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e-IRG – NewsletterPaving the way towards a general purpose European e-Infrastructure

Highlights from the delegates meetingsSince the publishing of the previous edition of this Newsletter, there were three delegates meetings, in Milan, Rome, and Riga.Page 4

Freeing up ScienceAnnouncing the kick-off of OpenAIRE2020.0

Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructuresNew Guidelines document published by the e-IRG. Page 6

e-Infrastructure CommonsInterview with Arjen van Rijn.Page 18

e-IRG Workshop RomeAn important topic discussed was the document "Guidelines and Best e-Infrastructure practices for large-scale research infrastructures".Page 13

Conference reportCloudscape VII in BrusselsPage 23

Newsletter Spring 2015

e-IRG Chair Sverker Holmgren re-elected for a second term

During the delegates meeting in November 2014 in Rome, the e-IRG delegates re-elected Sverker Holmgren unanimously for a second term. Sverker Holmgren was elected for his first term as e-IRG chair during the delegates meeting in Athens under the Cyprus EU Presidency in 2012. The first term of Sverker Holmgren’s chairmanship was focused on the transition from FP7 to Horizon 2020, the International Conference on Research Infrastructures 2014 in Athens and strengthening the collaboration with ESFRI. ¶

Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructuresWith the title "Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures" e-IRG recently issued guidelines on how to take into account the use of existing and upcoming e-Infrastructures when defining new research infrastructures. The aim of this guidelines document is to guide large-scale research infrastructures in the process of planning and of implementing in a later phase their electronic infrastructure (e-Infrastructure) components, with a special focus on integration with and use of existing or emerging national and European electronic Infrastructures (e-Infrastructures). ¶

Read further at Page 6 >>

e-IRG Workshop Open Science and e-Infrastructures, June 3, RigaThe upcoming e-IRG workshop covers Policy Aspects of Open Science for e-Infrastructures. It aims to discuss the requirements and consequences of the transition to Open Science on e-Infrastructure policies. ¶Read further at Page 2 >>

Research Data Alliance Plenary 5 Conference ReportConference in March 2015 in San Diego. With the theme “Adopt a Deliverable", four hundred attendees celebrated the support RDA has received in its first two years as a global organisation and collaborated on ways to foster an open environment for data. ¶ Read further at Page 11 >>

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e-IRG Workshop Open Science and e-Infrastructures, June 3, 2015, Riga, LatviaThe e-IRG workshop under the Latvian presidency of the European Union covers the theme of Policy Aspects of Open Science for e-Infrastructures. It aims to discuss the requirements and consequences of the transition to Open Science on e-Infrastructure policies. The topics discussed will cover the policies on governing the access to data, computing and networking resources, sharing of resources and the transfer of knowledge.

This one-day e-IRG workshop will take place on 3 June as pre-conference event to the WIRE conference - Week of Innovative Regions on June 4-5, 2015. The e-IRG workshop sessions will explore how different e-Infrastructure policies have to be adapted to support Open Science and how the different countries could benefit from these changes. In the afternoon of the first day of the WIRE conference, one of the parallel sessions will tackle the topic “The Challenges of Open Data” with emphasis on regional aspects.

In more detail, the aim of the workshop is to discuss the requirements and effects of the gradual transition from Science to Open Science on e-Infrastructure policies and to present some use cases. To support the transition from Science to Open Science the policies governing the access to data, computing, and network - in short the e-Infrastructures - enabling the sharing of data and resources and the transfer of knowledge and software, need to be adapted.

There are currently four sessions planned in the e-IRG workshop:

Welcome addresses and invited presentations including a keynote. In this session local dignitaries will provide welcome addresses and the perspectives of the Latvian EU presidency; EC representatives will present EC Consultation on Science 2.0 results, and there will be a keynote presentation on the policy implications for e-infrastructure when Open Science is introduced.

Session 1: Open Science - Directions and main issues The aim of this session is to present the main directions on Open Science along with main issues or areas that may require policy actions. OpenScience Finland, the Research Data Alliance actions on Open Science/Data

and the Long Tail of Science/Data perspectives will be presented in this session.

Session 2: Open Science – Use Cases The aim of this session is to present some concrete use cases on Open Science, including best practices, challenges and plans. New ESFRI/Research Infrastructure cluster projects and e-Infrastructure data projects will be presented focusing on their approach regarding Open Science. The issue of open software licenses will also be tackled.

Session 3: Open Science – The policy perspective and relevance to e-Infrastructures. The aim of this panel is to present Open Science policy perspective at EU/regional/national levels and relevance/implications on e-Infrastructures (again at EU/regional/national levels). The viewpoints of national initiatives, EC, ESFRI, LIBER/LERU and of key e-Infrastructure data projects will be explained. ¶

The detailed programme and information on registering at the e-IRG website: http://e-irg.eu/e-irg-workshop-june-2015

For more on the WIRE conference visit http://wire2015.eu/

iSGTW celebrates its 5th anniversary

iSGTW began as Science Grid This Week (SGTW), which was first published in April 2005. Back then, the fastest supercomputer in the world had a Linpack benchmark performance of around 140 Tflop/s (compared to the current record of almost 34,000 Tflop/s) and there were only around a third as many internet users as there are today.

The publication went international in November 2006, becoming International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW). Since then it has grown steadily, receiving over a million visits from countries all over the globe. ¶


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Towards an Open Science CommonsSergio Andreozzi, Strategy & Policy Manager at EGI.eu.

Open science has become a high priority concept in the agenda of policy makers and research organisations. What does it mean, to open science?

Historically, open science started in the 17th century with the institution of science as a profession and with the birth of a publishing system that ensured recognition for original ideas and motivated scientists to disclose research results.

More recently, we are observing a new shift in open science, driven by the digitalisation of the research process, the internet and social networks, and the globalisation of the scientific communities.

Openness can be tackled from different perspectives: 1) opening of the research process, e.g. by enlarging participation to a broader set of researchers including amateur citizen scientists or by making research tools, infrastructures and services accessible to all interested parties with non-discriminatory and clear rules; 2) opening of research products; this ensures that everyone has equal access rights to scientific publications, data, code and other artefacts generated during the research process, especially if it benefitted from public funding.

Different types of related and complementary resources need to be shared in modern open science:

Scientific instruments: the equipment that generates scientific data, from small-scale lab machines to massive facilities (e.g., see ESFRIs); access policies should be clearly defined and embody the principle of openness.

Data: the essential asset that can be used as input into the research process or shared as intermediate or final product; making data reusable across disciplines and organisations is still a key issue and organisations such as RDA are tackling this problem.

Digital services and software: the digital infrastructures and the related software tools and applications provide the essential platform for collaboration, for analysis, sharing and preserving data and for data-driven science; they can be open in terms of access for use, or in terms of supporting open standards that enable easier integration and interoperability across services.

Knowledge: the intellectual capital required or generated by the research process; it can be available through some media (e.g., publications, MOOC) or by interpersonal knowledge transfer ; it is essential to develop new skills (e.g., data scientist) or to support researchers in their work (e.g., consultancy).

All these key resources are involved in the modern science, but their accessibility is often limited (e.g., technical, legal barriers) and fragmented. There are many initiatives to overcome the current situation and we believe that results can be greater if they are managed as a commons.

Managing a resource as a commons means that resources are shared across a given community in a way that guarantees non-discriminatory access, while ensuring adequate controls to avoid congestion or depletion when the capacity is limited. It also

means that members of the community have direct participation in the governance of the commons.

An example is the Wikimedia Commons, an online database created to manage images and media files for Wikipedias in all languages. Another example is the Genome Commons, the large collection of data that was generated by the Human Genome Project and that is today available as a public resource.

Making the Open Science Commons a reality means, for instance, that researchers can easily access distributed sources of knowledge and develop skills; identify and book scientific instruments to conduct experiments, discover and access datasets for analysis and reuse, access computing platforms and capacity to produce new research results. Appropriate business models are in place to ensure preservation of the research results and capacity building to serve the user demand. All these shared resources are managed collectively through a multi-level governance (e.g. community-specific, country-specific) that encourage the sharing and promote collaboration.

As we continue to further develop the vision of the Open Science Commons, we look for contributors that help us in this work. ¶

http://go.egi.eu/oscd

PRACE celebrates its 5th anniversary Source: PRACE

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) celebrates its 5th

anniversary. In the past five years, PRACE has made an enormous leap from a project-based consortium to a fully-fledged international association of 25 countries with an office in Brussels and multiple projects that it leads or co-operates in.

With over 10 thousand million core hours allocated through 10 Calls for Proposals to close to 400 projects – of which almost 60 led by industry – from around the world, PRACE has established itself as the pan-European Research Infrastructure for academic and industrial research and science supported by high performance computing (HPC). And to date, almost 5,000 people have taken part in almost 200 training events. ¶


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Highlights from the delegates meetingsFour times a year, the e-IRG delegates, representing their countries gather for a working meeting. These meeting is organised in the country that at that moment holds the Presidency of the European Union. Since the publishing of the previous edition of this Newsletter, there were three delegates meetings, in Milan, Rome, and Riga. Although the meetings are only open for delegates to attend, there are public minutes published of each meeting. These are available on the e-IRG web site. Because these delegates meetings are typical working meetings, a lot consists of reporting and discussing ongoing work. Hence when one meeting is finished, the results of the previous meetings are not that interesting anymore, as work has progressed. Here we will summarise the highlights of the Milan, Rome and Riga delegates meetings.!

MilanThe 38th e-IRG Delegates Meeting, 15. September 2014, Milan, Italy, was just before the inauguration of the new European Commission (EC). As e-IRG is working closely together with the EC Directorate General (DG) CONNECT, this EC change is of interest to the e-IRG too. At the delegates meeting the EC reported that the European Commission structure under Jean-Claude Juncker, will have 7 Vice Presidents. DG CONNECT is under two Commissioners: the Vice Presidents on Digital Single Market (Andrus Ansip) and the Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society (Guenther Oettinger), which is the follow-up of Digital Agenda for Europe.

e-Infrastructures stay within DG CONNECT, while research infrastructures including ESFRI

stay within DG Research & Innovation (RTD). In DG CONNECT there will be more focus on Innovation and Industry including entrepreneurship and the Internet of Things. DG RTD is under Vice President Growth, Jobs, Investments and Competitiveness (Jyrki Katainen) and Vice President Research, Science and Innovation (Carlos Moedas).

In several European countries work is on the way or just finished to update parts of the e-Infrastructure policies and related documents. The Czech Ministry of Education initiated the evaluation of all e-Infrastructures by an international panel of experts. There will be two stages; the first stage with the list of e-Infrastructures has already been completed. In October the second round of evaluation will start.

The process will be used for the update of the national research infrastructure roadmap. Also Estonia is in the process of updating its infrastructure roadmap. In Finland there is a big effort of the ministry underway on Open Science and Research. Finland's Strategy and Roadmap for Research Infrastructures 2014–2020 is currently being updated. Also Poland and France updated their roadmaps.

