NGI profile: France Grilles
A look into the French NGI, co-host of the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon
France Grilles, the French National Grid Initiative (NGI), was set up in June 2010 as a Scientific Interest Group to represent the country’s resource infrastructure providers. A year on, France Grilles is celebrating its first anniversary at the French Grid Day, an event co-located with the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon (19-23 September 2011).
The interest of the French research community in grid computing goes back many years. In August 2007, the CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique) – the largest research agency in France – paved the way by creating the Institute des Grilles (IDG). Shortly after that, the CNRS put together the steering board “to develop a sustainable model for production grids at European and national scales,” says Vincent Breton, director of the IDG. The result of this concerted work was France Grilles, a partnership of eight institutions led by CNRS’s IDG.
France Grilles operates 23 sites, supporting gLite, DIET and OAR middleware stacks. “DIET and OAR are middlewares developed within the French research community in computer science,” explains Breton.
Over the past year, from June 2010 to May 2011, Frances Grilles was responsible for more than 215 million normalised CPU hours (KSI2K), which represent about 15 per cent of the total EGI output. The largest share of the resources comes from the CNRS-IN2P3 computing centre in Lyon, which providing about 50 per cent of the cores and 80 per cent of the available storage.
Lyon’s computing centre is the spine of the resource infrastructure and the host of the technical coordination team.
The French NGI is also heavily involved in the wider EGI community. Besides co-hosting the Technical Forum in Lyon, the country is leading the development of the EGI Operations Portal (task JRA1.5 task within the EGI-InSPIRE project). This is an important contribution to the whole community, since the Operations Portal is the tool used to provide official metrics such as the number of user communities or end-users, and helps to mage and monitor the workload of site operators within the NGIs.
France Grilles has a broad user base and in total, the French Certificate Authority has issued about 900 certificates. A large proportion of users come from High Energy Physics Virtual Organisations and all of the four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE) put French infrastructure resources to good use. The Life Sciences and Computational Chemistry communities are also active infrastructure users.
The scientific output of France’s grid research communities has been published in many peer reviewed journals, including the Journal of Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics, Public Library of Science, Nature and the Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The French NGI provides many services to its users, the first of which is training: “From April 2010 to April 2011, nine tutorials were organised in several French cities reaching about 150 users from all disciplines,” says Breton. France Grilles is also setting up a number of services to improve user support and to analyse the scientific activity. “Our first national user forum will take place in Lyon 19 September 2011. It will be the opportunity to get to know the grid users better,” he adds.
France has many plans for the future and Breton highlights three priorities for 2011: “Operate a stable infrastructure, improve the services to our users and start a strategic roadmap for cloud computing.”
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