© 2006 STEP Consortium
ICT InfrastructureICT InfrastructureStrandStrand
© 2006 STEP Consortium
PresentationPresentation
Marco PetroneMarco PetroneCinecaCineca
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
LHDL
• started Feb 2006
• exemplar for community building/collaboration
• storage & computing services– professionally managed– looking for sustainable model
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
PresentationPresentation
Chris JohnsonChris JohnsonUniversity of UtahUniversity of Utah
© 2006 STEP Consortium
Integrated Software Environment
• data capture
• imaging
• modelling
• simulation
• interpretation
• intervention
• variety of visualisation techniques
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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• users continue to use outdated algorithms – possibly because later algorithms are more complex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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
ICT InfrastructureICT Infrastructure
Gordon Clapworthy
STEP Consortium
© 2006 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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
Living Human Digital Library
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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
© 2006 STEP Consortium
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