All these national research infrastructure roadmap and policy updates were related to the ESFRI 2016 Roadmap process, that was launched late September 2014 in Trieste. As a result of the closer relationship of e-IRG with ESFRI several e-IRG representatives have become members in strategic ESFRI working groups. This includes working groups with research infrastructures on Health and Food, Physical Sciences & Engineering, Innovation, Environment, and Social Sciences and Cultural Innovation. The goal of the participation is to collect and identify needs of research infrastructures for e-infrastructure services, and to promote the available e-Infrastructure services to research infrastructures.

To help the research infrastructures, the e-IRG was working on what was then still called the White Paper 2014: a set of guidelines for “Best practices for using e- infrastructures in large scale Research Infrastructures”. The best practices would be based on the e-Infrastructure Commons, a continuous activity of the e-IRG.

RomeThe 39th e-IRG delegates meeting took place in the exquisite headquarters of the Conference Hall of the Rectors of the Italian Universities in Rome, Italy and was organised in conjunction with the e-IRG workshop held just before the delegates meeting. The main topics addressed during the meeting were the collaboration with ESFRI, including the activities of e-IRG in ESFRI working groups, the new e-IRG White Paper, the Charter of Access to Research Infrastructures and the PLAN-E initiative. The highlight of the meeting was the re-election of the e-IRG Chair Sverker Holmgren for another 2 years.

The e-IRG Executive Board and an ESFRI representative had a formal meeting with EC officials from DG CONNECT. This meeting was very positive and it showed that the Commission had a genuine interest in the activities of e-IRG, including the e-Infrastructure Commons, the e-IRG ESFRI co-operation, and the role of e-IRG as an advisory body. There was a clear request for e-IRG: the issuing of a proposal for the structure of the e-Infrastructure Work Programme 2016-2017 in order to facilitate the implementation of the Commons. In addition, it was confirmed that e-IRG will deliver to ESFRI the e-IRG White Paper 2014 (the name was later changed to e-IRG Guidelines Document) as planned in February 2015.

Work with ESFRI had also continued as was reported during the meeting. The deadline for new ESFRI Roadmap proposals was 31 March 2015. Roadmap proposals would be required to respond to five questions related to e-Infrastructures. The 2016 ESFRI Roadmap for the first time will contain a landscape analysis of research infrastructures in Europe and internationally. e-IRG will provide input on data management and e-Infrastructures in this landscape section.

Also the progress on the White Paper 2014, “Best practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large scale Research Infrastructures” was discussed. A draft version was made early in the process for the proposers, while the final version was planned to be available before ESFRI's deadline of 31 March 2015.

The status of the Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures document was also


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discussed. The document had been evaluated by several research infrastructures including e-Infrastructures - see the article of page 11 of the Fall 2014 issue of this Newsletter. In November, a consensus on the text and a formal approval for publication was expected within the EC. The document is expected to be published in the beginning of 2015.

On 29-30th September 2014 the Platform of National eScience Centres in Europe (“PLAN-E”) had been created in a constituting meeting in Amsterdam. It has some relation to e-IRG work, but addresses different topics and audience. The platform aims to bundle present knowledge and expertise on e-Science across Europe and to define a practical work program towards close cooperation between centres involved in conducting eScience. The main idea of PLAN-E is to build a platform for discussions among e-Science centres. In the first PLAN-E meeting there was a wide range of national actors (including e-Science centres, e-Science platform service providers, and research bodies).

RigaThe 40th e-IRG delegates meeting took place in the Rectors Office at the Riga Technical University. The main topics at this delegates meeting were the White Paper, which was renamed to Guidelines Document at the meeting, and discussions on the input for the draft Work Programme 2016-17 (WP2016-17) of Horizon 2020.

The e-IRG considers the e-Infrastructure Commons as important input to the EC for the preparation of the H2020 Work Programme 2016-2017. This includes the following aspects:

The set of services, provisioned by several e-Infrastructure providers to fulfil the specific needs of the users, should be constantly evolving to adapt to changing user needs.

In WP 2016-2017, an analysis and preparation phase is needed to further identify and isolate the services to be included in the Commons and to enable the creation of a coordination platform for operational e-Infrastructure provisioning.

The process of consolidating service provisioning for the Commons has been partly initiated in WP 2014-2015. A stronger role should be established for European user communities as drivers of the process. WP 2016-2017 should introduce requirements on consolidation of the Commons in all its stages. In particular, the coordination should involve and explicitly name the organisations that formally commit to provide services within the Commons.

In the Commons vision, e-Infrastructure providers have the freedom to innovate, and users enjoy the freedom to choose the services they need. In order to enable this vision, an ecosystem of e-Infrastructure providers is needed, and innovation projects motivated by advanced and demanding user communities.

This could well fit the proposed structure for e-Infrastructures in WP 2016-2017:

1. Integration and consolidation of e-Infrastructure platforms supporting European policies and research and education communities.

2. Prototyping innovative e-Infrastructure platforms and services for research and education communities and the citizens at large.

3. Support to policies and international cooperation.

The White Paper was getting in its final phase by the time of the meeting. The delegates decided to rename the White Paper to e-IRG Guidelines Document. The document should be practical and pragmatic, more open and not only deal with large infrastructures. However, it will be very difficult to get a complete list of all e-Infrastructure initiatives.

For national initiatives and developments, e-IRG will refer to the e-IRG Knowledge Base. This stresses the need for updating this information. e-IRG will request from the e-Infrastructures specific information such as access modes and costs. The e-IRGSP4 project is working on expanding the information in the Knowledge Base with the help of e-IRG delegates that can provide information related to their countries.

With the Guidelines Document almost finished, the e-IRG delegates are directing their attention towards an update of the e-IRG Roadmap. e-IRG Roadmaps provide recommendations and visions for how e-Infrastructures should and could be developed over the coming years. The previous version was published in December 2012. Some of the new aspects for the Roadmap 2015 could be opening e-Infrastructures for massive data collection using new (mobile) technologies. Examples are: the Internet of Things especially in aspects of sensors, Crowd sensing, machine to machine technologies (both wireless and wired). At the next e-IRG delegates meeting in June, again in Riga, the Roadmap and the Roadmap process will be discussed in greater detail.

The e-IRG has also two active task forces: a Task Force on Data Analytics and Computing - that will include recommendations for the EC and the Member States - and a Task Force on Long Tail of Science. The latter group has just started. It could be that the e-IRG delegates will decide in the upcoming meeting to focus on only one task force. If so, we will report on it in the next Newsletter.

Detailed minutes of the delegates meetings are publicly available. If you go to the events pages on the e-IRG website and look for the delegates meeting of your interest, you find a link to the public summary document. It can however take some time before these documents come available, as these minutes have to be approved before publication.¶

Excellent Science in the Digital Age

features e-InfrastructuresSource: European Commission

The Commission published a brochure "Excellent Science in the Digital Age".

It highlights some of the many European initiatives and co-funded research projects which address scientific excellence. European Union policies and investment in these initiatives fosters scientific progress and helps seed new markets, while strengthening European innovation and completing the Digital Single Market, one of the key priorities of the European Commission.

Several e-Infrastructures are mentioned in the brochure, including PRACE, GEANT, and EGI. ¶

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/

Excellent Science

in the Digital Age

Policy and Actions


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With the title "Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures" e-IRG recently issued guidelines on how to take into account the use of existing and upcoming e-Infrastructures when defining new research infrastructures. The aim of this guidelines document is to guide large-scale research infrastructures in the process of planning and of implementing in a later phase their electronic infrastructure (e-Infrastructure) components, with a special focus on integration with and use of existing or emerging national and European electronic Infrastructures (e-Infrastructures). Large-scale international research infrastructures normally have significant networking, computing and data management needs. In the past such research infrastructures often had to establish their “own” e-Infrastructure components and implement and operate the related services. This was done to ensure that the best possible services, adapted to the particular research infrastructure environment and users' requirements, were provided. However both national and European e-Infrastructures of more generic nature have evolved significantly and now offer a broad range of services developed in collaborative efforts with users. It might be more cost effective to use the generic e-Infrastructure services than to build a research specific e-Infrastructure.

Successful research and innovation needs access to first class research infrastructures, and development of top-class research infrastructures is one of the key areas in the reinforcement of the European Research Area. In the overall context of research infrastructures, e-Infrastructures play a more and more important role. Today, almost all large-scale research activities include or are supported by several e-Infrastructure components. Major scientific breakthroughs are increasingly achieved by an international, cross-disciplinary team transferring, storing and analysing vast data collections and performing advanced simulations using different types of computing facilities. e-Infrastructures also enable a new mode of science where resources, i.e. other research infrastructures, are shared and used remotely to overcome fragmentation and cope with increasing costs and complexity. Existing and

emerging e-Infrastructures represent a highly valuable asset when planning and implementing large-scale research infrastructures and such infrastructures in turn represent very important user communities for more generic e-Infrastructures. Much effort has been spent on bringing research infrastructures and e-Infrastructures together for their mutual benefit, but it might still be difficult for many of the stakeholders to grasp the needs of users and the advantages of using existing e-Infrastructures and related services.

To optimise the outcome for research and to facilitate the process of establishing a new research infrastructure, it is essential that the e-Infrastructure needs are already considered at the planning stage. The Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures contains some useful guidelines.

Even if these guidelines were mainly aimed at the research groups that were preparing a research infrastructure proposal in the frame of the ESFRI call for proposals for its next roadmap the conclusions and best practises are useful for all groups that are planning a new research infrastructure and also for existing research infrastructures that want to update their ICT environment and could consider the use of e-Infrastructures or want to update their e-Infrastructure and/or extend their e-Infrastructure services.

In this article we only present the e-needs questions, guidelines and best practices but the document contains substantial background information on existing and upcoming e-Infrastructures and e-Infrastructure services. This background information leads to an understanding of the e-Infrastructure landscape in Europe and in the individual countries. The short overview of the basic e-Infrastructure components is focused on the European scale. However, note that in many cases also e-Infrastructures at a national level can be of great importance and that often coordination exists between the national and European level. It was not possible to elaborate all details on these

national e-Infrastructures in the document but instead pointers to them are provided in the form of references in the e-IRG Knowledge Base. In general, contact information and pointers to more information about e-Infrastructures are presented in the References section of the guidelines document.

e-Needs of ESFRI Research infrastructuresFor the sake of the submitters of ESFRI proposals e-need questions, relevant to the specification of the e-Infrastructure requirements of the proposed ESFRI research infrastructure, have been included in the guidelines. It was important for all ESFRI project proposers to reflect on their needs for networking, computing, data and related services - together coined “e-needs” - and to introduce their plans on these matters in their proposal. Indicators are coupled to the questions and will be used to evaluate the answers on the e-needs questions.

Those questions are:

• What will be the data management and open data policy of the research infrastructure? (e.g. would data become accessible from a repository to the public? Would the research infrastructure be interfaced to e-Infrastructures for science?)

• What is the plan for supporting advanced data management and how will it be funded?

• What is needed (if applicable) from external e-Infrastructure services (resources for storage, computing, networking, tools for data management, security, access, remote analysis, etc.)?

• Will the research infrastructure contribute to the development of e-Infrastructure Commons in the field or in general?

• Will the research infrastructure policy on data include training services for “data

Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructuresAn e-IRG guidelines document

Rosette Vandenbroucke, e-IRGSP4


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practitioners” to enable the effective use of data repositories and data analysis tools by non-scientists?

