CHAIN-D2 3-Final_2

Transcription

CHAIN-D2 3-Final_2

Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures
Research Infrastructures – Support Action
Grant Agreement n. 260011
www.chain-project.eu
SEVENTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME
Capacities specific program - Research Infrastructures
FP7–INFRASTRUCTURES–2010-2
Project acronym: CHAIN
Project full title: Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures
Grant agreement no.: 260011
Start date of project: 1 December 2011
Duration: 24 months
Deliverable D2.3
Regional sustainability report
Version 0.5
Due on: 30/09/2012
Submitted on: 12/10/2012
Organisation name of lead beneficiary for this deliverable: GRNET
Dissemination Level: Public
Abstract:
This deliverable provides the report on sustainability-oriented actions supported by the project, and
also includes the sustainability study.
CHAIN Project
Deliverable D2.3
Copyrights © The CHAIN Consortium 2012.
More details on the copyright holders can be found at the following URL: http://www.chain-project.eu
CHAIN (“Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures”) is a project co-funded by the European Union in the framework
of the 7th FP for Research and Technological Development, as part of the “Capacities specific program – Research Infrastructures
FP7–INFRASTRUCTURES–2010-2”. For more information on the project, its partners and contributors please see http://www.chainproject.eu
You are permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document containing this copyright notice, but modifying this document is
not allowed. You are permitted to copy this document in whole or in part into other documents if you attach the following reference to the
copied elements: “Copyright © 2010. The CHAIN Consortium. http://www.chain-project.eu”.
The information contained in this document represents the views of the CHAIN Consortium as of the date they are published. The CHAIN
Consortium does not guarantee that any information contained herein is error-free, or up to date.
THE CHAIN CONSORTIUM MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, BY PUBLISHING THIS DOCUMENT.
Document log
Issue
Date
Comment
V0.1
04/07/2012
Table of Contents circulated for comments
V0.2
13/09/2012
Inputs for most the core sections
V0.3
17/09/2012
V0.4
02/10/2012
V0.5
12/10/2012
Author
Ognjen Prnjat, Spiros Livieratos, Zoi
Panagiotara
Gang Chen, P.S.Dhekne, Federico
Ruggieri, Ludek Matyska, Eric Yen,
Luis Nunez, Tiwonge Banda,
Margaret Ngwira, Salem Alagtash,
Ognjen Prnjat, Eirini-Gianna
Koukouzeli
Expansion of executive summary and
Ognjen Prnjat
conclusions
Feedback from partners incorporated, minor
Ognjen Prnjat, Eleni Kontrafouri
updates
Final text, final incorporation of comments Spiros Livieratos, Ognjen Prnjat, Eleni
from
partners,
incorporation
of
Kontrafouri, Eirini-Gianna
sustainability study, administrative checks
Koukouzeli
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Table of contents
Table of contents ................................................................................................................... 3
 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 5
 Purpose ........................................................................................................................ 5
 Terminology................................................................................................................. 5
 Executive summary ........................................................................................................... 6
 NGI and sustainability guidelines .................................................................................... 8
 Progress of suitability-oriented recommendations – report per region ........................ 13
 Sub-Saharan Africa recommendations progress .......................................................... 13
 Mediterranean recommendations progress .................................................................. 15
 Latin America recommendations progress .................................................................. 17
 India recommendations progress ................................................................................ 21
 China recommendations progress ............................................................................... 22
 South-East Asia recommendations progress ............................................................... 24
 Actions on strengthening national structures - report per region ................................. 25
 National report template ............................................................................................. 25
 Sub-Saharan Africa national report ............................................................................. 26
 Mediterranean national report ..................................................................................... 29
 Latin America national report ..................................................................................... 33
 India national report ................................................................................................... 38
 China national report .................................................................................................. 39
 South-East Asia national report .................................................................................. 40
 Analysis of a Sustainability Model for a Regional Body for Grid Coordination .......... 43
 Methodology .............................................................................................................. 43
 Sub-Saharan Africa sustainability analysis ................................................................. 52
 Goals Setting ....................................................................................................... 52
 Situation Review ................................................................................................. 53
 Strategy formulation ............................................................................................ 65
 Mediterranean sustainability analysis ......................................................................... 67
 Goals Setting ....................................................................................................... 67
 Situation Review ................................................................................................. 67
 Strategy formulation ............................................................................................ 72
