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Project profile: GISELA

Plotting a sustainable e-Infrastructure in Latin America

The GISELA consortium – short for Grid Initiatives for e-Science virtual communities in Europe and Latin America – has many things in common with EGI, including a mission to provide sustainable e-Infrastructure resources to its community of scientists and researchers.

It’s no surprise then that project coordinator Bernard Marechal joined Steven Newhouse in the User Forum in Vilnius to sign two Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs): one project MoU between GISELA and EGI-InSPIRE, and one infrastructure MoU between the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (on behalf of the GISELA partners) and EGI.eu.

With these agreements GISELA becomes an EGI Infrastructure Provider, entitled to a seat on the EGI Operations Management Board. “This is an opportunity to expose Latin American needs to middleware development,” says Marechal, adding that “a tighter collaboration with EGI translates into better gLite knowledge dissemination and access to useful tools.”

GISELA brings together 19 beneficiaries (and 12 other parties) from 15 countries in Europe and Latin America for two-year project that started in September 2010 with two main goals:

• To implement a Latin American Grid Initiative (LGI) sustainability model rooted on National Grid Initiatives (NGI) or Equivalent Domestic Grid Structures (EDGS), in association with CLARA, Latin American NRENs and EGI.

• To provide Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) with the e-Infrastructure and application-related services required to improve the effectiveness of their research.

The long-term idea is to establish a powerful e-Infrastructure facility built on the legacy of the ‘e-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America’ (EELA) project series, as well as to develop and implement a sustainability model for the e-Infrastructure.

In addition, GISELA aims to provide support to both small user communities based at research institutions or working in small collaborations, and large Virtual Research Communities spanning Latin America and Europe. This includes providing training and tutorials to new users, operational support, porting new applications to the grid or managing digital identities and grid certificates.

GISELA’s support services are provided by the project’s team and in collaboration with other initiatives.

At its start, the GISELA project supports research communities from 11 scientific domains including bioinformatics, life sciences, high energy physics, civil protection, earth sciences, engineering, chemistry, e-learning, computer sciences, mathematics and fusion. But they are keen to point out that neither the number of user communities nor the number of scientific domains is restricted and that new communities and new applications are more than welcome in the project.