It is mandatory to answer these questions in the ESFRI project proposals and indicators that will be used for the evaluation are attached to each question.

Recommendations and best practicesA first general recommendation is that the e-Infrastructure needs and data aspects have to be fully taken into account from the beginning of the research infrastructure study phase. The needs and the required resources have to be assessed and the data policy, including the data sharing rules, and the data life cycle, have to be defined.

The first series of best practices that should be taken into account refer to a general framework of e-Infrastructures. They point

out that a lot is already realised, that a lot is going on and that it is more than worth to check if a new research infrastructure can use existing or upcoming e-Infrastructures and/or learn from the experiences of others in that field:

• Check existing e-Infrastructures and related services before defining the ICT infrastructure for your research infrastructure;

• Check with existing research infrastructures how they realised their ICT infrastructure;

• Contact existing e-Infrastructures and ESFRI projects at national level and/or European level as appropriate;

• Work to an ICT synergy with other projects to encourage the development of the e-Infrastructure Commons. This can include participation in the discussions of the interoperability framework, in the research infrastructure disciplinary field and the generic one, to make sure that your specific requirements are taken into account;

• Pay attention to the interoperability of services and data;

• Plan your access to ICT resources.

Data is a very important part of every research infrastructure. As a fundament for research infrastructures, sustainable e-Infrastructure services for enabling access to, storing, preserving and curating large amounts of data need to be in place. To ensure that data will be available across borders and disciplinary domains, research infrastructures and e-Infrastructure providers are recommended to take appropriate steps to:

• Define a data management policy;

• Define a data management plan if appropriate to your research infrastructure;

• Ensure that data formats are standardised and contain sufficient information on the data (metadata);

• Define e-Infrastructure solutions consisting of multiple layers, successively adding more specialised higher-level services using standardised interfaces;

• Define and successively move towards a common data storage layer that can effectively serve requirements coming from different research infrastructures. Also here, standardised interfaces and federative

approaches should be used to include existing solutions;

• Adopt a global, standardised lowest-level data infrastructure, including e.g. authorisation and authentication and persistent data identifiers;

• Ensure that quality of the e-Infrastructure services and the data security is delivered at a level which is relevant for the data at hand;

• Pay attention to the sustainability of your data, also after the end of the project.

An e-Infrastructure CommonsThe notion of an e-Infrastructure Commons has been used in "Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures" but may not yet been well known.

e-IRG uses the metaphor of the Commons for the e-Infrastructure resources, which among others refer to networking, computing, storage, data and software, along with digital tools and collaboration opportunities. In the e-IRG Roadmap 2013, e-IRG outlines Europe’s need for a single “e-Infrastructure Commons” for knowledge, innovation and science. The e-Infrastructure Commons is the political, technological, and administrative framework for an easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe. The e-Infrastructure Commons can be thought of as a living ecosystem that is open and accessible to European researchers and scientists, and continuously adapts to the changing requirements of research.

http://e-irg.euhttp://e-irg.eu

Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures | 3 4

Best Practices for the use of Best Practices for the use of

e-Infrastructures by large-scalee-Infrastructures by large-scale

research infrastructuresresearch infrastructures

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015

http://e-irg.euhttp://e-irg.eu

66 An e-Infrastructure CommonsAn e-Infrastructure Commons

6.1 Defnition

e-IRG uses the metaphor of the Commons for the e-Infrastructure resources, which among othersrefer to networking, computing, storage, data and software, along with digital tools and collaborationopportunities. In the e-IRG Roadmap 2013, e-IRG outlines Europe’s need for a single “e-Infrastructure Commons” for knowledge, innovation and science. The e-Infrastructure Commons isthe political, technological, and administrative framework for an easy and cost-effective shared use ofdistributed electronic resources across Europe.

The e-Infrastructure Commons can be thought of as a living ecosystem that is open and accessible toEuropean researchers and scientists, and continuously adapts to the changing requirements ofresearch. Breaking through the limitations of today’s separate e-Infrastructure components, servicesand governance, an “e-Infrastructure Commons” should liberate scientists from the often complexand distracting business of “computing”. They need services that are coherent, managed and above allintegrated or initially interoperable, so that they can get on with the business of science. However, it

17 | Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures

Illustration 2: The e-Infrastructure Commons provides a common interface for research infrastructures to access e-Infrastructures.


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Breaking through the limitations of today’s separate e-Infrastructure components, services and governance, an “e-Infrastructure Commons” should liberate scientists from the often complex and distracting business of “computing”. They need services that are coherent, managed and, above all, integrated or initially interoperable, so that they can get on with the business of science. However, it is not the idea that there will be just “one way” of supplying or using any service through an “efficient” mandated or “voluntary” monopoly. It is important that e-Infrastructure providers are encouraged to be open and competitive and, above all, not “institutionalised”. Allowing e-Infrastructures to evolve is important: keywords here are open competition, collaboration but also technological innovation.

Such an e-Infrastructure Commons can only be established through a joint and truly common strategic effort between user communities and the organisations involved in the development and operation of e-Infrastructures, both at the national and at the European level. It is primordial that large-scale research infrastructures contribute to the realisation of this e-Infrastructure Commons to their own benefit and that of science in general. They can do so by carefully considering to use existing e-Infrastructures services to fulfil their ICT requirements and by collaborating with other research projects and research communities.

The figure gives a schematic view of an e-Infrastructure Commons.

The guidelines document also gives an overview of some existing e-Infrastructures and the services they provide. This includes networking infrastructures (GEANT), Computing infrastructures (PRACE, EGI) and data infrastructures (EUDAT, Zenedo, OpenAIRE).

For each type of e-Infrastructure, also use cases are described. A list of read-further links shows possible next steps.

The guidelines document “Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures” can be downloaded from the e-IRG website. ¶

http://e-irg.eu/guidelines

E S F R I R e s e a r c h I n f r a s t r u c t u r e s

O t h e r R e s e a r c h I n f r a s t r u c t u r e s

International Research Projects

T h e e - I n f r a s t r u c t u r e C o m m o n s

D a t a

C o m p u t i n g

N e t w o r k s / C o n n e c t i v i t y

T o o l s & S e r v i c e s

EUDAT ExtendedSource: EUDAT

The kick-off meeting for the next phase of EUDAT, which will run until early 2018, took place in March at CSC in Finland. EUDAT is now three years old. EUDAT is providing a suite of common data services supporting multiple research communities and individuals. These services are offered through a geographically distributed, resilient network connecting general-purpose data centres and data repositories for specific research

communities. EUDAT’s shared services and storage resources are distributed across 15 European nations with data stored alongside some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

In this new phase EUDAT also reaches out beyond its traditional sphere of influence to engage with a wider range of stakeholders and research communities. To this end, EUDAT has brought ten new organisations on board and plans to issue two calls for collaboration to engage effectively with research communities that are not presently part of the project consortium. Currently EUDAT interacts with and serves 29 research communities and plans to increase this interaction to over 50 communities in the next three years. ¶http://eudat.eu


Spring 2015 9

From Platform Operators to Service Providers Workshop Report

Ad Emmen 25 March 2015, Brussels, Belgium

e-Infrastructures are infrastructures and hence, you have an operator for each infrastructure. Does this make sense? Today, probably it does. Tomorrow, maybe not. That's why Augusto Burgueño Arjona, head of the e-Infrastructure unit of the EC, organised an open workshop on March 25, 2015 in Brussels with the title "From platform operators to service providers".

e-Infrastructure providers were there, ranging from high-speed networking to Crowd computing, policy bodies, and organisations that depend on e-Infrastructures. The goal was to discuss the effects of this transition that could be implemented in the EC H2020 Work Programme 2016-2017 and to assess how the e-Infrastructure community could anticipate the new Work Programme for research funding that will start in 2016.

Because of the structure of the EC H2020 Work Programme decision process - it goes through national representatives, not through direct interaction with the EC - the discussion in Brussels was mainly amongst the participants. The discussion was organised in a structured way though, by means of the usual post-it notes and rotating discussion tables.

And what was the result? In the end, there were 8 topics discussed to some extent. Although perhaps not the most important ones, they at least have some relevance:

1. How to define a set of dynamic interoperable services? These should be made discoverable through a federated registry. The access policies of the services should be clearly described and also the costs. There has to be attention paid to the interoperability of all these services. Hence, it is necessary to have clearly defined interfaces and service portfolios. For long lived services, we could have integrated operations.

2. How to engage a broad spectrum of technologists such as computer scientists, IT, infrastructure providers and software providers, including service providers and distributed system providers, for better innovation. The innovation process could benefit from more knowledge exchange and project collaboration.

3. Community needs in the post-VRE area. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are separating the user environments from the core e-infrastructures. VRE projects could still play a role in the innovation process where they can be a basis to initiate the development of new services. They could be handed over to the core e-Infrastructure providers at the end of the project.

4. From innovation to production. The current funding for EC projects is more for prototyping than for creating production ready products. So, it might be useful to also include some metrics to determine the maturity level of a proposed product or service. There is also the question about if and how the production operation should be separated from innovation. Here, it may be useful to use a product life cycle model. The transition from innovation to production should be included in the innovation process itself.

5. How to agree on or deliver an understandable offer for the European Research Area. This focused more on how to define and combine e-Infrastructure services in a way that is understandable for the users.

6. How to make infrastructure operations independent of project funding is a topic that overlapped with a few of the others. The participants observed that many projects go through a number of stages. From project 1, with a follow-up project 2 with new exciting add-ons and then complemented by a project 3, etc. So, actually it becomes more like an institution. The challenge is to separate production from innovation, even if it is funded from the same source. Production cannot be called a project.

7. How to foster cross-domain consistent integration. Increased consistency and compatibility might improve the usefulness of all our infrastructures. Things like common data descriptions over many domains are considered to be fresh in many projects. Each participant came up with its own preferred set of options for the menu. That does not lead to much compatibility. The community would like to have the ability for every researcher who produces data to make this visible in a shared space with a good description, the ability to query and retrieve it in common ways. RDA could play a role here.

8. Governance model. Here, the difference between production, geared towards sustainability, and innovation, focused on change, was discussed. Production is long-term based, while innovation is based on the short term. They could be funded differently and by different funding organisations. Funding organisations range from local and regional to national and European wide. A service lifecycle process should connect production and innovation.

So, apart from discussions on services and service definition, the relation and balance between production e-Infrastructures and the innovation needed to develop those infrastructures proved to be an important topic.

There is one skill you need in order to be able to participate in meetings like this: writing with pencil on paper in a readable way. Not sure whether they still teach this at school these days. ¶

Discussion tables at the workshop.

© Augusto Burgueño Arjona


10 Spring 2015

Freeing up Science Announcing the kick-off of OpenAIRE2020Natalia Manola, Project Manager OpenAIRE2020, University of Athens

Open access has evolved from being an initiative championed by a few organisations a decade ago, to something that has now become an integral part of the European Commission's Horizon 2020. Now, in all Horizon2020-funded projects, open access to the results of all funded projects is required. In place to support this policy is the OpenAIRE infrastructure.