 Latin America sustainability analysis.......................................................................... 74
 Goals Setting ....................................................................................................... 74
 Situation review ................................................................................................... 75
 Strategy formulation ............................................................................................ 84
 India sustainability analysis ........................................................................................ 86
 Goals Setting ....................................................................................................... 86
 Situation review ................................................................................................... 87
 Strategy formulation ............................................................................................ 93
 China sustainability analysis ....................................................................................... 95
 Goals Setting ....................................................................................................... 95
 Situation review ................................................................................................... 96
 Strategy formulation .......................................................................................... 104
 South-East Asia sustainability analysis ..................................................................... 106
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 Goals Setting ..................................................................................................... 106
 Situation review ................................................................................................. 107
 Strategy formulation .......................................................................................... 112
 Overall analysis and insights .................................................................................... 114
 Sustainability-oriented workshops ............................................................................... 118
 Overview of the process ........................................................................................... 118
 Sub-Saharan Africa .................................................................................................. 118
 Mediterranean .......................................................................................................... 119
 Latin America .......................................................................................................... 119
 India ......................................................................................................................... 121
 China ....................................................................................................................... 121
 South-East Asia ........................................................................................................ 121
 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 122
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 Introduction
The CHAIN project, started on the 1st of December 2010, aims to coordinate and leverage the
efforts made over the past 6 years to extend the European e-Infrastructure (and particularly
Grid) operational and organisational principles to a number of regions in the world. CHAIN
uses their results with a vision of a harmonised and optimised interaction model for eInfrastructure and specifically Grid interfaces between Europe and the rest of the world. The
project is aiming to elaborate a strategy and define the instruments in order to ensure
coordination and interoperation of the European Grid Infrastructure with those emerging in
other regions of the world (Asia, Mediterranean, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa).
One important aspect of CHAIN activity is provision of sustainability-oriented support to the
regions and to the national structures (emerging National Grid Initiatives). This deliverable
reports in detail regarding these support activities and provides a detailed regional
sustainability analysis for the future.
 Purpose
The purpose of this deliverable is to provide a report regarding sustainability support activities
carried out by the project, as well as a detailed sustainability analysis for the future.
 Terminology
This subsection provides the definitions of terms, acronyms, and abbreviations required to
properly interpret this document.
GA
Grant Agreement
DoW
Description of Work – Annex I to the GA
EC
FP7
ROC
European Commission
European Commission’s Framework Programme Seven
Regional Operation Centre
CHAIN
Co-ordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures
DCI
Distributed Computing Infrastructure
EGI
European Grid Initiative
EGI-InSPIRE
European Grid
Infrastructure
EPIKH
Exchange Programme to advanced e-Infrastructure Know-How
ERA
European Research Area
HPC
High Performance Computing
MoU
Memorandum of Understanding
NREN
National Research and Education Network
NGI
National Grid Initiative
ROC
Regional Operation Centre
NKN
National Knowledge Network of India
VRC
Virtual Research Communities
Initiative-Integrated
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Pan-European
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Deliverable D2.3
 Executive summary
The deliverable presents the progress of the ongoing WP2 task regarding the long-term
sustainability support carried out by the CHAIN project.
After the deliverable overview, the background documentation is briefly summarised,
followed by the in-depth report and analysis.
The report core consists of four sets of developments. The reports are lengthy, and these
details are provided for the reference of the regions and as documentation, while the summary
is provided here.
First, the progress of sustainability-specific recommendations defined within the previous
deliverable D2.2 is presented, per region. All the recommendations have been followed and
succinct reports given on each recommendation within each region. In terms of regional
bodies’ developments, major achievements are certainly the establishment of ASREN as a
dedicated legal body, and its explicit involvement in Grid coordination activities;
establishment of the ROCs for Africa&Arabia and China as core operational bodies; and the
commitment of Latina American NRENs/NGIs in continuing the Grid operations in Latin
America via a clear Memorandum of Understanding.
