An Overview of the EGEE Project

The European Union has launched the EGEE (enabling grids for e-science) initiative which aims to build a massive global grid infrastructure that serves as a tool capable of solving a great variety of problems in science, engineering and industry. The EGEE grid combines the processing power of more than 20,000 CPUs, a storage capacity of about 5 million GB and a global network connecting some 200 sites in various places around the globe. The EGEE grid builds on the experience of the LHC grid which was built by CERN researchers to handle the vast amount of data generated by the operation of the large Hadron collider in an underground complex in Switzerland. The EGEE grid is already crunching test data for the LHC experiments and also for dozens of applications in such areas as astrophysics, medical imaging, bioinformatics, climate studies, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research, and financial forecasting.

This talk presents the progress and recent history of Grid computing in Europe using the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project as an example. EGEE is funded by the European Commission (EC) to build a multi-science Grid infrastructure for the European Research Area, and connected to other regions through collaborating infrastructures and other EC funded projects. The use of the EGEE grid by the fusion community and its collaborative work with other grid and HPC projects will be highlighted. By considering these developments, this talk will suggest some guidelines for the fusion community to make optimal use of such e-Infrastructures and position itself with respect to future grid developments.

In the work presented in this paper, a Web-based, grid-enabled environment for wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) system simulations has been implemented and evaluated. The increasing demands for computation times as the complexity of the simulation increases (e.g., increased sectorization order, smart antennas, etc., or combining system with link-level simulations) soon become prohibitively high. A WCDMA simulation is essentially a Monte Carlo simulation, consisting of a large number of identical and independent processes, which are viable for efficient and cost-effective distributed processing on a grid infrastructure. In the work presented herein, a problem-solving environment (PSE) has been implemented for grid-enabled execution of WCDMA simulations on the production grid infrastructure deployed by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project. The problem-solving environment provides a secure, Web-based portal for interacting with the grid middleware (e.g., job submission and monitoring, result retrieval, etc.). The grid-enabled simulator is presented, and implementation details are discussed. Simulation results and grid execution statistics are also shown, in order to demonstrate the validity of the approach.

In silico (on the computer) oncology is a complex and multiscale combination of sciences and technologies that focuses on the study and modelling of biological mechanisms related to the phenomenon of cancer at all levels of biocomplexity. In silico oncology simulation models may be used for evaluating and comparing different therapeutic schemes, while at the same time considering different values of critical parameters which present substantial inter-patient variability. As the number of the involved parameters characterizing both the complex tumour biosystem and possible treatment schemes increases, the resulting exponential increase in computational requirements makes the use of a grid environment for the execution of the simulations a particularly attractive solution. In this paper, a grid-enabled simulation environment for the execution of in silico oncology radiotherapy simulations on grid infrastructures is presented and implementation details are discussed. The environment provides a web portal as the end-user interface and contains advanced features that facilitate the execution of in silico oncology simulations in grid environments. Special consideration has been given during the development of the environment in order to simplify the maintenance and extension of the application, while additional services for Quality of Service provisioning have been applied. The simulation environment has been employed in order to perform several scenarios of glioblastoma multiforme radiotherapy simulations on the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) grid infrastructure. Indicative simulation results, as well as statistics regarding execution times on the grid, are presented.

Grid information systems play a central role in today’s production Grid infrastructures, enabling the discovery of a range of information about the Grid services that exist in an infrastructure. As the number of services within these infrastructures continues to grow, it must be understood whether the current implementations are able to scale to meet the future requirements. Existing approaches for evaluating Grid information systems mainly focus on performance metrics and do not consider the quality of the information itself. This paper proposes a comprehensive benchmarking methodology for the evaluation of Grid information systems which includes a metric to assess the quality of the information returned. Using this methodology, two commonly used Grid information system implementations, Metadata Directory Service (MDS) and the Berkeley Database Information Index (BDII), are evaluated using data obtained from the Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) production Grid.

In a joint effort between computer scientists and theoretical chemists new tools have been developed for Grid applications leading to the efficient management of large computational campaigns in the field of quantum chemical calculations. For that purpose, the Vienna Grid Environment (VGE) software has been successfully extended allowing efficient job submission, status control and data retrieval. In addition, the services of the Compchem Virtual Organization of Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE) Grid environment have been used. Extensive photodynamical simulation runs using the software packages COLUMBUS and NEWTON-X have been performed on the cis-trans isomerization of a model retinal system, aiming at a detailed picture of the primary processes of vision.

Europe is playing a leading role in building multinational, multidisciplinary e-infrastructures. Initially, these efforts were driven by academic proof-of-concept and test-bed projects, such as the European Data Grid Project, but have since developed into large-scale, production e-infrastructures supporting numerous scientific communities. To establish a production-quality e-infrastructure in a greenfield region like the Baltic region, a dedicated project was established, the BalticGrid project. According to the principle of think globally, act locally, the aim of the project was to build a regional e-infrastructure that seamlessly integrates with the international e-infrastructure of Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE). The establishment of a European e-infrastructure ecosystem is currently progressing along two distinct paths: European Grid Initiative (EGI) and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) infrastructures. internetworking; smart grids

