures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) is an initiative, strongly supported by the European Commission (EC), that seeks to develop an integrated model of human physiology at multiple scales from the whole body through the organ, tissue, cell and molecular levels to the genomic level. VPH had its beginnings in 2005 with informal discussions amongst like-minded scientists which led to the STEP project, a Coordination Action funded by the EC that began in early 2006. The STEP project greatly accelerated the progress of the VPH and proved to be a catalyst for wide-ranging discussions within Europe and for outreach activities designed to develop a broad international approach to the huge scientific and technological challenges involved in this area. This paper provides an overview of the VPH and the developments it has engendered in the rapidly expanding worldwide activities associated with the physiome. It then uses one particular project, the Living Human Project, to illustrate the type of advances that are taking place to further the aims of the VPH and similar initiatives worldwide.
Computational simulations and thus scientific computing is the third pillar alongside theory and experiment in science for a few decades now. In the last decade, the term Grid and later e-science evolved as a new research field that both focus on collaboration in key areas of science using so-called next generation distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) to extend the potential of scientific computing. During the past years, significant international and broader interdisciplinary e-research is increasingly carried out by global collaborations that often share the resources of these DCIs. Examples of these DCIs have been the Enabling Grid for e-Science (EGEE) infrastructure as well as the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) in Europe. Despite of the early success we can observe a change in the near future with these infrastructures since these project-based funded infrastructures like EGEE or DEISA move towards a more sustainable funding model in Europe. The result is a different landscape of DCIs as experienced in the last decade leading to the European Grid Initiative (EGI) infrastructure and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) infrastructure. At the same time end-user communities organized themselves better than before and developed roadmaps for their scientific endeavours. In this context, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) released an interesting roadmap of 44 projects that bear the potential of a high amount of end-users that also require DCIs for their scientific e-research. Another promising roadmap alignment of DCI end-users can be observed in the context of the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) to push and focus efforts related to e-Health. In parallel to all the aforementioned 'emerging changes' UNICORE is still established as the technology of choice for resources used in High Performance Computing (HPC). The question remains whether this will be the case in the future and to which extend new e-research endeavours will influence the funding opportunities (and thus major developments) for the UNICORE community. This contribution will give some answers to these questions by providing one potential UNICORE roadmap that reveals a promising future.
In this work we describe our developments towards the provision of a unified access method to different types of computing infrastructures at the interoperation level. For that, we have developed a middleware suite which bridges not interoperable middleware stacks used for building distributed computing infrastructures, UNICORE and gLite. Our solution allows to transparently access and operate on HPC and HTC resources from a single interface. Using Kepler as workflow manager, we provide users with the needed integration of codes to create scientific workflows accessing both types of infrastructures.
E-health makes use of information and communication methods and the latest e-research tools to support the understanding of body functions. E-scientists in this field take already advantage of one single infrastructure to perform computationally-intensive investigations of the human body that tend to consider each of the constituent parts separately without taking into account the multiple important interactions between them. But these important interactions imply an increasing complexity of applications that embrace multiple physical models (i.e. multi-physics) and consider a larger range of scales (i.e. multi-scale) thus creating a steadily growing demand for interoperable infrastructures that allow for new innovative application types of jointly using different infrastructures for one application. But interoperable infrastructures are still not seamlessly provided and we argue that this is due to the absence of a realistically implementable infrastructure interoperability reference model that is based on lessons learned from e-science usage. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to explore the potential of using multiple infrastructures for one scientific goal with a particular focus on e-health. Since e-scientists gain more interest in using multiple infrastructures there is a clear demand for interoperability between them to enable a use with one e-research tool. The paper highlights work in the context of an e-Health blood flow application while the reference model is applicable to other e-science applications as well.
The growing power and number of high performance computing resources made available through computational grids present major opportunities as well as a number of challenges to the user. At issue is how these resources can be accessed and how their power can be effectively exploited. In this paper we first present our views on the usability of contemporary high-performance computational resources. We introduce the concept of grid application virtualization as a solution to some of the problems with grid-based HPC usability. We then describe a middleware tool that we have developed to realize the virtualization of grid applications, the Application Hosting Environment (AHE), and describe the features of the new release, AHE 2.0, which provides access to a common platform of federated computational grid resources in standard and non-standard ways. Finally, we describe a case study showing how AHE supports clinical use of whole brain blood flow modelling in a routine and automated fashion.