European Grid Infrastructure

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Infrastructure services

The European Grid Infrastructure’s (EGI) mission is to allow scientists and researchers access to an integrated and seamless computing e-infrastructure spanning more than 30 countries.

To fulfil its commitment to its user communities, EGI relies on a series of infrastructure services contributed by members of the EGI federation.

Operations Portal

The operations portal provides information to Operations Centres, VO managers and other interested parties, as well as related services such as the VO registration tool, the broadcast and downtime tool and the regional dashboard. Developed by the CC-IN2P3, part of the French NGI.

Monitoring Portal

The Service Availability Monitoring is the backbone of the monitoring infrastructure and tests the performance of grid services continuously. The monthly availability and reliability figures are calculated from the test results, accessible from this portal. Developed by CERN.

Accounting Portal

The EGI central accounting portal presents a homogeneous, user friendly view of the data and provides a good understanding of resource utilisation. Local operations are responsible for the validation of the gathered data and supervise the publication process. Usage information is persistently stored in central repositories. Developed by CESGA, part of the Spanish NGI.

Helpdesk

EGI provides support to users and operations staff through the Global Grid User Support – GGUS – a distributed helpdesk with central coordination. GGUS is a central tool, fully interfaced with several local helpdesks. Developed by KIT part of the German NGI.

Configuration Database

The Grid Configuration Database – GOCDB – contains general information about the resource centres that make up the grid infrastructure. GOCDB is accessed by end-users, managers, support teams and VO managers, as well as by other tools and third-party middleware with an interest in grid topology.

Core grid services

These include middleware services for researchers using EGI by providing information discovery, authentication, workflow management or file cataloguing, for example. The actual set of local core services operated can vary, depending on the scale of the NGI and on the number of VOs supported.

Auxiliary core services can be deployed centrally to guarantee the good running of the global infrastructure services. Examples of such services are:

  • the VOMS (Virtual Organizations Management Service) service and VO membership management for infrastructural VOs (DTEAM, OPS);

  • the provisioning of middleware services needed by the monitoring infrastructure (e.g. top-BDII and WMS);

  • the Certification Authority;

  • the messaging service that supports the monitoring and accounting tasks with a reliable message broker infrastructure;

  • and other catch-all core services to support small user communities.