t-Infrastructure
Introduction
By t-Infrastructure we mean e-Infrastructure
specifically adapted to the needs of education, both
of trainers and students. It is onerous to set up
and operate, and therefore ICEAGE undertakes
pioneering work to demonstrate how this may be done
and to clarify requirements. At present this is
undertaken on specially provided distributed
software platforms. However, we also envisage some
aspects of t-Infrastructure being provided by
specialised VOs on standard production
e-Infrastructure.
ICEAGE will develop and run shared
t-Infrastructure, usable by students and teachers
throughout the European Research Area (ERA), so that
they have easy access to educational exercises
running on e-Infrastructure and can demonstrate the
potential of e-Infrastructure to transform the way
we work and live.
ICEAGE WP4 aims to focus on three items:
- The development of improved or new forms of t-Infrastructure.
- The set up and management of t-Infrastructure.
- The set up and management of t-Infrastructure sharing policies.
WP4 is led by the University of Catania.
GILDA
The initial t-Infrastructure for the ICEAGE project
is GILDA
(Grid Infn Laboratory
for Dissemination Activities).
The GILDA project was started in 2004, by the Italian
National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), in the
context of both the
Italian INFN Grid
project, and the
European EGEE
project.
The purpose of GILDA was to create a grid testbed
entirely dedicated to training and dissemination
activities. GILDA initially consisted of a full grid
infrastructure, based
gLite
(formerly LCG) middleware, plus other facilities, as a
dedicated Certification Authority and a Virtual
Organisation.
Testbed
The GILDA Testbed consists of a series of sites,
installed with latest version of the INFN Grid
middle-ware (fully compatible with gLite), spread all over
Italy and the rest of the world. Each site executes all the
services to allow people to try the Grid, such as
Resource Broker, Information Index, Data Managers,
Monitoring tool, Computing Elements, and Storage Elements.
An
up-to-date map
of the GILDA Testbed showing active sites and their status
is available.
Monitoring
The GILDA t-Infrastructure is approximatively formed by
20 sites (not everyone in perfect working order) and new
sites continuously join/disjoin GILDA. For example, to support
the activity of the ICEAGE project, two sites, NeSC in
Edinburgh and STZAKI in Budapest, was added last year.
Most of sites are managed on best-effort basis and this
could potentially decrease the quality of the service
offered. To face this issue GILDA has been enhanced with
some of the monitoring instruments already used in the
EGEE production service. In particular: SAM and GStat.
SAM
client periodically sends tests on the resources present
in the BDII and publishes the results on
a web
site, allowing VO and site managers to quickly spot
sites with errors. Results are also graphically summarised
on
a Google
Map.
Another monitoring system employed in GILDA is
GStat. This
is essentially based on the information published by sites
on the BDII. Unlike SAM, GStat does not send functionality
tests on sites, but summarises data published by the BDII
providing several compact views in a
web
page. GStat also verifies coherence of published data.
Other monitoring tools, providing status information with
different approaches, can be present in GILDA. A complete
list of monitoring tools is
available here.
Multi Middleware
In order to fulfil the multiple middleware/platform
requirements of the ICEAGE project, since the beginning of
2007 GILDA
offers OMII-UK, Globus
Toolkit 4 (GT4)
and UNICORE services
that co-exist with gLite on the same resources. An
up-to-date list of middlewares, and related services,
provided by GILDA is available in the
GILDA web.
This infrastructure offers a good opportunity to new Grid
users because they can try all the main middlewares, with
respective services, on the same machine. This allows to
learn the difference, in terms of functionality and
performance, and evaluate which is the best fit for their
real life applications.
Currently, the Multi Middleware is limited to a couple of
Sites (Catania is full working, NeSC and SZTAKI are under
installation). However, if the demand of a such
infrastructure from new Grid users will increase, this
could be extended to all the sites.
Support System
Users should be assisted during their knowledge path by a
dedicated support system where they can submit public
tickets to explain the problems they have and obtain
assistance, instead of write private emails, so to create and
expand a shared knowledge base.
In GILDA web pages there is
a section
dedicated to the support activity. Between 1 April 2006
and 28 February 2007, this support system got more than
200 new tickets and more than 90% of them have been closed
in a couple of days time. Most of the tickets are related
to very basic help.
In the context of ICEAGE, the Support System has evolved
with the idea of providing students with a help desk
available for them not only during the courses but also
before, to get started with the access procedures, and
after. This improves the quality and extends the time of
the didactic provision.
Access statistics
The users attentions to the tInfrastructure and the
related training material are continuously evaluated. This
control allows to understand the user needs and improve
the quality of the service provided.
The attention is valuated tracing the navigation of the
users in the GILDA web page. This is made by
the Google
Analytics tool that collect information like number
of daily users, origin country, time spent during a visit,
number of page, pages most visited and so on.
Traning material
The Grid technology evolves continuously and it could be
difficult to find an up-to-date documentation for the
latest technologies. For this reason the GILDA team put a
big effort on produce guide and documents on the used
middleware.
In the context of ICEAGE, during the past year, the
documentation and training material has been entirely
re-organised in
a tWiki
site comply with requirements coming up from grid
summer schools and university courses supported by
ICEAGE. The tWiki is a collaborative environment where
everybody can give his own contribution.
This material is both for users at any level of knowledge and
system administrators that have to install and maintain
the middleware working.
User
A large effort has been devoted to ease the start-up of
beginners. Tens of topics are organised in three levels of
difficulty: beginners, intermediate, and advanced. For
each topic there is a short tutorial describing a
particular aspect (WMS, DMS, security, etc.).
System admin
Tutorials for site-administrator, regarding
troubleshooting and grid services installation have also
been added as well as a section on gLite APIs usage.
Booking courses and tutorials
The main goal of GILDA is to provide an Infrastructure
for all those willing to organise grid-tutorials and
University Grid course for users and/or system
administrators.
Tutorial and course organisers can book GILDA for their
purposes just filling
a web
form.
Training courses
Many grid-tutorials have been supported by GILDA in the
past few years. An up-to-date list of these is published
between
the GILDA
page.
University degree and master courses
Universities start to provide courses on Grid computing
only from few years and currently they are not
usual. However, a list of course supported by ICEAGE
and/or GILDA is maintained in
the ICEAGE
web site.
Documents
Documents describing the activity of WP4 can be found here.
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