Moreover, strong lobbying strategies and approaches have been adopted in the Mediterranean,
Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, supporting an active dissemination and lobbying
campaign which yielded the results reported in this deliverable.
Second, the progress is given, per region, of the National-level actions within the respective
region - explicitly describing the national-level support to countries provided by CHAIN
project. This is given in short tabular format. The biggest developments in this area are as
follows. First, initial actions on kicking off National Grid Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa
have started, which is of crucial importance in this greenfield region. The exemplary
developments in South Africa, which is converging to a very stable and structured NGI, are
being also used as guidance for other countries in the region. In the Mediterranean, ASREN,
as the centre of gravity, is actively supporting the existing National Grid Initiatives and has
started crucial actions in Kuwait and is stimulating other countries as well. In Latin America
and South-East Asia, the NGI model does not seem to be the optimal solution, and majority of
effort is focused on sustaining the established Joint Research Unit (South-East Asia) and
ensuring continued support for regional grid operations through a targeted MoU (Latin
America). Progress is steady in India and China with long-term defined programmes support
the development of network, Grid and related computing efforts.
Third, a detailed sustainability analysis per region has been carried out, via the internal and
external audits, directional policy matrices, SWOT analyses, and strategy formulations. There
is no silver-bullet solution or best practice that fits all regions, thus the result of analysis
provides a set of suggested measures for improvement and new opportunities for each region.
Finally, a short report is given on sustainability-focused dissemination workshops carried out
by the CHAIN WP2, with strong support of WP5. The targeted workshops for all regions have
been delivered by the project, and within those the sustainability-focused sessions have been
clearly defined, aiming to raise awareness and support the sustainability-related
recommendations. The model has proven to be effective.
Overall, sustainability support is one of the most complex activities in any infrastructure
project, cutting across a number of fields from operations, user communities, dissemination
and training, and naturally the financial and political-level support. The WP2 activity worked
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over a number of strategic lines of action, producing a set of key recommendations,
sustainability guidelines, detailed analysis and suggestions for way forward, but also in a
number of concrete actions described here, yielding long-term sustainable results.
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 NGI and sustainability guidelines
As sustainability has different forms and has to some extent variable aspects over CHAIN
regions, we continuously collect relevant information on the project wiki (the Workpackage 2
section at http://www.chain-project.eu/wiki/-/wiki/WIKI+Page/WP2). The primary goal of this
document collection is to provide a living and evolving place where interested parties can find
relevant documents and compare them across countries and regions. It also serves as a place
where new documents are uploaded as they are published, guaranteeing thus an up to date
information.
The actual wiki is split into two subsections:
 The Regional and NGI status and sustainability plans.
 Strategic and sustainability documents.
The first subsection is organized per regions and provides (where available) information about
individual countries. If possible, the information is structured to provide a fast access to the
status of the creation and maturity of NGI in individual countries. For each country, the
following information is sought for:
 Status of NGI, i.e. whether NGI exists formally, informally (as a MoU or similar kind of
supporting document), or whether there are at least some plans to setup an NGI.
 Relationship to NREN, as in some cases the already existing NREN is taking care of the
NGI (either its creation or even serving as an NGI).
 The availability of some sustainability related documents of activities, e.g. regional or
national plans and activities for long term support, some planned or already executed
projects covering NGI and its operations etc.
 Where available, pointers to official web pages and also to individual documents are
provided per country (region) basis, to give interested parties access to original
information sources.
The second wiki subsection (Strategic and sustainability documents) is a collection of relevant
documents, structured per content. The documents collected here are complementary to the
information provided in the first wiki subsection, and do not include the country specific
(national) documents referenced in the first wiki subsection.
