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Date of the Meeting: 15th October 2009, Alberta Canada

Minute Author: David Wallom

Attendees:

EGEE: Steven Newhouse,

TeraGrid: JP Navaro, Dan Katz

DEISA: John Kennedy

OSG: Keith Chadwick

Naregi: Kento Aida

WestGrid: Rob Simmonds

OGF-Europe: David Wallom

Security: David Kelsey

Due to telephone problems, Bob Jones (EGEE) and Miron Livny (OSG) were unable to connect to the meeting.

Canadian Introductions

Rob S introduced WestGrid and Compute Canada. Rob went through the individual pages that have already been defined and give opinions for each fields etc. (This was for WestGrid and Compute Canada.)

Portals and Gateways

JP Navaro introduced the portal and gateways survey that he had performed.

There was a discussion about differences between portals and gateways above and beyond survey reports.
Portal: General web based access
Gateway: Community specific not web specific
Availability of common information services could facilitate interoperation between different community gateways across infrastructures.
Do infrastructures know and catalogue all portals and gateways?

Steven said that he did not consider access to multiple infrastructures from a single portal as meaning that the infrastructures interoperated. There needs to be additional work on “Grid Access Points”.

Data Allocations

David introduced the data table from the webpage and DEISA is going to look into TeraGrid policies where they apply for communities. Other infrastructures, particularly EGEE, want to ensure that they are not in the business of resource allocation per se.

Charging

Infrastructure Position statements received before the meeting:

EGEE position statement:

EGEE does not own the resources and hence does not charge for their usage. Accounting information is used by several VOs, such as those for the LHC experiments, to verify that resources pledged by resource providers is indeed made available. It is envisaged that this scheme will be extended to more and more VOs in the future (the reporting process has already started for EGEE’s “top 10” VOs).

During EGEE-II a survey was made of the sites in the production infrastructure to determine if they would be interested in renting access to their resources, a small number did respond positively. For many others the issue was that they had no mechanism internally for charging for resources or it was forbidden by the owning organisation.

In EGI, national grid initiatives pay a membership fee to join. This fee takes into account, as one parameter, the size of the national resource community but not their resource usage. Looking to the future, one could envisage that the exchange of resources between EGI member countries, or between VOs, will be better formalised.

Extract of Bob’s notes on e-Infrastructures for e-Science: 7th Concertation Meeting, Brussels 12-14 October 2009.

The event was organised by the Belief-II project with approximately 120 registered participants: http://www.beliefproject.org/events/7th-e-infrastructure-concertation-meeting

The event involved project and user community representatives. The plenary sessions gave an overview of where we stand with e-Infrastructures today, the goals of the ESFRI projects and how they could potentially make use of e-Infrastructures. Seven recent EC projects were presented from the data management/access domain. Data management was a declared theme with a number of the parallel sessions dedicated to different aspects of data storage, access and management.

Governance models for e-Infrastructures session

Peter Tindemans highlighted what are the issues around governance models for networks, grids, HPC and data repositories. He suggested a closer integration of e-Infrastructures (network, grids, HPC) for data management and proposed to put aside 2% of money allocated to users in research grants for storage of data. I believe we have to think about motivation as well - if people are obliged to store data but don’t really care about it afterwards they will pick the cheapest service available and only store the minimum set of data required. How about if they could gain credit when the data is accessed as well as being charged for storage? Would this motivate them to store their most interesting data?

Marie-Christine Sawley also picked-up the idea of using grants or “vouchers” as a way of giving users the financial means to get access to e-Infrastructures. This scheme could cover all e-Infrastructure services (including commercial and public providers) and provide a true freedom of choice but requires two important aspects:

Interoperability between all e-Infrastructures is necessary to enable freedom choice by allowing users to move their identify, data and code between e-Infrastructure providers
An accounting model to ensure resources consumed by users can be recorded across all e-Infrastructures

Recalling a conversation I once had with Satoshi Matsuoka, I believe Japan has already experimented with such a model so we could perhaps learn from their experiences.

DEISA position statement on charging fees:

Usage of DEISA resources is free of charge. DEISA is operated on top of national supercomputing services. Part of the resources are dedicated to DEISA. Resources are provided via two different mechanisms:

DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) with annual calls for single projects
Virtual Community Support

DECI proposals are subject to a peer review and a technical evaluation. Guidelines for virtual community support are under development.

Discussion

There was a discussion on charging and how it may apply to different infrastructures. This included what technical infrastructures may be needed with respect to auditing. The general response from participants was that they do not currently or plan to have charging for their resources.

Actions: JP to provide definitions for a gateway and a portal. With these definition the questionnaire will be re

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