As technology advances with newly developed intelligent systems, the involvement of telecommunication in today's efficient government structures for speedy infrastructure projects is essential. Telecommunication technologies offer a revolutionary channel for transmitting information that optimizes the pace at which infrastructure works are done and increases the accuracy and quality of the work to be accomplished. Governments globally, in their effort to respond to the growing demands of the modern economy and enhance service delivery, are adopting modern telecommunication technologies. Such systems help capture, monitor and pro, and process information in real-time, hence, project management and decision-making. Applying 5G networks, IoT, and cloud computation in infrastructure development increases services' overall performance and delivery. For example, 5G allows for more efficient communication and data exchange. At the same time, the IoT allows for monitoring the state of infrastructure conditions to help increase the effectiveness of operations. Cloud technology supports adequate and secure data management, allowing convenient data sharing across the government. Telecommunication enhances infrastructure projects' progress and responds to emergencies, energy, and the public. It improves transparency, public voices, and participation, thus improving the public's trust in government, which is served by these technologies. Nevertheless, obstacles, which include geographic inequality of telecommunication networks and information security threats, are still the key concerns that should be considered. This paper focuses on telecommunications' current and future use in government infrastructure projects to capture the gains and pain and propose a way forward. It also aims to show how telecommunication revolutionizes how governments formulate, implement, and control their infrastructural developments for economic growth and the upliftment of their people.

Communication network requirements for major smart grid applications in HAN, NAN and WAN

The open grid services infrastructure (OGSI) defines a distributed system framework by integrating grid and Web services technologies to facilitate the sharing of various resources, which result in grid service. Grid service inherits the features from Web service, aiming at enabling interoperability among heterogeneous grid application. However, in the open grid services architecture (OGSA), grid services are isolated, it is difficult building a grid service management framework which can work across organizations. Based on BPEL4WS, this paper proposes an agent-oriented grid service modeling framework to address the difficulties in developing grid applications based on grid services.

Grid technology is widely used in recent years, it has solved the real sharing of resources, make each node of unified command and use of resources, the information grid is on the basis of computational grid, using data mining. Information fusion and search engine technology and building are advantageous for the collection and sharing of grid resources. The goal to create a build on OS and Web is based on the new generation of Internet information platform. In this platform, the distribution of the information processing is the collaboration and intelligent. Focus crawler sets according to the target subject. In the form of intelligent collection topics come from the Web page, and then adopt the method of machine learning. The information retrieval on the collected information intelligent need process and analyze. Finally, the effective retrieval way is to meet the demand of the user's information retrieval.

Future distribution grids will be subjected to fluctuations in voltages and power flows due to the presence of renewable sources with intermittent power generation. The advanced smart metering infrastructure (AMI) enables the distribution system operators (DSOs) to measure and analyze electrical quantities such as voltages, currents and power at each customer connection point. Various smart grid applications can make use of the AMI data either in offline or close to real-time mode to assess the grid voltage conditions and estimate losses in the lines/cables. The outputs of these applications can enable DSOs to take corrective action and make a proper plan for grid upgrades. In this paper, the process of development and deployment of applications for improving the observability of distributions grids is described, which consists of the novel deployment framework that encompasses the proposition of data collection, communication to the servers, data storage, and data visualization. This paper discussed the development of two observability applications for grid monitoring and loss calculation, their validation in a laboratory setup, and their field deployment. A representative distribution grid in Denmark is chosen for the study using an OPAL-RT real-time simulator. The results of the experimental studies show that the proposed applications have high accuracy in estimating grid voltage magnitudes and active energy losses. Further, the field deployment of the applications prove that DSOs can gain insightful information about their grids and use them for planning purposes.

Grid computing is the next wave of distributed computing based on open standards and using commercial-off-the-shelf building blocks. It is becoming the new economy and major forces propelling the IT industry. In the emerging world of the virtual Internet, grids will provide instant global access to innovative services that deliver the power of the entire Internet to mobile users anywhere, any time, via any device, online or offline.Grid computing is a continuing advances in technology, which is base on open standards-based integration. As grid computing gains support and popularity, the needs grow for studying computer science and technology problems arising from grid systems and applications. Grid computing is supported by many countries and governments. Government plays a very important role in the development of Grid. The ministry of education of China has issued the ChinaGrid project.Currently, Grid technologies are extending to commercial applications. It has a significant influence on human society and various activities.

Nowadays, there is a trend to create resource-consuming applications without building heavy computer centers, but to use resources on computer systems distributed over the internet. Grid middleware is a framework to access these resources. The concern of this paper is the evaluation of a specific grid middleware, namely Globus Toolkit, for data-intensive applications. As a test case, we have designed and implemented a service-based distributed web crawler on top of this middleware: A web crawler is a complex application consisting of many nodes. It imposes significantly higher demands on grid middleware regarding administrative flexibility compared to grid applications that allocate computing power of grid nodes. We have observed that some components of Globus Toolkit are flexible enough to provide the control functionality necessary for a web crawler, while others are not. For these other components, we propose possible extensions. Since we expect the combination of those characteristics to occur with many other grid applications as well, our study is of broader interest, beyond web crawling.

In computational fluid dynamics programming, meshing quality determines the reliability of the results of numerical calculation. For numerical programming in heat and mass transfer of U-type ground heat exchangers (GHE) in ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems, considering the limitation of the structured grid technology for complex geometric model, unstructured grid technology should be adopted. In this paper, combined with the application and research status at home and abroad, the performance characteristics of the commonly used three kinds of unstructured grid technologies are compared, and the applications of three-dimensional Delaunay grid technology in the related fields are introduced, with emphasis on the research status of the two key problems in the application of this technology, namely boundary consistency and sliver elements. The purpose of this paper is to provide help for the numerical calculation programming of U-type GHE in GSHP systems under coupled heat conduction and advection.