The subsection starts with the EGI Design Study documents including the first NGI
guidelines, documents used in the process of NGI creation under the EGI umbrella. These EGI
DS documents are provided more for reference, as they were already replaced by deliverables
from EGI InSPIRE and EMI projects in the next part. The EGI InSPIRE and EMI documents
provide an up to date view on the sustainability plans of the EGI collaboration and also of its
major middleware provider, the EMI consortium.
The Europe related documents and followed by regional roadmaps and recommendations and
further by description of organizational schemes and sustainability plans from individual
regions. These documents come from previous EC co-funded projects, supporting the
development of grid infrastructures in individual regions. The last part is dedicated to selected
MoUs between EGI and regional projects or initiatives.
The taxonomy of the documents is given below.
Regional and NGI status and sustainability plans
[1] Latin America - DSA1.4 Infrastructure Assessment Report (10/2008):
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[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
Deliverable D2.3
http://documents.eu-eela.eu/record/1273/files/EELA-2-DSA1.pdf
Mediterranean – EUMEDGRID - Support D3.1 Sustainability plan for a two tiers
competence centre in the Mediterranean (7/2010):
http://eumedgrid.it/index.php/docs-and-reports/publications/doc_details/43eumedgrid-support-d31-sustainability-plan-for-a-two-tiers-competence-centrein-the-mediterranean
Asia-Pacific - D2.2 Policy Report/Technical Roadmap (3/2009):
http://www.chainproject.eu/c/wiki/get_page_attachment?p_l_id=754495&nodeId=754939&title
=Strategic+and+sustainability+documents&fileName=Strategic+and+sustainab
ility+documents%2FEUAsiaGrid-D2.2.pdf
WP2 Roadmap of EUAsiaGrid (4/2010):
http://www.euasiagrid.org/wiki/index.php/WP2_Roadmap
EUIndiaGrid 2.4 Final Report on Sustainability (1/2012)
ility+documents%2FEUIG-DEL-D2.4-v1.0-FINFinal+Report+on+Sustainability.pdf
Strategic and sustainability documents
[6] EGI D5.3 Blueprint (12/2008)
ility+documents%2FEGI_DS_D5_3_V300b.pdf
[7] EGI D4.3 NGI Guidelines (7/2008)
ility+documents%2FEGI_DS_D4-3_FINAL.pdf
[8] EGI D3.2 Functions Definition (5/2009)
ility+documents%2FEGI_DS_D3-2.pdf
[9] EGI D2.7 EGI Sustainability Plan (3/2011)
ility+documents%2FEGI-D2.7-final.pdf
[10] EGI D2.4 DCI Collaborative Roadmap (1/2011)
ility+documents%2FEGI-D2.4-207-V3.pdf
[11] EGI D6.2 Sustainability Plans for the Activities of the Heavy User
Communities (3/2011)
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ility+documents%2FEGI-D6.2-final.pdf
[12] EGI D6.5 Sustainability plans for the HUC activities (6/2012)
https://documents.egi.eu/document/741
[13] EMI Roadmap and DCI Collaborations (3/2011)
ility+documents%2FEMI-DNA1.4.pdf
[14] EMI Exploitation and Sustainability Plan (4/2011)
ility+documents%2FEMI-DNA2.4.1.pdf
[15] Mediterranean Technological Roadmap for the SEE-GRID National Grid
Initiatives (12/2004)
http://www.seera-ei.eu/images/stories/see-grid/SEEGRID-WP2-GR-063Deliverable2.2-a-2004-12-15.pdf
[16] Mediterranean CA and RA guidelines for new candidates (9/2006)
http://www.seera-ei.eu/images/stories/see-grid2/SEEGRID2-WP3-GR-035Deliverable3.2-a-2006-09-28.pdf
[17] Mediterranean Infrastructure Deployment Plan (6/2007)
http://www.seera-ei.eu/images/stories/see-grid2/SEEGRID2-WP3-CH-002Deliverable3.1b-g-2007-06-29.pdf
[18] Asia-Pacific Policy Report/Technical Roadmap (3/2009)
[19] The Long-Term Latin American Grid Initiative: Model and Operation Cost
Estimate (10/2008)
ility+documents%2FEELA-2-DSA1.pdf
[20] Latin-America White Paper for the Long-Term Sustainability of eInfrastructures (4/2010)
