Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

A Weakly Coupled Adaptive Gossip Protocol for Application Level Active Networks.

With the sharp increase in heterogeneity and distribution of elements in wide-area networks, more flexible, efficient and autonomous approaches for management and information distribution are needed. This paper proposes a novel approach, based on gossip protocols and firefly synchronisation theory, for the management policy distribution and synchronisation over a number of nodes in an Application Level Active Network (ALAN). The work is presented in the context of the IST project ANDROID (Active Network Distributed Open Infrastructure Development), which is developing an autonomous policy-based management system for ALAN. The preliminary simulation results suggest that with the appropriately optimised parameters, the algorithms developed are scalable, can work effectively in a realistic random network, and allow the policy updates to be distributed efficiently throughout the active network with a lower latency than other similar types of gossip protocols

Policy-based Resource Management for Application Level Active Networks

The emerging active network concepts, particularly those focusing on the application level, will provide the users with the flexibility of deployment of customised services on the operator's infrastructure. This will be achieved through deployment of user customised control code in virtual execution environments residing on the network nodes such as routers and servers. In order to achieve efficient network operation, the resource consumption on both element and network levels must be managed. In an active networking environment resource requirements come in three categories: bandwidth, memory and processing. Based on the active networking architecture proposed in the IST project ANDROID, we develop resource models and metrics that take into account these three resource categories. The resource models are further used to define the necessary classes of policies in order to achieve efficient resource management. Policies are expressed in XML, and an example policy is given. Finally, we present an experiment comparing the use of alternative resource allocation policies. We also briefly discuss some security issues in the application level active networks

Integrity and Security of the Application Level Active Networks

The advances in programmable networks enforce the importance of ensuring and maintaining the integrity and security of the network and the supporting systems. In the future programmable network scenarios, the threats to integrity and security will rapidly increase as third-party value added service providers and end-users start deploying their customised applications on the operator infrastructure. Here we discuss some typical integrity issues relevant in the programmable network scenarios. We introduce the Application Level Active Networking (ALAN) principles, and the basic management principles of ALAN-enabled networks, developed by the IST project ANDROID (Active Network Distributed Open Infrastructure Development). In this context, we discuss the candidate approach to managing the integrity issues in ALANenabled networks and reflect on some integrity-oriented techniques. Finally, we focus on security management, and briefly describe the ANDROID security architecture.

HP-SEE User Forum 2012

This book is a collection of carefully reviewed papers presented during the HP-SEE User Forum, the meeting of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe’s (HP-SEE) Research Communities, held in October 17-19, 2012, in Belgrade, Serbia. HP-SEE aims at supporting and integrating regional HPC infrastructures; implementing solutions for HPC in the region; and making HPC resources available to research communities in SEE, region, which are working in a number of scientific fields with specific needs for massively parallel execution on powerful computing resources. HP-SEE brings together research communities and HPC operators from 14 different countries and enables them to share HPC facilities, software, tools, data and research results, thus fostering collaboration and strengthening the regional and national human network; the project specifically supports research groups in the areas of computational physics, computational chemistry and the life sciences. The contributions presented in this book are organized in four main sections: computational physics; computational chemistry; the life sciences; and scientific computing and HPC operations.  

High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe's Research CommunitiesResults of the HP-SEE User Forum 2012 /

X, 171 p. 88 illus., 24 illus. in color.online re

The DORII project e-infrastructure: Deployment, applications, and measurements

Remote Instrumentation Services go far beyond offering networked access to remote instrument resources. They are establishing as a way of fully integrating instruments (including laboratory equipment, large-scale experimental facilities, and sensor networks) in a Service Oriented Architecture, where users can view and operate them in the same fashion with computing and storage resources. The deployment of test beds for a large basis of scientific instrumentation and e-Science applications is mandatory to develop new functionalities to be embedded in the existing middleware to enable such integration, to test them on the field, and to promote their usage in scientific communities. The DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project is a major effort in this direction. The paper presents the performance monitoring infrastructure that has been built in DORII and the results concerning a selected application in seismic engineering. \ua9 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2011