© 2006 step consortium ict infrastructure strand

© 2006 STEP Consortium

ICT InfrastructureICT InfrastructureStrandStrand


PresentationPresentation

Marco PetroneMarco PetroneCinecaCineca


EU Infrastructures

• Géant network

• e-Infrastructure has 3 projects:– EGEE:

• interconnecting small/medium computing facilities– DEISA:

• network between existing supercomputer sites– OMII-EU

• extension of OMII-UK; develop middleware for Grid– some Periphery projects

• taking advantage of the infrastructure


Other Issues

• EuroVo:– integration of off-the-shelf software– procedure for software development to certification

quality

• pyramid structure:– national/local facilities to communicate with

European-level facilities to be developed– European facilities should have resources larger than

those currently available at HPC sites


LHDL

• started Feb 2006

• exemplar for community building/collaboration

• storage & computing services– professionally managed– looking for sustainable model


Questions/Remarks

• new environments unfriendly to users

• users should have greater support

• staff available at supercomputer centre specialised to particular fields

• recognise that user should feel comfortable– they want the “look” of their familiar software– difficult with specialised software

• need layer to support more general user

• EC is currently supporting recent projects to address this problem


PresentationPresentation

Chris JohnsonChris JohnsonUniversity of UtahUniversity of Utah


Integrated Software Environment

• data capture

• imaging

• modelling

• simulation

• interpretation

• intervention

• variety of visualisation techniques


Questions/Remarks

• how to ensure that the representation is accurate?

• little done so far in relation to uncertainty in visualisation – needs work

• users continue to use outdated algorithms – possibly because later algorithms are more complex

• making different software modules work together remains a challenge– need common component architecture

• too much code is produced to low software engineering standards


ICT InfrastructureICT Infrastructure

Gordon Clapworthy

STEP Consortium


The Roadmap

• Common Objectives

• Research Challenges

• Resources Required

• Ethical, Legal and Gender Issues

• Impact Analysis

• Dissemination Models

• Exploitation Models & Long-term Sustainability

• Concrete Implementation: recommendations


Common Objectives

• support community building

• provide user-specific access tools

• develop production-strength semantic representations of the VPH and of the infrastructure (Semantic Grid)

• develop robust backend services for:– user authentication– access to VPH resources (data services, simulation

services)– publication of VPH Resources– federation of repositories


Living Human Digital Library


Research Challenges

• VPH portal (Biomed Town?)

• frameworks and toolkits for fat clients development

• semantic resource brokers

• tools for collaborative maintenance of ontologies

• software architecture for semantic representation of storage resources

• software architecture for sharing and reuse of simulation resources

• toolkits for wrapping of storage and simulation resources into web services


Research Challenges /2

• VPH Node backend middleware distribution

• VPH Security model (Challenge)

• interoperability toolkits (mediators)

• concrete implementation– direct EC funding for continuous operation of the

common infrastructure

© 2006 step consortium ict infrastructure strand

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