ility+documents%2FEELA-2-DNA1.11.pdf
[21] CLARA Business Plan (8/2011)
ility+documents%2FGISELA-D1.4-v1.4.pdf
[22] Mediterranean Operational, Organizational and Policy Schemes (3/2005)
http://www.seera-ei.eu/images/stories/see-grid/SEEGRID-WP4-GR-087Deliverable4.1-a-2005-03-15.pdf
[23] Mediterranean Sustainable Organisational and Operational Approach (3/2007)
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http://www.seera-ei.eu/images/stories/see-grid2/SEEGRID2-WP2-RO-009Deliverable2.2-final-2007-03-25.pdf
[24] Mediterranean Regional and National Organisational and Policy Schemes
(12/2006)
http://www.seera-ei.eu/images/stories/see-grid2/SEEGRID2-WP2-RO-008Deliverable2.1-final_a-2006-12-15.pdf
[25] Africa Sustainability plan for a two tiers competence centre in the
Mediterranean (7/2010)
ility+documents%2FEUMEDGRID-Support_D3.1_V4.pdf
[26] Asia-Pacific Policy Report/Technical Roadmap (3/2009)
[27] EUIndiaGrid D2.1 Sustainability Roadmap sustainable uptake of a mature cooperation between European and Indian grid infrastructures (4/2010)
ility+documents%2FEUIG-DEL-D2.1-v1-0-FIN.pdf
[28] EUIndiaGrid D2.2 e-Infrastructures across Europe and India Brochure
(10/2010)
ility+documents%2FEUIG-DEL-D2.2+-+eInfrastructures+across+Europe+and+India.pdf
[29] EUIndiaGrid D2.3 Updated Roadmap on Sustainability (1/2011)
ility+documents%2FEUIG-DEL-D2.3-v1-0-FIN.pdf
[30] MoU between EU-IndiaGrid2 and GISELA (12/2010)
ility+documents%2FGISELA-MOU02-EUIG2.pdf
[31] MoU between EGI.eu and UFRJ (3/2011)
http://www.chainproject.eu/c/wiki/get_page_attachment?p_l_id=754495&nodeId=75493
9&title=Strategic+and+sustainability+documents&fileName=Strategic+
and+sustainability+documents%2FGISELA-MOU04-UFRJ_EGI.eu.pdf
[32] MoU between EGI-InSPIRE and GISELA (3/2011)
ility+documents%2FGISELA-MOU05-EGI-InSPIRE.pdf
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Current EGI InSPIRE and EMI documents:
[33] D2.7 EGI Sustainability Plan (3/2011)
http://documents.egi.eu/public/ShowDocument?docid=313
[34] D2.13 EGI Sustainability Plan (6/2012)
http://documents.egi.eu/public/ShowDocument?docid=1147
[35] D2.30 EGI Strategic Plan (8/2012)
ility+documents%2FEGI-1098-D230-final.pdf
[36] EMI DNA2.4.1 - Exploitation and Sustainability Plan (7/2010)
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/EMI/DeliverableDNA241/EMI-DNA2.4.11277604-Exploitation_Sustainability_Plan-v1.0.pdf
[37] EMI DNA2.4.2 - Exploitation and Sustainability Plan (4/2011)
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/EMI/DeliverableDNA242/EMI-DNA2.4.21277605-Exploitation_and_Sustainability_Plan_M12-v1.0.pdf
[38] EMI DNA3.1.1 - Collaborations, Exploitation and Sustainability Plan (4/2012)
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/EMI/DeliverableDNA311/EMI-DNA3.1.11450889-Collaborations_Exploitation_and_Sustainability_Plan_M24-v1.0.pdf
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 Progress of suitability-oriented recommendations – report per
region
This chapter presents the progress of sustainability-oriented recommendations provided in the
previous WP2 deliverable – D2.2 – per region. As explained in the Deliverable, in order to
have clear identification of the recommendations they have a tag that is using the following
convention: “Recommendation”- SerialNumber- RegionName-Term-Priority, where:
- Term: Short (CHAIN project duration ~ 1 year) / Medium (next 3 years) / Long (>5
years)
- Priority: High / Medium / Low
- RegionName can be one of the following: GEN (General/Non Region Specific), AF
(Sub-Saharan Africa), AP (Asia-Pacific), CA (Central Asia), CN (China), IN (India),
LA (Latin America), MED (Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula).