OpenAIRE is a network of Open Access repositories, archives and journals that support Open Access policies. It goes beyond the traditional publications aggregator by interconnecting entities related to scholarly communication, and research information, namely publications, research data, funding, people, organisations and data sources. The platform allows users to navigate through a rich information space and provides a wide range of services, from deposition to statistics.

Now in its third phase of funding, the OpenAIRE2020 project kicked off at the end of January 2015 at the coordinating institution, the University of Athens. The project consists of 50 partners, so delegates alone numbered well over 100, from all European countries, and beyond. The first day of the two-day kick-off was a plenary session, presenting all the main areas of the large initiative. The second day allowed to focus on details with break-out groups discussing project tasks. The following is a short summary of the plenary themes:

A Technical and Community NetworkThe mission of OpenAIRE2020 remains to support the open access mandate of the

commission, to implement it and to monitor its take-up. As in previous projects, the infrastructure has two elements: a robust technical platform, based on the D-NET software, operates a service-oriented technical platform to interconnect the underlying scholarly communication infrastructure elements, and providing trusted added-value services.

A Europe-wide community of institutions who act as OpenAIRE ‘ambassadors’ complements the infrastructure. Each EC member state has an OpenAIRE representative on the ground, implementing national policy and technical developments. The importance of the library and institution in this scholarly infrastructure should not be underestimated: repositories and their valuable contents deliver the open access resources to fill the OpenAIRE information space, ensuring visibility and reuse of valuable research. Support and training is also a key element in the OpenAIRE2020 activities, the team creates the necessary resources, training materials, webinars, and workshops to ensure the right stakeholders are informed about the mandate.

ZenodoZenodo is a data and publications repository, based on a system that CERN has implemented for storing the publications of the high-energy physics community. CERN is a partner of OpenAIRE, which has provided software and a repository for publications of researchers that don’t have one in their home institution or community. This has been very successful and has been used quite extensively in the wider research community, as it accepts not only publications, but also datasets and other forms of research results. The software is very well designed and robust and has an easy interface.

Scholarly communication elementsCore elements of what standards open access metrics should be based on. Challenging traditional peer review methods will be tackled via a prototype for new methods of reviewing publications. Data

citation practices in different disciplines will also be covered. The Association of Europe’s Research Libraries (LIBER) will be administering a ‘Gold’ open access fund to pay for post-grant FP7 publication fees. Legal issues such as public sector information concerns and sharing data will also be covered.

Permanent entityAnother central activity will be that of establishing OpenAIRE as a legal entity within the first year. This will establish the infrastructure as a permanent infrastructure in the scholarly communication landscape.

Finally, the technical infrastructure will continue to consolidate and improve the quality of its data. Data flows monitoring will be further improved, de-duplication mechanisms will be refined, and inference and research analytics will be a vital element. This means that research information will be automatically extracted from article full-texts, e.g. links between publications and data, research grants, classification schemes, etc. Research analytics then combine geographic and disciplinary aspects with funding schemes, to offer graphical views of how funded research is multi-disciplinary and distributed across Europe. This all relies on a seamless approach to interoperability between data sources, and a crucial task will be to consolidate the OpenAIRE guidelines to enable uniform data collecting. Other international organisations, such as the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, and La Referencia in Latin America are also in the project to ensure the long-term and stable ways of exchange between repositories.

The OpenAIRE infrastructure currently aggregates from 580 data providers, and integrates more than 10 million open access publications, and six thousand datasets related to publications. It is expected to grow substantially during this next project phase, as well as become a catalyst to change the scholarly landscape.¶

OpenAIRE: https://www.openaire.eu/ Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/Liber : http://libereurope.eu/E-mail: natalia[{@}]uoa.gr


Spring 2015 11

Research Data Alliance Plenary 5 Conference Report8-11 March 2015 in San Diego, California, USA

Yolanda Meleco, Research Data Alliance/U.S.

This past March, representatives from the international data community convened in San Diego, California to attend the Research Data Alliance’s (RDA) 5th Plenary Meeting. With the theme “Adopt a Deliverable", approximately four hundred attendees celebrated the support RDA has received in its first two years as a global organisation and collaborated on new ways to foster an open environment of data sharing and exchange.

With support from the European Commission, the Australian government and the United States (U.S.) National Science Foundation (NSF), RDA has grown from a core group of committed agencies to a community that now comprises more than 2,600 members from more than 90 countries, all dedicated to pragmatically removing the barriers to data sharing and raising awareness of those challenges among regions, disciplines, and professions.

Hosted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, the first day of the Meeting was titled “Adoption

Day” and highlighted several organisations’ success stories related to the adoption of RDA’s outputs, which are data types and schemas, pieces of software and recommendations developed by RDA Working Groups to remove barriers related to the sharing of data among researchers. From the European region, adopters included the European Collaborative Data Infrastructure (EUDAT), Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN), and the German Climate Computing Center. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Deep Carbon Observatory, Kent State University, and Washington University St. Louis represented the U.S. region.

Additional Meeting activities took place at the Paradise Point Hotel in San Diego and comprised a combination of breakout sessions and plenaries focused on topics including but not limited to big data, training, data fabric, interoperability, data stewardship, and metadata standards. Video recordings and presentations for the plenary sessions are available in the programme page, while photos from the meeting are available in the photo gallery.

Keynote speakers featured Margaret Leinen, Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Dean of the School of Marine Sciences at the UC San Diego; Stephen Friend, President, Co-founder, and Director of Sage Bionetworks; and Naoyuki Tsunematsu, Principal Adviser, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Japan. !

Several RDA working groups also reported on their recent deliverables. A summary of these outcomes is provided below:

Scalable Dynamic Data Citation Working GroupThis group developed a dynamic-data citation methodology that supports efficient processing of data and linking from publications and enables researchers to reference precise subsets of changing data. Existing adopters include CODATA, OpenAire, Datacite, W3C and other related standards.

Metadata Standards Directory Working GroupA Prototype Metadata Standards Directory and use cases were developed within this group that enable information to be maintained transparently and with full version control. The Digital Curation Centre whose initial metadata directory was taken up has adopted this deliverable.

Wheat Data Interoperability Working GroupThis group implemented a common framework for wheat data terminology to enable interoperability between distinct data collections. The Wheat Initiative Wheat Information System has adopted this framework.

Data Description Registry Interoperability Working GroupSystems and graph technologies were implemented by this group that link data across multiple registries to facilitate search and discovery. Existing collaborators include the Australian National Data Service, CERN, DANS, DataCite, DataPASS, Thomson Reuters, Cornell and others.

Visit RDA’s website at http://rd-alliance.org for more information about this Meeting, the next Plenary Meeting (to be held in September in Paris, France, 21-25), RDA’s adopters, and deliverables. ¶

https://rd-alliance.org/plenary-meetings/rda-fifth-plenary-meeting.html

© Photographs: Alan Decker


12 Spring 2015

New phase in GÉANT ProjectThe1st May 2015 signals a new phase in the GÉANT Project. The GÉANT Project is a European success story. For nearly 15 years, through the joined forces of national research and education networking (NREN) organisations, it has been a vital element of Europe’s e-infrastructure strategy, providing the high speed connectivity needed to share, access and process massive volumes of data: data which is generated by, and essential to diverse research and education communities working in areas such as particle physics, bioinformatics, earth observation, drug discovery, and arts and culture.

The GÉANT Project has grown during its iterations (GN2, GN3, GN3plus) to incorporate not just today’s award-winning 500Gbps physical network, but a catalogue of advanced, user-focused services, and a successful programme of innovation that is pushing the boundaries of networking technology to deliver real impact to over 50 million users.

GN4-1 is a 12-month project beginning 1 May 2015, and ending 30 April 2016, pending EC acceptance of GÉANT’s proposal. As part of the GÉANT2020 Framework Partnership

Agreement (FPA), it is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020).

GN4-1 is the first step of a new phase in providing a stable, yet highly innovative, environment for the growth of GÉANT as the European Communications Commons for the European Research Area, providing the best possible digital infrastructure to ensure Europe remains in the forefront of research and other knowledge endeavours.

Close cooperation with other European e-Infrastructure providers and large scientific projects generating vast volumes of data (e.g.

ESFRI projects, CERN) will ensure the unique challenges of this dynamic community continue to be met.

Following the joining of TERENA and DANTE in 2014 to become the GÉANT Association, and with the project continuing to form a large part of the organisation’s work, the GÉANT Association is now known as simply “GÉANT”. This is reflected from 1st May 2015 in a single new logo and unified online web presences. ¶

http://www.geant.org/

Data strategies for research infra-structuresWorking paper by Elixir

This working paper on data strategies published by Elixir describes the high-level issues that may influence the data strategy of research infrastructures at various stages of development.

The information is primarily targeted at research infrastructure project managers (or equivalent) as communication and knowledge hubs. However, the information presented here may also be interesting for technical staff operating at the management level, and aid communication exchange and collaboration between the two groups.

The points presented in the document result from the discussions during the BioMedBridges workshop on data strategies for research infrastructures held on 19 February 2015 at the ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany as well as an earlier workshop with representatives of various e-

infrastructures and the document “Principles of data management and sharing at European Research Infrastructures”. ¶

https://zenodo.org/record/16413


Spring 2015 13

In Europe, ESFRI is coordinating a plan to install or upgrade a number of large research infrastructures. Selecting which infrastructures will get support is a long process. As many research infrastructures heavily rely on ICT they could use e-Infrastructures for computing, networking and data. At this stage of the ESFRI process, it is important that the e-Infrastructures let the research infrastructures know what are the possible existing or new e-infrastructure services that could fit their needs. The goal of the e-IRG workshop in Rome was to discuss these possible services and work on what would become the document "Guidelines and Best e-Infrastructure practices for large-scale research infrastructures".

IntroductionIn his introduction to the workshop Sverker Holmgren, the chairman of e-IRG, said there should be a single e-Infrastructure Commons for all users - a single interface, for users in order to easily choose the services they need and let scientists and the research infrastructures do what they do best. The e-Infrastructure Commons should span across all e-Infrastructures, ESFRI Projects,

International Projects, Data infrastructures and Projects, etc.

A lot of discussions have taken place on the relationship between e-IRG and ESFRI, including horizontal research infrastructures. e-IRG submitted input to the ESFRI roadmap, e.g. landscape analysis, and it also takes part in scientific evaluation. There is an Overarching Working Group consisting of all e-IRG representatives in ESFRI working groups. The next e-IRG White Paper will tackle ESFRI and related guidelines.

As EC-representative, Anni Hellman explained the structure of the new European Commission. There are now 7 VPs. They have assembled their respective portfolios to achieve convergence and synergies. Each VP looks after a specific area. DG Connect - under Günther Oettinger - Digital Economy and Society, reports to the VP for Digital Single Market, Andrus Ansip. The Commissioner for Research is Carlos Moedas. The reporting lines are more complicated now. There is a strong ICT agenda in place.

The new Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society is Günther Oettinger. A letter

from Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has the following message: Digitalise Europe. This involves revolution, legal steps, high quality digital network/infrastructure, innovation which always has to be related to industry, creative industries/media. The task is to turn digital research into a success story by supporting entrepreneurship, start-ups, new business, and innovation.

