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Lyon: a great place to make friends

A look at the agreements signed behind the scenes of the Technical Forum

In September the EGI community met up at the annual Technical Forum in Lyon, to discuss, present and debate the progress of the infrastructure. In between the sessions, coffee breaks and amazing dinners Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu, was able to snatch a few minutes to sign Memorandums of Understanding with SIENA and SAGrid.

Both MoUs are an important piece of the puzzle for EGI in enabling the vision of providing sustainable distributed computing services to support European researchers and their international collaborators.

SIENA is an EC-funded support action tasked with defining a roadmap for e-Infrastructures. Like EGI, SIENA is focussed on the standards they use and how they should interoperate. These issues are at the very heart of creating sustainable access to computing resources for researchers and SIENA invited Michel Drescher, EGI’s technical manager, to be on the roadmap’s editorial board (REB).

Michel was delighted to get involved: “We have just set up a federated clouds task force to provide the community with best practices, recommendations, and documentation to help EGI create a federated, virtualised infrastructure. The roadmap that SIENA is putting together will allow us to contribute to the future of these activities beyond EGI but also let us learn from the experiences of others.”

The MoU with SIENA is based on three main areas: disseminating the results of the collaboration, increasing the visibility of project objectives and results and highlighting the exchange of ideas and collaboration between the two.

Representing SIENA was Silvana Muscella, of Trust-IT. “Signing the MoU solidifies an already ongoing & strong relationship with EGI. We have been working with EGI through the SIENA REB but this lets us work together even closer to help EGI document the outputs of their task force,” she said. “We are at a very strategic stage in the open standards market, defining service contracts now and understanding how those standards potentially play a role in the areas of interoperability and portability is important.”

The second agreement signed at the Technical Forum was with the Meraka Institute, a member of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. They signed it on behalf of the South African national grid SAGrid, which is one of the youngest regional infrastructures. The MoU aims to bring SAGrid into the EGI community but also to let them gain from the expertise of EGI’s other members.

As SAGrid is a resource provider, the MoU focuses on policy and technological questions that guarantee the integration of the services they provide with EGI.

Bruce Becker signed on the dotted line alongside Steven Newhouse and sees the MoU as an important part of SAGrid’s growth. “We have been working on building a grid infrastructure for a while now. This has seen some real results recently with many institutes now actively providing computing resources.

his is the next logical step for us, helping EGI build a worldwide research infrastructure. We are now a part of something beyond our borders and this is a brilliant opportunity for South Africa to be a player on the global stage.”

These MoUs represent the diversity of the partners within EGI. It is this range of partners that will allow EGI to cement its reputation as a world leader in grid technology but also as an important part of the research community’s toolkit. •