This deliverable deals exclusively with the sustainability-oriented recommendations defined
by the project within D2.2 and subsequent analysis.
Each regional sub-section presents the sustainability-oriented recommendations relevant for
that region, each followed by the report on progress. Some recommendations have longer
reports, depending on their relevance.
 Sub-Saharan Africa recommendations progress
Recommendation- 1-GEN-Medium-High
In smaller countries, continue supporting the NGIs, which are under construction, while in
cases where no NGI is established, work towards embedding the NGI within the NREN if
there is no obvious strong DCI player in the country.
Report- 1-GEN-Medium-High
Contact has been made twice with many countries in Sub Saharan Africa and there is some
movement in perhaps 10 of them. UBUNTUNET is working with those both at researcher and
NREN level to provide guidelines on establishing NGI. Some are expanded in Section 6.1
Recommendation- 5-GEN-Long-High
In all regions, progress from JRU model on regional level through to establishing a dedicated
legal body and financial model.
Report- 5-GEN-Long-High
At regional level there is not yet a JRU as the national level NGIs are still in an early stage of
development but steady work with them is ongoing. At this stage also Africa ROC acts as a
centre of gravity.
Recommendation- 8-AF-Short-Medium
The development of the NGIs in regions which African states see as relevant to their
development (Southern-Med, South Africa) should be presented as examples to meetings of
the regional government heads of Science and Technology and the IST-Africa conference, as
well as the UbuntuNet Connect series of conferences.
Report- 8-AF-Short-Medium
The UbuntuNet-Connect 2011 and CHAIN workshop attracted over 100 participants and a
more focussed workshop to be held at UbuntuNet-Connect 2012 promises to bring focus to
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those countries which are ready to move. Working with UNESCO HP BGI has provided
synergy. The same will be done at the conference in November 2012 with a focus of VRCs and
NGIs.
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 Mediterranean recommendations progress
ASREN has stimulated Grid development in the region, however focusing mainly on basic
actions on starting new activities regarding Grid in countries in the region, and supporting
nascent NRENs. ASREN has helped to implement and install a Grid Site in Kuwait University
and linked to the Arab Grid infrastructure. A full grid site with all related services has been
installed and configured at Kuwait University. This new site, KU-01-KUGRID, is made part of
EUMEDGRID, included in the Arab ROC, and its KU Grid Node connects the users in Kuwait
University to ASREN Grid. ASREN has held several meetings with Lebanon to developing
Lebanon NREN. A third policy level meeting is planned in October 2012. Several and similar
other communications with Libya and Somalia have been made to stimulate interest. Sudan
REN has recently joined ASREN as a shareholder.
A major development in the region is the set-up of ASREN. ASREN is a legal entity overseeing
e-infrastructure at the regional level. Its shareholders are: Abu-Ghazaleh Consulting GmbH,
Jordan University Network, Morocco CNRS, and Sudan REN, with initial funding provided by
Abu-Ghazaleh Consulting and EUMEDCONNECT3 project.
Recommendation- 6-MED-Short-High
ASREN activities should explicitly include coordination of National Grid Initiatives, and
related regional Grid operations. ASREN should continue to be involved in European cofunded projects aiming at coordinating e-Infrastructures interoperations and planning.
Report- 6-MED-Short-High
ASREN is co-managing Africa-Arabia ROC, which coordinates National Grids across the
region. ASREN has been an active partner in EUMED projects, EUMEDGrid, CHAIN, and
CHAIN-REDs. ASREN is also active supports VRC, including SESEMEA, DCH - Indicate, etc.