Giorgio Rossi, the ESFRI vice-chair, explained the process for next roadmap proposals. There is a common understanding that research infrastructures are important as European competitiveness depends on their availability and quality. Europe’s competitiveness is built on investment in education and access to first class research infrastructures. Coordination is required to optimise the limited funds available and maximise the ROI. Data sharing between data producing research infrastructures must be optimised.

ESFRI is working off its 2010 Roadmap. It contains 42 research infrastructures, distributed across fields, some implemented; some others will have to go. ESFRI was mandated by the Competitiveness Council in

e-IRG Workshop Rome10-11 November 2014

Marcin Ostasz, Fotis Karayannis, e-IRGSP4


14 Spring 2015

July 2014. There will be a new roadmap for 2016 which will include two parts: a landscape analysis of research infrastructures in the EU and international context.

There are gaps in the EU research infrastructure eco-system. There is a process for developing the new roadmap. Proposals are to be submitted through national members. There are two assessment processes: scientific and governance assessments. There will be only 25 projects in the new landscape, including 8-10 new projects for all disciplines. The landscape analysis will be completed first.

Examples of research infrastructures required are the European Astronomy and Astrophysics/Particles, Exa-Analytical Facilities, EPOS, Health and Food Research, Customised Healthcare. The connections between the research infrastructures will be part of the landscape work, e.g. Energy research , production and efficient use of energy, and Social and Cultural Innovation research infrastructures will cross-connect with other domains.

PLAN-E: European co-operation of eScience centresDr. Patrick J.C. Aerts, Director Strategic Alliances, NLeSC, presented the PLAN-E initiative. The advancement of science has been strongly stimulated by the very existence of advanced e-infrastructures, such as provided by European and national back bone networks and the resource infrastructures on top of that, such as PRACE, EGI, EUDAT, ESFRI-facilities. Gradually, however, the focus on provisioning e-infrastructures and ICT is shifting towards their innovative deployment in science.

Enhancing science and so facilitating new discoveries by (optimal) use and re-use of techniques, software, tools and methodologies across disciplines is what the future of science, research and development will depend on. eScience is the discipline that addresses this shift in focus that goes well beyond the Big Data wave, however much this wave floods our present thoughts about conducting modern science.

In order to strengthen the position of eScience/Big Data Research as a domain per se, the aspirations of the field, the skills level of the scientists working in that field and the broader educational aspects a European platform of centres has been implemented in a constituting meeting September 29-30, 2014 in Amsterdam, to bundle present knowledge and expertise across Europe and to define a practical work program towards

close cooperation between centres involved in conducting eScience.

PLAN-E is a European cooperation of e-Science Centres. Science and society are interconnected. An example is the e-Science Centre (NLeSC) in the Netherlands with a mission to enable digitally enhanced research through use of e-science and similar tools. The application domains are those of e-Infrastructures. NLeSC is the coordinator and it is a platform of e-science and data research centres in the Netherlands with a leading role for NWO (e-Science) and SURF (HPC).

e-Science experts can apply to become members. The Platform is formed by e-Science and Data Research Centres. It will define common objectives. It is a continuation of the work of ARCADE, the Advanced Research Computing Academic Discussion Group in Europe, consisting of funding and policy agencies and HPC centres. Its main output was a Knowledge Base: An Overview of HPC in Europe. Its work has been transferred to e-IRG.

PLAN-E's task is to facilitate transferring knowledge to science on how to use research infrastructures. It will share knowledge of tools, e.g. data management. It will attract attention to and obtain support for important issues. It will form a community of e-Science users. It will foster the development of academic PhD skills that are needed at this level. It will focus on the layer between ICT and e-Science.It is a voluntary organisation with a kernel of active members. Terms of Reference will be defined as well the organisational aspects of PLAN-E will be dealt with.

CHAIN REDS: Coordination of intercontinental infrastructuresProf. Federico Ruggieri, Head of the Distributed Computing and Storage Department GARR and Director of Research at INFN, talked about CHAIN REDS.

Research and Education need efficient communication and innovative services that can jointly be named e-Infrastructure. Several e-Infrastructures have been deployed in different regions of the world providing services ranging from the Network connectivity to Grid, Cloud and HPC Computing. Research and Education, however, is now globalised and Virtual Research Communities can address new scientific challenges thanks to the collaboration of groups distributed worldwide. European and non-EU e-Infrastructures have thus to interoperate to address the requirements of cross-continental

research communities. Coordination and harmonisation of e-Infrastructures among different regions of the world is the aim of the CHAIN-REDS project. The presentation showed the current achievements of the CHAIN-REDS project and the technical and organisational challenges that Regional e-Infrastructures have to face today and in the near future.

Metrology infrastructure for researchDavide Calonico, Director of Research at INRIM, Italy, presented the metrology infrastructure for research.

Time and Frequency Methodology is used in telecoms, dating, defence, etc. The worldwide market for frequency control devices is around 4.5 billion euro/year. Measurements are based on the Metre Convention in which each member country has its own meter institute. Atomic clocks are installed worldwide. A Nobel Prize has been awarded in this area. The INRIM clock ensemble is tasked with transferring the clock time reference to users. Satellite and optical fibre (LIFT project) are used to distribute the accurate time. In the LIFT project, Torino is linked to Florence through Bologna via optical fibre. More links are planned, including London-Paris and Torino-Munich. The users are science, radio-astronomical telescopes, metrology, space geodesy, atomic physics, and industry, e.g. atomic clocks in space.

EISCAT-3D projectIngrid Mann, Head of Projects at EISCAT, Sweden, talked about the EISCAT-3D project, which is concerned with earth atmosphere coupled to space. It is on the ESFRI Roadmap (Environment), its preparatory project is ending now, the full project is to be launched in 2019. The project has international sites, 3 partners and 6 associated partners. The task is observing earth and charged constituents in the earth atmosphere with high power radio waves. It uses global radars, rocker and satellites. It observes e.g. space transition at polar atmosphere. Measurements happen during an 11 year solar cycle and time series data is produced with incoherent scatter.

A new system will be needed consisting of huge antennas, multi-static phased arrays, with 10K antennas per site. The research infrastructure has sites in the Nordic countries. It has established data centres with existing national research infrastructures, including common archives.

The research infrastructure’s further needs are on-site computing, network connections, operational needs, etc., developing links to e-science and e-Infrastructures. The project


Spring 2015 15

needs to remain science driven and data driven. The next step will be EInSCAT-3D implementation.

EPOS: European Plate Observing SystemMassimo Cocco from the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Seismologia e Tectonofisica in Rome, Italy, presented the European Plate Observing System (EPOS). EPOS is a long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, data products and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid earth science in Europe. EPOS aims to obtain a holistic, sustainable, multidisciplinary research platform that will provide coordinated access to harmonised and quality-controlled data from diverse earth science disciplines, together with tools for their use in analysis and modelling. This integrated platform requires a significant coordination between, among others, disciplinary thematic communities, national research infrastructures policies and initiatives, and geo- and IT-scientists.

The EPOS mission is to integrate the existing research infrastructures in solid earth science warranting increased accessibility and usability of multidisciplinary data from monitoring networks, laboratory experiments and computational simulations. This is expected to enhance worldwide interoperability in the earth sciences and establish a leading, integrated European infrastructure offering services to researchers and other stakeholders.

EPOS is promoting open access to geophysical and geological data as well as modelling/processing tools, enabling a step change in multidisciplinary scientific research for earth sciences.

The EPOS Preparatory Phase, funded by the European Commission within the Capacities program, aimed at leveraging the project to the level of maturity required to implement the EPOS construction phase, with a defined legal structure, detailed technical planning and a financial plan. The actual EPOS implementation phase will be built upon the successful achievements of its preparatory phase. EPOS will operate a full e-science environment including metadata and persistent identifiers.

In the presentation, Massimo Cocco described the research infrastructures to be integrated in EPOS and presented the EPOS IT architecture in order to illustrate the integrated and thematic core services to be offered to the users. Some of the thematic services at community level already exist and are operational. The presentation also dealt with the implications for the user community and funding agencies associated with the adoption of open data policies and access rules to facilities as well as the implications for the proper assessment of socio-economic impact of distributed, multidisciplinary research infrastructures. Massimo Cocco also discussed the resources needed to tackle the challenge of fostering data driven research and big data applications. For earth scientists, the prevalent problem is represented by the need of data, which must be promptly discovered, made accessible and downloadable, curated, minable and transferrable together with appropriate

processing software and e-infrastructure resources. In general, there are a number of overlapping issues that regard data organisation and their access, data transfer from and to supercomputing centres (HPC) and among the platforms of the federated communities. Finally, Massimo Cocco also discussed the international cooperation initiatives and the global perspectives for solid earth data infrastructures.

ELIXIR: The European Life-Science Infrastructure for Biological InformationRafael Jimenez, ELIXIR Chief Technical Officer at EMBL-EBI, UK, presented the ELIXIR initiative. ELIXIR deals with biological research data. It consists of sustainable, national centres connected together with EMBL-EBI as the main hub, on top of existing research

infrastructures. It is run by 17 EU states where there are ELIXIR nodes. Data growth is a strategic driver. Challenges are the amount of resources (1800), non-centralised data, the dispersion of production data, data growth - doubling each 12 months. The technology is improving and the cost is getting lower. The network file transfer process is as follows: 1 day to produce, 4 days to transfer. There are collaborations with e-Infrastructures with EUDAT, EGI and GEANT.

ESS: The European Spallation SourceMark Hagen, Head of the ESS Data management and Software Centre, asked a key question: How can e-Infrastructures help ESS? The plans of ESS are the development of a first accelerator by 2019. The tools have to be completed by 2019-2025. An application example is the thermal neutron scattering -

neutron and x-rays are used together, which is a technique rather than a field. A variety of users are targeted, including medicine, battery industry, chemistry. Another example is the use of protons to produce neutrons. The funding is in cash and in-kind by members. ESS will provide the equipment. The ESS organisation and management structure includes the Data Management and Software Centre (DMSC).

The Square Kilometre ArrayMiles Deegan, Engineering Project Manager for the Square Kilometre Array Organisation at Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, presented the Square Kilometre Array initiative.

During the past 18 months the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Project has made major advances. Since 2008, the global radio astronomy community has been engaged in the development of the SKA in a major effort - the ‘Preparatory’ phase of the project. The Preparatory phase ended in December 2011 and, following a number of major changes, the international SKA project has now progressed to the ‘Pre-Construction’ phase (2012-16). The Member Nations have set up the SKA Organisation, a not-for-profit company founded in the UK, to lead activities and the Pre-Construction work has been organised into a series of design work packages to be

Cost of data production technologies declines faster than storage


16 Spring 2015

delivered by consortia from the Member Nations. Miles Deegan described the organisation and scope of the work packages as the project begins the work of preparing for SKA1 construction. Miles Deegan covered the e-Infrastructure requirements of the SKA, in particular the high performance computing (HPC) and big data aspects.

