EGI-InSPIRE
Abstract
The ultimate goal of EGI-InSPIRE is to provide European scientists and their international partners with a sustainable, reliable e-Infrastructure that can support their needs for large-scale data analysis. This is essential in order to solve the big questions facing science today, and in the decades to come.EGI-InSPIRE will coordinate the transition from a project-based system (the EGEE series) to a sustainable pan-European e-Infrastructure. The four-year project will support grids of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC) resources.The project is ideally placed to integrate new Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, to benefit the user communities within the European Research Area.EGI-InSPIRE will collect user requirements and provide support for the current and potential new user communities, for example the ESFRI projects. The project will also support the current heavy users of the infrastructure, such as high energy physics, computational chemistry and life sciences, as they move their critical services and tools from a centralised support model to one driven by their own individual communities.
Intellectual Merit
The outcome of the activity proposed to be carried out on FutureGrid resources helps defining and raising the quality of demanded and delivered Grid Middleware. The Quality Criteria that are used to verify the software delivered to EGI.eu is driven by public process of requirements gathering sourced from user communities and operations communities.
Broader Impact
Software that does not pass Quality Criteria Verification will not be allowed to the production infrastructure of EGI.eu, thus broadly raising the bar of software availability, usability and reliability. By introducing such a gate keeping function in EGI.eu, technology providers specialised in delivering software to Grids are exposed to common Quality Assurance procedures found in the commercial world, which will leverage general introduction of software development processes that are not gauged at project lifespan, but software sustainability instead.
Use of FutureGrid
Use as infrastructure for verification of quality criteria applied to software delivered for release on the production infrastructure of EGI.eu.
Scale Of Use
On demand provisioning of virtual machines for verifying quality criteria of delivered Grid middleware. The frequency of provisioning is expected to happen about once per month. The number of VM instances is expected to vary, from very small (less than 5) to medium capacity (about 20). The average time of VM uptime is expected fom below 24 h up to a week.
Futuregrid is a resource provider for