Environmental Monitoring

The workshop follows last year’s 2nd successful event covering Grid and eCollaboration technologies and standards, highly relevant for today’s rapidly evolving eScience infrastructures

This version of the D4Science production infrastructure involves sites contributed by CNR, ESA, NKUA, UNIBASEL, ENG, BDM-USTRATH, and also includes one EGEE production site from Ireland. It runs the DHN-based version of the gCube software and gLite.

The infrastructure hosts the resources provided by the Environmental Monitoring (EM) community and currently supports the ImpECT Virtual Organisation and its Virtual Research Environments (VREs).

These VREs are accessible through the D4Science portal at: http://portal.d4science.research-infrastructures.eu. Note that at this stage only project members can access the D4Science production infrastructure by completing the registration form.

This is a good opportunity for project members to exploit a VRE, get familiar with the interface, run basic demonstrations, show and discuss these concepts with other users. For this purpose, a Demo VRE has been set up. The EM community members also have access to two EM specific VREs: Digital Library and Vegetation. This is also the first experience for the technical team in operating the production environment, and it is already leading to a number of enhancements (software configurations, operational procedures and tools).

OGF23, one of the largest and most important events held this year, featured an extensive community program for those interested in learning about Grid and distributed computing technologies. This event, held in Barcelona (2-6 June 2008), was organised in various sessions ranging from "Cloud Computing" to sessions dedicated to "Standards and Research Groups". Three keynote speeches were given: (i) Les Robertson (leading the LHC Computing Grid Project), (ii) Mario Campolargo (Acting Director in the European Commission, DG INFSO/F "Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures" and Head of Unit "GÉANT & e-Infrastructure”), and (iii) Werner Vogels (Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com).

The D4Science Project Director (Donatella Castelli) and the Technical Director (Pasquale Pagano) participated in the "Digital Repositories - Interoperability Using Grid Technologies" session by presenting the D4Science vision and outcomes.

• Donatella Castelli gave a talk entitled "Natural Resource Science: Environmental Monitoring and Fisheries and Aquaculture Resource Management". She presented case studies from specific domains focusing on the D4Science solutions to key challenges and user requirements.
• Pasquale Pagano presented the "gCube: A Framework for Controlled Sharing of Data, Services, and Computing Storage Resources" and gave insight into data, services and computing sharing, and storage resources using gCube, i.e. key horizontal issues in e-Infrastructures.

This session (held on the 5 June) concluded with a special roundtable discussion in which key researchers and practitioners reviewed the findings and recommendations for common standards and interoperability.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardisation effort for grid computing and applied distributed computing. The OGF community consists of thousands of individuals in industry and research, representing over 400 organisations in more than 50 countries. For more information: http://www.ogf.org

[22-07-2008 Published on CORDIS: http://cordis.europa.eu/wire/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.Detail&rcn=17667 ]

Catherine Marchand
ERCIM
2004, Route des Lucioles
06902 Sophia Antipolis
FRANCE
catherine[dot]marchand[at]ercim[dot]org
Tel: +33492385072

D4Science is one of the main European e-Infrastructure projects, involving 11 participants such as the European Space Agency, and the WorldFish Center, supported by the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research. Co-funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, the D4Science project was launched in January 2008.

D4Science aims to continue the path that the GEANT, EGEE and DILIGENT projects have initiated towards establishing networking, grid-based and data-centric e-Infrastructures that accelerate multidisciplinary research by overcoming several crucial barriers such as those related to heterogeneity, sustainability and scalability.

According to Donatella Castelli, Scientific Coordinator, CNR, "By building upon the experience acquired over the past years, we are now ready to put into production the first e-Infrastructure that will enable sharing and seamless access to heterogeneous content, service and computer resources".

The exploitation of this e-infrastructure will be initiated by serving two major fields, Environmental Monitoring as well as Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management.

As a result, thousands of scientists will obtain increasingly more facilities for creating Virtual Research Environments based on shared computation, storage and generic service resources offered by EGEE and DILIGENT at a European level. They will also benefit from data and domain-specific service resources provided by large international organisations among the project participants. Cooperation between these participants will also encourage the use of data streams from diverse scientific communities to perform socio-ecosystem modelling.

The primary clients of these Virtual Research Environments serving specific scenarios will be researchers, decision-makers, international and government officers, and non-governmental organisations worldwide.

As stated by Krystyna Marek, GÉANT & e-Infrastructure Unit, European Commission, "We expect that the D4Science infrastructure will have a multiplicative benefit to many scientific fields. In a not distant future it will be able to act as a catalyst for increasing the resource sharing, cooperation and cross-fertilisation among multiple communities that is necessary for addressing the many grand challenges of science and society."

As an example, the work on ecosystem modelling that the two communities will perform in D4Science can be applied to the whole domain of biodiversity management, conservation and exploitation.

Notes to editor:
Scientific coordination of D4Science is headed by CNR while the management of the project is ensured by ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.

Website: www.d4science.eu

Contact: donatella[dot]castelli[at]isti[dot]cnr[dot]it