SKA is a huge user of data. SKA is a next generation radio interferometer. The current project phase (SKA Phase 1) is deploying 3 telescopes on 2 sites. They are 100x more sensitive than what is available now. The total cost is 1.5 billion euro and the sites are in South Africa and Australia. Examples of SKA Science are neutral hydrogen in the universe from cosmic dawn till now, evolution of galaxies, star formation, the cradle of life, and fundamental forces. SKA has 8 Science Working Groups. The global SKA structure is as follows: the project office is located at Jodrell Bank, and there are 11 technical Work Packages. The transport requirements are 6 ExaBytes for the SKA 1. There is a project called ‘Science Data Processor Consortium’ led by Cambridge University to support that. SKA 2 will see huge changes in the number of dishes, e.g. South Africa will have 2500 dishes. The issues to resolve will be signal transport, signal processing, software engineering, and data storage.

DARIAH-ERICTibor Kalman from the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung (GWDG), Germany, and Eveline Wandl-Vogt from the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW), Wien (AT), who are both DARIAH, Co-Chair Virtual Competency Centre 1 e-Infrastructures, presented the DARIAH-ERIC project.

DARIAH - Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities - aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the Arts and Humanities by offering a portfolio of services centred around European research communities. The DARIAH infrastructure is a social and technological infrastructure. It aims to be a connected network of tools, information, knowledge, people and methodologies for investigating, exploring and supporting

research across the broad spectrum of the Digital Humanities and Arts. The core strategy of DARIAH is to bring together national, regional, and local endeavours to form a cooperative infrastructure where complementarities and new challenges are clearly identified and acted upon. DARIAH is aiming to bridge the gap between traditional and digital Humanities and Arts, taking into account technical as well as social innovation. DARIAH integrates national digital Arts and Humanities initiatives all over Europe and operates a platform to enable trans-national, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research. It offers a portfolio of services and activities centred around research communities. It develops a research infrastructure for sharing and sustaining digital Arts and Humanities knowledge.

By bringing together national activities from several countries, DARIAH will be able to offer a broad spectrum of services including training initiatives, such as summer schools and transnational curricula, a knowledge repository with standards and good practices for digital asset management, and guidance on repository certification and digitisation processes. The DARIAH e-Infrastructure utilises standards and best practices, allowing collaborations with several research infrastructures and offering opportunities for innovative research.

For the various affiliated projects, services for data sharing and digital publishing will be offered alongside technical systems for persistent identification, authentication and long-term preservation. The DARIAH-ERIC was established on August, 15th 2014, by 15 Founding Members: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France (host), Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Serbia and Slovenia.

The Mission of DARIAH is to support digital research for humanities and arts. It is a social and technical research infrastructure. It provides access to tools, standards and it also answers questions by members and users. It supports social sciences and it cooperates

with the European School on Social Innovation, creating common teams.

Panel DiscussionThe panel discussion started along 5 prepared questions:

• Are the ESFRI projects actively participating in RDA to develop standards for data access, data management etc.?

• Are the used standards and best practices in the ESFRI projects publicly accessible documented?

• What are your recommendations to new ESFRI projects for a successful application?

• Do you think that ESFRI projects could benefit from and contribute to innovation in the e-Infrastructure area? If yes, how will this be achieved?

• Is the harmonisation of the scientific assessment between ESFRI and e-Infrastructure providers (e.g. PRACE) thinkable to accelerate the application procedure?

The second part of the workshop was dedicated to e-infrastructures: The PRACE Supercomputing Research Infrastructure, future perspectives of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure, EGI - Open Science Commons for the European Research Area, and GEANT perspectives in the Horizon2020 era.

The PRACE Supercomputing Research Infrastructure

Sanzio Bassini from CINECA, Italy and Chair of the PRACE Council, offered an introduction about PRACE. PRACE is an AISBL with PRACE BOD as the management body and its four pillars: SSC representing science, the Access Committee carrying out the peer review, the User Forum representing users, and the Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) representing industry. PRACE will


Spring 2015 17

organise the PRACE Days - the annual PRACE scientific and industrial event - in Dublin in May 2015 and the 2016 event in Prague. PRACE also provides access to Tier-1. It is involved in data management with the second pilot in this area undergoing technical evaluation, integrating EUDAT technology, in accordance with EUDAT. The PRACE scientific impact amounts to 242 papers by April 2014. The PRACE h-index is 16. PRACE will grant access to future CoEs and some resources will be reserved so that CoEs will not have to compete. PRACE Training is implemented through the PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs), Code Enabling, and the Summer of HPC. The Call process includes Preparatory Access, Project Access, Tier-1, Access for CoEs, and SHAPE. PRACE aims to provide high quality service, attract and train talent and lead the integration of the HPC Ecosystem and also to further develop the PRACE association.

EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure: future perspectivesDamien Lecarpentier from CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland, and EUDAT Project Director, described the future perspectives of EUDAT. EUDAT, the European Data Infrastructure, is a pan-European research data infrastructure initiative funded by the European Commission. EUDAT's vision is to enable European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment, as part of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) conceived as a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, combining the richness of numerous community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe's largest scientific data centres. Currently, EUDAT is working with more than 30 scientific communities and has built a suite of five integrated services - B2SHARE, B2DROP, B2FIND, B2SAFE, and B2STAGE - to assist them in resolving their grand challenges. Damien Lecarpentier provided an overview of the project status and highlighted some of the main challenges being addressed to achieve the CDI vision.

GÉANT perspectives in the Horizon2020 eraChristian Grimm, General Manager DFN, Germany, and Bob Day, Janet, UK, talked about the GÉANT perspectives in the Horizon2020 era. GÉANT provides Networking, Services and People. Terena and GÉANT together have become the GÉANT Association. Its task is the development of advanced network and e-Infrastructure services. It is included in Horizon2020 which provides the building blocks while the EU funding serves as a glue. The priorities of the Framework Partnership Agreement are sustainability, universality, reliability, and innovation.

Open Science Commons for the European Research AreaTiziana Ferrari, EGI.eu Technical Director and EGI-InSPIRE Project Director, presented the Open Science Commons, a vision to allow researchers from all disciplines to have easy and open access to the advanced digital services, data, knowledge and expertise they need to collaborate to achieve excellence in science, research innovation. This vision requires the contribution of e-Infrastructures and Research Infrastructures for its realisation, and it requires technical integration as well as organisational harmonisation, cooperation and coordination of all the players to realise synergies in procurement and provisioning of services, development of integrated business models and policies of access.

The realisation of the Open Science Commons is necessary to advancement of the implementation of the ERA, the sustainability and persistency of e-Infrastructures and Research Infrastructures, and requires the development of a coordinated roadmap both at the European and national levels. The EGI current contribution to the Open Science Commons, the future strategy and the EGI recommendations to e-IRG, ESFRI and the EC were presented.

Panel DiscussionThe panel discussion was started with a series of prepared questions:

• Have the providers made progress in establishing an e-Infrastructure Commons? What are the concrete results?

• What are the next planned steps?• How have the users been involved?• What are the user experiences? • What are the major obstacles to fulfil user's

service requests? Financing, service not in portfolio, etc.

• Do you see the necessity of an overall, centralised service desk?

ConclusionsThe following conclusions could be drawn after the presentations and discussions held during the workshop:

There is an agreement on the importance of the e-Infrastructure Commons but there are still somewhat different understandings of the concept and different initiatives of different scope are taken by several actors.The e-IRG plenum will continue to discuss and facilitate the implementation of the Commons as described in the e-IRG White Paper 2013.

ESFRI projects want to take part in the development and delivery of e-Infrastructure services for their projects. ESFRI projects need sustainable e-Infrastructures. A clear funding scheme has to be drafted.

E-Infrastructures have an extensive set of services available and operational today and want to know if and how they can be used by the Research Infrastructures. E-Infrastructures foresee new significant demands on e-Infrastructures due to wide/open access to data.The discussion on the e-Infrastructure Commons needs to include discussions on governance, access modes, funding streams, etc. The national dimension is essential for the further development of European e-Infrastructures and other research infrastructures.

Videos and slides of the presentations at the workshop are available on the e-IRG website. ¶

http://e-irg.eu/workshop-2014-11-programme


18 Spring 2015

e-Infrastructure Commons initiative aims to organise efficient e-Infrastructure for international research community at a European levelAd Emmen, 5 January 2015, Amsterdam

e-Infrastructure Commons is a hot topic these days. In the Netherlands they have some recent experience in restructuring the e-Infrastructure landscape, where the main organisations are now all under the umbrella of SURF. Of course each country is different, and on a European scale things are significantly different from the Dutch case but it is useful to put things in perspective. We had the opportunity to interview Arjen van Rijn, Institute Manager NIKHEF in Amsterdam and Member of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, e-IRG, on the topic of a better service for scientific users in Europe by means of the e-Infrastructure Commons.

Arjen van Rijn explained to us where the e-Infrastructure Commons is for by starting from his home experience within the Netherlands. e-Infrastructures are not built because of the fun of it but because the user communities are served with e-Infrastructures. Over the last decade, Arjen van Rijn has experienced, being involved in building and providing e-Infrastructures, that the user sometimes has forgotten the reason why it is all for.

Within the High Energy Physics Institute (NIKHEF) it is very clear who the user is. NIKHEF has involved users who pretty well know what they need. Arjen van Rijn has no problem identifying who his users are, he knows them very well. When you scale this up to a country, however, you encounter various organisations and various players that busy themselves with providing e-infrastructure services and ICT services for research in various ways. Then, the whole landscape becomes a bit fuzzy and unclear.

Ten years ago, Arjen van Rijn has observed this for the Netherlands: there was an organisation busying itself with getting a supercomputer; there was another organisation busying itself with providing the academic network; there was NIKHEF trying

to coin a distributed infrastructure called Grid at the time. Basically everybody was doing their own thing without looking for any integration of these initiatives. Every party was going to the ministry of education and research asking for money.

The ministry did a very sensible thing and suggested that all parties should organise themselves because they basically had the same goal: serving the user communities in the Netherlands. That is what happened in the Netherlands.

The relevant parties, namely SURF; SURFnet; SARA; at the time NCF; the project where Arjen van Rijn was involved in, BigGrid, teamed up and came with an integrated plan that was called ICT infrastructure for research in the Netherlands. The parties stressed that it was important to have an encompassing organisation to achieve such an infrastructure in the Netherlands. All parties considered SURF as the best organisation to form this umbrella.

SURF familyIn the years after that, it emerged that the SURF family was extended to not only contain SURFnet, which was the traditional role for the academic networking, but also marry with SARA and have SARA (with a new name SURFsara) as the Dutch Academic High Performance Computing Center in its family, and even establishing, together with NWO, which is the funding organisation for research, an eScience Center for the tooling and generic tools for using the e-Infrastructure.

These developments in the Netherlands have made Arjen van Rijn quite happy because now there is an organisation that has all the parts to be able to have an interpretive service provision to the scientific user communities in the Netherlands.

This is what, according to Arjen van Rijn, also has to happen at the European level, because, as we all know, research does not stop at Maastricht and Delfzijl. It crosses borders. User communities are usually internationally organised and they all want to use ICT infrastructures provided basically by national organisations but these national organisations need to organise themselves within Europe to get an efficient infrastructure for their international user communities. That is basically why Arjen van Rijn is such a fan of the e-Infrastructure Commons idea, coined by the e-IRG, to have the relevant organisations in Europe also team up and provide unified, integrated services to European organised user communities.

