Certified Grid Engineer Curriculum

It is proposed that we should have two levels of certification

• Certified Grid Engineer
• Certified Grid Technician

It should also be possible to study just a single module if a user needs a shorter course, but this will not lead to a certification. In order to do this the curriculum must be modular.

There could also be different flavours of qualification depending on the modules taken

• Grid Certified Engineer (Systems)
• Grid Certified Engineer (Applications)

There should be a number of core modules and a set of elective modules of which a cetain number must be taken (or a certain number of credits from these modules must be attained). This electives list can be expanded by local people (sysadmin, programming, apis, deployment, etc.). The curriculum must specify that in order to achieve the qualification the learner must have demonstrable practical ability in one middleware, so examples will be done on a real grid throughout, but the middleware can vary. The Technician could involve the technician base module and one specialisation module while the Engineer could involve the Engineer base module and several specialisation modules There should be a clear migration path from technician to engineer.

The certification name doesn't specify what middleware they know, in their CV for example they would say "Certified Grid Engineer (Applications) with experience of the gLite Grid middleware).

The approach decided on was to list modules and then split them into:

• Core Modules
• Systems Modules
• Applications Modules

Core Modules:

• Introduction
• Motivations
• History and context
• Definition of a Grid
• Case studies

These could be prerequisites - maybe have a pre-course session to provide some background information, required skills, etc. or foundation level material that you actually cover as part of the course

Possible modules:

• Grid Security
• Information Services
• Resource Allocation
• Data Management
• workflows and scripting languages
• APIs - at least an introduction to APIs, what is an API, what is the value of APIs
• Software Engineering Concepts Rudiger points out that an end user doing workflows may not need this but... Malcolm and David counter that small workflows become big workflows and they need to know how to write maintainable systems they may not need to learn how to be software engineers, but they need an appreciation of the issues, etc. so that they can recognise when they're running into problems and can get appropriate help.
• standards (protocols and APIs) APIs above come into this from above
• Networking concepts and practical networking issues
• Management issues - multiple ownership issues, VOs, policies, handling people who don't adhere to policies. Grid Operation Concepts or Socio-economic concepts of Grids.

Issue for later discussion

information about the market...

Rudiger has some info about the possible market for this training. Polytech schools in Germany are currently modifying their distributed curriculum to include grid so we are already producing grid engineers but without any standard curriculum. These people will be needed in banks, insurance companies, companies who sell compute cycles (maybe google, yahoo type companies), copanies who buy compute cycles... Where do they get trained staff?

• from academia - people who are already working with grids
• from clustering background - transfer to grids
• from polytechnics - producing staff directly for that demand

The Certified Grid Engineer curriculum focusses on the third option, above but can also be useful to those from a clustering background who wish to transfer to Grids.