IFJPAN in BalticGrid-II project
On 1 May 2008, the BalticGrid Second
Phase (BalticGrid-II) project has started. It is designed to increase
the impact, adoption and reach, and to further improve the support of
services and users of the recently created e-Infrastructure in the
Baltic States. This will be achieved by an extension of the BalticGrid
infrastructure to Belarus; interoperation of the gLite-based
infrastructure with UNICORE and ARC based Grid resources in the region;
identifying and addressing the specific needs of new scientific
communities such as nano-science and engineering sciences; and by
establishing new Grid services for linguistic research, Baltic Sea
environmental research, data mining tools for communication modelling
and bioinformatics.
The e-Infrastructure, based on the
successful BalticGrid project, will be fully interoperable with the
pan-European e-Infrastructures established by EGEE, EGEE associated
projects, and the planned EGI, with the goal of a sustained
e-Infrastructure in the Baltic Region.
The BG-II consortium is composed of 13
leading institutions in seven countries, with 7 institutions in
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, 2 in Belarus, 2 in Poland, and one each
in Sweden and Switzerland.
IFJPAN is involved in 3 activities
of BalticGrid-II project.
NA2 - Education, Training,
Dissemination and Outreach
As a leader of this activity
IFJPAN is responsible for planning, organizing and coordinating of all
NA2 tasks. The objectives of this Activity are as follows:
- Sharing information on the benefits
of Grids, especially the
BalticGrid-II project and its offer, to broad communities of potential
users in academia and the public sector with special emphasis on
communities in the Baltic States and Belarus.
- Provide training for the formation
of staff skilled in Grids
(Grid administrators).
- Provide training for users at
various levels - for beginners
(especially for users from new communities), and more advanced - mostly
for application developers.
- Assuring communication of Project
progress among its partners.
- Ensure expertise sharing
between partners to improve skills and
comprehension of teams that work with BalticGrid-II infrastructure.
SA1 - Grid Operation
The SA1 activity is focused on
providing sustainable, high quality Grid infrastructure. IFJPAN
contributes with computational and storage resources to the
infrastructure maintaining and providing support for services at
production grid site called IFJ-PAN-BG. Apart from that IFJPAN is
hosting and monitoring services for "bgtut" Virtual Organization which
is used for all hands-on training and tutorials on the BalticGrid-II
infrastructure.
SA3 - Application Integration and
Support
IFJPAN is coordinating effort of
application support in BalticGrid-II. Taking advantage of experienced
team, IFJPAN staff role is to keep a consultancy service for local
experts that work with application teams. Additionally, best practices
are collected to form a guide for application grid-enabling.