There is an increasing reason to do that. There are movements in Europe to organise

research on a European scale. The most prototypical examples of that are the ESFRI projects, for research infrastructures on European scale. What Arjen van Rijn sees happening now, and he is glad about it, is that e-IRG and ESFRI together have now confirmed the importance of this e-Infrastructure Commons.

ESFRI, in its new round of proposals, will pay explicit attention to the e-Infrastructure needs of its projects. Arjen van Rijn considers this as a major milestone because this forces these European user communities on their behalf to make very explicit what they need. This is the best driver to get the European e-Infrastructure Commons organised because if the users know what they want, in dialogue with the providers, Arjen van Rijn is certain that it will emerge how important it is that these European e-Infrastructure organisations organise themselves in order to serve these European user communities.

Arjen van Rijn thinks that all parties definitely are moving into the right direction. In fact, ESFRI is now taking a giant leap, what Arjen van Rijn believes that the Dutch funding agency NWO should do, and that is to be very consistent in asking research initiatives about their e-Infrastructure needs, because that is important to get the planning for the national e-Infrastructure organisations going.

European scaleBasically, this is done for the users and that is why all the fragmented parts of the e-Infrastructure in Europe need to join and form this e-Infrastructure Commons. Whether that needs to be a single organisation or an ecosystem of organisations, that is to be seen, as long as we do not forget the idea and the reason why we, as e-Infrastructure providers, are here, according to Arjen van Rijn.

To illustrate what Arjen van Rijn has seen happening in the Netherlands, is that the traditional role of the academic and networking NRENs has moved closer to the user. They developed the wish or the need to develop end user services whilst the parties that were traditionally involved in computer data services were already very close to the user, usually, but of course, needed the network to get the services to wherever they were needed.

For Arjen van Rijn, there is a very logical evolution to get those parties together and provide integrated services. Again, he is happy to observe that this is happening not only nationally but also in Europe.

There is a typical example that is used many times but that is very important, that we at least should try to have in Europe a common authentication scheme. There is a very nice


Spring 2015 19

system rolled out in Europe already that is called eduroam. For the travelling scientists, this is a blessing. You open your laptop in the environment of a university or elsewhere and your home institute credentials give you access to this network of the host institution. This is an incredible thing to have.

Next stepTo scale this up to have access to the European organised resources, is the next step. There are many initiatives and projects that are aiming to accomplish just that. Having a common authentication and authorisation framework is something that definitely deserves a lot of attention and which will really help lower the barrier for research communities and researchers individually to access the services that are out there. That is a very obvious example and we know that a lot of effort is put by the European Commission in helping accomplish such solutions.

There are more examples. If you are a research community organised in various countries over Europe, and you have good contacts with your national e-Infrastructure provider organisation, it is a bit of a burden to roll out a solution that you have agreed with your national organisation over your various European counterparts. In that respect, it would be very nice to have a European gateway where you can discuss these solutions as a European organised research community and make sure that your solution is then deployed in the countries, in these national e-Infrastructures where your research community is active in the same way, so that you have one point of contact at

a European level and get this deployed in the various European e-Infrastructure organisations. This is another obvious advantage of organising things at a European level.

Another example is that at a European scale, you will be able to attract the best partners to innovate services. This does not necessarily mean that every partner needs to be on board but with innovative projects, you can build consortia that can really bring a service to the next level. If you do that on a European scale, you have a bit more guarantee that it will work more rightly than only in your own context.

These are for Arjen van Rijn compelling arguments to organise things on a European scale. What is needed now from the e-IRG perspective, is that we give an answer on questions to these research communities on

what is the best practice of addressing your e-Infrastructure needs and this is currently what the partners are working on in the e-IRG as the topic of the next White Paper (that has now been published as the Guidelines Document “Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures”).

You can see the interview with Arjen van Rijn on video at YouTube. ¶

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZsAEwHArxQ

New edition of the ERIC practical guidelinesA European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) is a legal framework that entered into force on 28 August 2009. So an ERIC is a legal entity like a Foundation or Society, but one that is not restricted to one country.

This specific legal form is designed to facilitate the joint establishment and operation of research infrastructures of European interest.

The ERIC Practical guidelines are aimed at assisting potential applicants for the ERIC legal framework.They entail the consolidated regulation as well as a model request for setting up an ERIC and a template for drafting the statutes of an ERIC.

The document is published by the European Commission.¶

http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/eric-practical-guidelines-pbKI0114480/

Research and Innovation

Legal framework for a European Research Infrastructure Consortium

ERICPractical guidelines


20 Spring 2015

Embassy Cloud at EMBL to act as a model for the e-Infrastructure Commons at a European level

Ad Emmen

11 December 2014, London

At the Cloud Plugfest December 2014 in London, we had an interview with Steven Newhouse, Head of Technical Services at EMBL/EBI. EMBL is an intergovernmental organisation tasked with providing support for the life sciences community in Europe. EBI is the European Bioinformatics Institute, an outstation of EMBL that focuses on providing large scale data and analysis infrastructure for life scientists.

Part of the analysis infrastructure is the EMBL Embassy Cloud. The Embassy Cloud is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud that has been developed over the last two years to meet some of the increasing challenges researchers find around the size and the data sets that they are handling and the analyses the researchers want to undertake with them.

As the data is getting so large it is becoming very difficult for researchers to download that data unto their own local hardware and to do their analyses locally. What the Embassy Cloud allows is for researchers to develop their own virtual machines, to upload those virtual machines to the EMBL Cloud infrastructure, potentially with their own data, and then to undertake analyses in their own analysis environment with their own data and exploiting the data we already have posted within our own data centres, Steven Newhouse explained.

This provides the best for all people. The researchers have access to a state-of-the-art computing infrastructure. They do not have to move our large datasets to their own computers. Instead, they bring back compute to where our data is located, Steven Newhouse added.

Doing this at one place is relatively straightforward as is shown with the Embassy Cloud but, really, the challenge is to build a European-wide infrastructure that can undertake this. Elixir is the umbrella that is driving this activity across Europe within the life sciences but Elixir and the life sciences community are not the only people who are doing this.

Other communities, such as high-energy physics, earth observation and so forth, are also facing this challenge. This is why a group of the EIRO Labs, the European Intergovernmental Research Organisation, have come together and developed this concept of the e-Infrastructure Commons. The e-Infrastructure Commons is where there are a suite of services available for the researcher - some coming from their own community, some accessible from other communities. These are there for them to

compose and bring together to meet their individual research needs.

Within such an e-Infrastructure Commons the ability to move data and to move compute jobs around between different resource centres is absolutely critical. This is why interoperability for Cloud services and for data is so very important, not only just for life sciences but also for the wider European Research Area in Europe.

Interoperability events such as the Cloud Plugfest are very important in understanding what the current state-of-the-art is in Cloud computing and the ability to interface different Clouds back together but also in showing the way forward. What are the priorities for integration at the moment that will enable us within the next year to establish a Cloud infrastructure and a wider suite of services that will enable life science research for the decade to come? ¶

http://www.ebi.ac.uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf4ZkjwSd8

From Data to Knowledge in the Life Sciences. © EMBL/EBI

Mutation X disrupts

enzyme function, which causes Y

disease


Spring 2015 21

From coal trading to Cloud computing trading as a commodityAd Emmen

10 March 2015, Brussels

At CloudScape VII, held in March 2015 in Brussels, we interviewed James Mitchell, CEO and founder of Strategic Blue, on trading Cloud computing as a commodity. The European Commission is helping to foster a vibrant Cloud computing market in Europe. Cloud computing is seen by many as a commodity, or at least tradable as a commodity. James Mitchell has a background of commodities trading at Morgan Stanley. James Mitchell not so much wanted to discuss exchange trading where everything is forced to be a fungible commodity somewhat artificially, but he is rather someone who would come up with physical power stations and environmental liabilities: not the sort of things which are fundamentally interchangeable.

About five years ago, James Mitchell moved across into the IT sector with a view to bringing across the trading, pricing and risk management expertise that he was so used to working with, to take the commodities world and applying it to Cloud computing. It has been quite a steep learning curve. James Mitchell is still generally winning the debate about whether or not electricity is a good analogy for Cloud computing. It covers about ninety percent of the key aspects of Cloud computing. When it breaks down, he is able to take from other commodities like coal for example.

Coal is very much not the same when you dig it out of the ground in different parts of the world, in the same way as an instance or a virtual machine from a Cloud provider is very different depending on the way that is being provisioned by different Cloud providers.

There is nevertheless a very healthy trade market in coal. It is based around a quality benchmark, known as the API (Argus/McCloskey's Coal Price Index) for standard or perfect coal that has a particular energy, ash, moisture and sulphur content. When a cargo changes hands between a buyer and a

seller, they go on board and they actually measure what has been delivered independently. There is like a truing up of the value of this depending on whether it has a high energy content. Then you will pay a premium for it. If it has a high sulphur content, that is bad and then you get a discount from it.

A similar methodology can be applied in order to create relative value metrics and benchmarking between different Cloud services. The majority of particular infrastructure services are based on common underlying technologies, such as CPU, storage, and the pricing from different providers for kind of similar services should be mutually consistent and make sense. If that happens, there is going to be an opportunity to use some of the financing techniques which are common for example in the electricity industry where you don't need to fund the building of a power station with a 100% equity, but you can do it with 20 percent of equity and 80 percent of debt. This has driven down the cost of financing power stations. The same thing can be done for the built out of Cloud services.

The Deutsche Börse has been trying to create an exchange for Cloud computing. What is your vision with regard to that?

James Mitchell says there have come two types of exchanges in the world. There is a telephone exchange and there is a financial exchange. The two are very different. What a telephone exchange does, is that it provides a way of physically making a connection between a buyer and a seller. There are aspects of that to what the Deutsche Börse are talking about that may well be a precursor to the financial side which would make sense as the Deutsche Börse elsewhere is very big in electricity trading and they are not doing the physical connecting up electricity-wise.

Where the financial exchange comes in, they basically offer their services to an already-formed over-the-counter traders market where there are bilateral contracts between traders of a particular commodity. The exchange itself doesn't take any risk. All that is doing is finding willing buyers and sellers who have to be willing simultaneously to enter into a contract with the exchange. It is simply a way of reducing the overall costs of trading between sophisticated counter parties. It is not normal for end users to interact directly with an exchange because the exchange has to remain risk-free. You have to post collateral which requires a low-cost capital to be able to finance this.

Even a big hedge fund, for example, generally would not interact directly with an exchange. They would go to a prime broker which is generally owned by a bank, who then manages the collateral on behalf of a range of clients. These exchanges are generally services

which offer to traders once they are trading with one another. They then publish a transparent price which is seen by end users and is used as a metric for whether or not the price that they pay at the retail level should be going up or down.

In Cloud computing where there are so many different types of machines, do we have the same case as in coal trading? Is there some kind of general content?

The area James Mitchell is caring about is looking at trading thousands of different Cloud services. Prices are set for them on behalf of the customers. Something that would help James Mitchell out tremendously is finding customers who regard different instant types as fungible and different regions or availability zones as interchangeable for that particular application. This allows to internally couple, when all risks are managed, the prices of these together.

