Service activities

The overall objective of the Service Activities is to make available and maintain a stable, reliable and usable infrastructure to the D4Science user communities. This will be achieved incrementally during the lifetime of the project through the following activities:

• SA1 Infrastructure Operation – will define, setup and maintain the infrastructure needed for the provision of a stable service to the user communities;
• SA2 Community Specific Operations – will implement the requirements of the user communities as infrastructural requirements, configurations and operations;
• SA3 Software Integration, Testing and Distribution – will build a deployable, reliable, documented middleware distribution.

The interactions among SA work packages and the relationships of SA with the other project activities are depicted in the D4Science activity organisation figure.

The D4Science vision consolidates the result of the DILIGENT project and prepares the way for the operation of a generic e-Infrastructure offering secure sharing, dynamic allocation of resources (where the concept of resources is extended to content and services in addition to computing and storage) and configurable GUIs for scientific communities. In line with this vision, the resulting e-Infrastructure will support the project target communities and will be open for adoption by other user communities.

As a result, the D4Science infrastructure will interoperate sites based on:

• gLite services providing computing and storage grid resources;
• gCube services providing on demand and dynamic Virtual Research Environments.

In order to achieve this objective, the Service Activities in the D4Science project foresees to build on the results of the DILIGENT, EGEE-II and EGEE related projects.

The EGEE production infrastructure counts today about 240 sites spread over 45 countries and sharing about 36,000 CPUs, as well 5PB disk space plus additional tape mass storage. D4Science will extend the EGEE production infrastructure with additional gLite sites allowing the sharing of computational and storage resources for D4Science communities at a large scale.

During a lifetime period of tree years, the DILIGENT project has built a testbed infrastructure basing on the requirements of two user communities. The DILIGENT testbed provides today the basic mechanisms for creating and deploying Virtual Research Environments that support on-demand sharing of resources. The DILIGENT test bed is supported until end of November 2007. D4Science will move the DILIGENT sites from prototyping to production quality and give a long-term perspective to this new infrastructure.