In order to create a market, what you require is enough people that regard multiple resources as interchangeable with some - and you might need two of these and three of that - but if it is more than half as cheap, it is good to move from one to the other. If you have enough people who are able and willing to do that, either doing it themselves in a sophisticated manner or alternatively have passed this flexibility to a trader who is very focused on the pricing of these options, you end up with the supply-demand characteristics for capacity management of one Cloud resource, then affecting the other one because people can follow prices as a reason to move from one to the other.

This is a way of trying to balance the electricity grid across Europe for example. There are pricing signals that get traders to buy cheap wind power - it is very windy in Denmark - and ship it across the border to Germany, across the border into France, ship it through a DC interconnect with significant losses to the UK. When we size very complicated in Cloud computing, you need to know enough about the particular commodity you are comparing it to at a new level of detail.

There has been an awful lot of market structure and physical technology that has


22 Spring 2015

been applied to the world of electricity in order to make people feel that it is more simple than Cloud computing. It really isn't, it just has different complications.

Is there some unit that exists in trading?

James Mitchell would find it lovely that there would be an SI unit for Cloud computing. There are various organisations that are trying to do that. James Mitchell doesn't know if we will end up with just one. If you look at oil, there is West Texas Intermediate and there is Brent. So first, we ended up with two major ones. The other point to note is the vast majority of the oil that comes out of the ground today bears no resemblance to the Brent crude nor West Texas. The oil market continues to work to good effect. It would be very nice to see those kinds of independent benchmarks be brought forward.

In high performance computing, typically a lot of benchmarks are used. People like to have a scale with numbers which is easy to understand.

This is the challenge in terms of trying to do this well, according to James Mitchell. In the Cloud world there is no reason why you could not have quite a large number of benchmarks, provided you would like to have the ability to do reference pricing in between them. The ideal is to have one master benchmark, and either another benchmark or an actual service for your specific provider. The key thing is that you want to rate the change of the difference between the main benchmark and what you are specifically looking at. You want that rate to be very slowly compared to the main benchmark. So long as you can make that happen you can essentially use the main benchmark as a means of proxy hedging the future price risk you have because you have locked in a contract what you are actually going to use.

If you take an extreme example of this: the Russians entered into an agreement with the Chinese to build a pipeline from Russia's gas fields to China's new market. They agreed an index price for the prospect gas. The index they chose was the price of crude oil. Oil and gas are fundamentally different but this is what they chose because the price for gas follows the price for oil. It's not because you make gas from oil but because lots of contracts for gas are written on the price of oil because oil is a much more liquid contract and you are able to hedge more easily.

You end up with this self-fulfilling prophecy that because everyone hedges using Brent crude, even when it's natural gas, it continues to work.

What you do in your company is a kind of marketplace, a kind of trading?

Strategic Blue has two core services. It has a Cloud option service which is a service for end customers of Cloud computing. Take for example Amazon web services customers. The company offers to step into the billing chain between a customer and Amazon and fix three issues. The first is billing: the company can get rid of credit cards, change the currency, send the invoice before the usage month instead of a few days later because it can choose the terms under which it builds a customer relationship. These are all procurement issues.

The second one are financial issues. You can get a huge discount if you pay upfront for one year or even a bigger one if you pay upfront for three years. That can really mess with cost allocation problems and not to mention cash flow - a CTO sold to the CFO that the move to the Cloud would move CAPEX investments to OPEX costs. If you prepay it looks like you are moving it back again. There

tends to be a reluctance to make these long-term commitments to the customer.

Those long-term commitments are crucial for the Cloud providers so they can do capacity planning and that is the reason why they offer a discount that is deeper than their expectation of dropping on demand prices.

In general, it should always make sense to pre-commit if you are able to make a pre-commitment. Strategic Blue basically are the intermediates that will pay the Cloud provider and will secure a long-term contract from the customer. It may not exactly match. For example, Strategic Blue might get an eight-month deal from the customer and buy 12 months from a Cloud provider. The company will take the pricing risk for four months.

The company builds up a book of risks, it has value-at-risk limits, which is expected from people with a background in trading, backed by hedges and former traders. In order to manage that risk, the company has basically developed a pretty deep expertise in the price of Cloud services, particularly at Amazon, but they are looking also at Azure and Google.

The second service of Blue Strategic is making that pricing insight available as a service where the company shares the way it looks at historical data and the way it looks at any data that is has on forward pricing and basically help Cloud buyers, Cloud resellers and Cloud providers to understand where the process might go and how they can appropriately look at pricing data and use that in terms of their own pricing risks. ¶

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4rHQekJp2A

Cloud trading model used by James Mitchell’s company Strategic Blue.


Spring 2015 23

Cloudscape VII Conference ReportAd Emmen

March 9-10, 2015, Brussels, Belgium

e-Infrastructure progress is strongly linked to technical innovations and the way industry and commerce are dealing with those. Apart from networking, big data and supercomputing, Cloud computing is the most important technology driver. At the Cloudscape VII conference in March in Brussels, experts in Cloud technology and business gathered and they had some new messages that also affect e-Infrastructures.

Despite what everyone assumes, there will be no consolidation in Cloud computing providers. Yes, the Microsoft Azures, the Googles and the Amazones will continue to play an important role, but they will not wipe out the smaller Cloud providers as Joe Weinman convincingly showed. With data and figures from his books “Cloudonomics” and “Digital Disciplines” (to appear this Summer) he illustrated there is a business case for smaller, specialised Cloud computing infrastructure providers. Actually there is room for a lot of them. This is good news for e-Infrastructures where often a variety of specialised infrastructures is needed which are only partially fulfilled by the big Cloud computing providers. And it is good news for Europe as it provides an opportunity to still play a role in Cloud computing provision.

An illustration was provided by Robert Jenkins from the smaller Cloud provider CloudSigma. As part of the HelixNebula e-infrastructure project, together with a local authority and university in Rome, they took data and married it to a kind of digital building

on the Cloud. They were able to map land movement and overlay this with the actual buildings. As such, they were able to profile risk. If they saw a building or an area had moved more than a certain amount, knowing the age of that building and the type of building, they could infer a risk in terms of structural damage. Close cooperation between the partners with different expertise and the Cloud provider made this possible.

So there will be many specialised Clouds around for some time to come. In many cases, especially for complex applications such as common in e-Science, this will mean that applications on several Clouds needs to be combined. Hence Cloud computing federation was a hot topic at Cloudscape VII. And of course, this is related to standardisation. The more standardised Cloud infrastructures are, the more easily they can be federated. However, also Cloud interoperability standards are needed to ease interaction. The developing IEEE InterCloud standard was discussed. Of course, in e-Infrastructures Cloud federation is already pioneered in, for instance, the EGI federated Cloud. It is good to see that this is part of a wider development that is also taking place in industry.

Accounting and charging for e-Infrastructures in a correct and fair way is very difficult. It starts already with the unit of service that you want to charge. Do you want to charge per computer core? But what type of core? And does it include the memory in the core? And the connection speed it has? Or are we going to a higher level, Virtual Machines as a charging unit? It is a very difficult issue. We know things are similar (you can compute stuff on it) but we do not know how to express that in a unit. In commercial Cloud computing, it is the same. There are different offerings from different Cloud providers that do similar things. But you cannot compare them well enough to exchange them. They are not tradable like coal or oil. James Mitchell from the Cloud computing trading company Strategic Blue, explained how trading experiences from the oil & gas industry could help to formulate Cloud computing services that could be traded like commodities. As in oil, for instance, a barrel of oil from one oil field can have quite a different type of oil content than from any other oil field.

However, the oil industry has figured out ways to compare them and hence make them easily tradable. The same kind of techniques could perhaps be successfully applied to e-Infrastructures too.

Tiny Clouds are always fun to watch such as the really tiny ones that fit in a briefcase like, for instance, http://Cloudcase.eu or the NuvlaBox from SixSq. The latter was on display. The small robust NuvlaBox runs complete Cloud computing software. It can be used for local computing and monitoring in real life infrastructures, for example.

Cloudscape VII was held in the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Brussels. Microsoft representative Rüdiger Dorn touched on another important issue in Cloud computing: security and data privacy. The new data privacy direction under development by the European Commission is certainly something to follow up. It could have serious implications for e-Infrastructures too.

A number of videos with Cloudscape VII presenters is collected on YouTube. The Cloudscape website contains all the presentations and a conference summary. ¶

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3ODjj4AihxMJO3Faw5FBOGz9bE2OC0Mq

http://cloudscapeseries.com

1

A smart and secure connected digital world

A Faster Path to Innovation for a smarter, bigger and connected world

www.cloudscapeseries.eu | [email protected] | @cloudscapeserie


24 Spring 2015

e-IRG secretariatc/o The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)P.O. Box 93575NL-2509 AN The HagueThe Netherlands

Phone: +3170 344 0526 Mobile: +316 303 699 04email: [email protected]

Visiting address:

Java Building, Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië 300NL-2593 CE The HagueThe Netherlands

e-IRGSP4This newsletter is produced by the e-IRGSP4 project. e-IRGSP4 is partially funded by a grant from the FP7 programme of the European Commission under grant agreement no 632688.

http://e-irgsp4.e-irg.eu

About the e-IRGThe main objective of the e-Infrastructure initiative is to support the creation of a political, technological and administrative framework for an easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe. Particular attention is directed towards grid computing, storage, and networking.

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group was founded to define and recommend best practices for the pan-European electronic infrastructure efforts. It consists of official government delegates from all the EU countries. The e-IRG produces white papers, roadmaps and recommendations, and analyses the future foundations of the European Knowledge Society.

http://e-irg.eu

In this issueEe-IRG Chair Sverker Holmgren re-elected for a second term 1e-IRG Workshop 2Towards an Open Science Commons 3Highlights from the delegates meetings 4Best Practices for the use of e-Infrastructures by large-scale research infrastructures 6From Platform Operators to Service Providers 9Freeing up Science 10Research Data Alliance Plenary 5 Conference Report 11Data strategies for research infra-structures 12New phase in GÉANT Project 12e-IRG Workshop Rome 13e-Infrastructure Commons initiative 18Embassy Cloud at EMBL 20From coal trading to Cloud computing trading as a commodity 21Cloudscape VII Conference Report 23

Upcoming events

3 June 2015 ! e-IRG Open Workshop on "Open Science and e-Infrastructures", Riga, Latvia

! http://e-irg.eu/e-irg-workshop-june-2015

4-5 June 2015! Week of Innovative Regions in Europe - WIRE 2015, Riga, Latvia! http://wire2015.eu/

15-18 June 2015! TERENA Networking Conference 2015, Porto, Portugal! https://tnc15.terena.org/

12-16 July 2015! 30th ISC High Performance Conference, Frankfurt, Germany! http://www.isc-hpc.com/home.html

23-25 Sep 2015! Research Data Alliance's Sixth Plenary Meeting, Paris, France! https://rd-alliance.org/plenary-meetings/rda-sixth-plenary-

meeting.html

20-22 Oct 2015! ICT 2015 - Innovate, Connect, Transform, Lisbon, Portugal! http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/ICT2015

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