ASREN activities should explicitly include coordination of National Grid Initiatives, and
related regional Grid operations. Efforts would need to be consolidated and Grid activities
should be available for the whole region.
Through Africa-Arabia ROC, all national grid sites in the region can be monitored and
managed. Researchers through their REN, when connected, can have access to grid sites at
the regional level.
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Recommendation- 67-MED-Medium-Low
Support actions should address the countries of Lebanon and, whenever possible, Libya to
complete and strengthen the regional initiatives in the area.
Report- 67-MED-Medium-Low
Several discussions/ meetings took place in Lebanon in an effort to build NREN. The main
challenge is in the lack of funding and agreement among universities to link at the national
level. No progress has been reported in Libya.
High level policy workshops should be organised to continue to push for the introduction of eInfrastructures in the priorities of the policy agenda of all the countries in the region.
ASREN has presented the concept of e-Infrastructure and its importance in several occasions,
including: ITU connect Arab Summit – Qatar, March 2012, Sharing Knowledge Across the
Mediterranean in Tunis – May 2012, Arab ICT ministerial meeting – Algeria, June 2012, and
several other occasions.
ASREN should take advantage of its upcoming conference organized together with
EUMEDCONNECT, EUMEDGrid, CHAIN, Internet2 on developing Arab –Infrastructure in
a global environment [e-AGE2011], with participation of experts from CLARA, APAN,
CANARIE, UbuntuNet, and international organizations and donors. Through e-AGE, ASREN
will get the attention on importance of connectivity, benefit from best practices elsewhere, and
help support consolidation not only the regional level but also at the global level inline with
CHAIN objectives.
Several panels have been organized during e-AGE with participants from national and regional R&E
networks. The purpose has been to bring consensus on best practices of e-Infrastructures and
connectivity scenario in the Arab regional context. A multi-stakeholder partnership framework has
been developed by ASREN. The concept idea was motivated by Dr.Samia Melhem from the World Bank
in her keynote speech. The main goal is to consolidate efforts made by different organizations in the
Arab region in building dedicated regional links, with an objective to promote ICT access,
connectivity, content and capacity in a comprehensive approach and on a large scale. Partners of the
framework represent ASREN, League of Arab States, Association of Arab Universities, Arab NRENs,
and Arab ICT organization. Partners are expected to provide policy support and resources to
governments in the Arab region to advance the attainment of a Pan-Arab e-Infrastructure by creating
an “enabling environment” for large-scale regional links and systems. Partners may also provide (i)
knowledge sharing and capacity building programs for NRENs, educational institutions, and policymakers, (ii) coordinated e-infrastructure deployment, (iii) assistance in developing grids, cloud
computing, and e-Infrastructure, and (iv) collaborative research communities, follow-up and
evaluation. The proposal is submitted and under evaluation at the world bank. The main issue is on
multi-country – regional – funding.
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 Latin America recommendations progress
The EELA-2 and at the beginning of GISELA project, the idea was to establish a regional grid
infrastructure by promoting the creation of Joint Research Units (JRU) in different countries.
However, this initiative was not that powerful because the institutions participated as individuals and
there was no collaboration with the NRENs, so the JRU initiative in most of the countries disappeared.
By the middle of GISELA project, the participation of the NRENs and RedCLARA gave a different
perspective to this purpose. In the beginning, the aim was to build a National Grid Infrastructure
(NGI) for each country, however, it was known by the NRENs that some countries would not be able to
reach that organisation, and we start to propose the idea of an Equivalent Domestic Grid Structure
(EDGS) to allow those countries that would not have an NGI to participate with individual institutions.
In spite of this, slight individual progress has been accomplished in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador,
Panama and Uruguay. Greater progress has been observed in Colombia that has already installed its
NGI and Grid Operation Centre (GOC) in a close cooperation with RENATA (Colombian NREN).
Mexico is coordinating through its JRU the migration to an NGI and the consolidation of its GOC,
RCs and Network Operation Centre (NOC) interrelationship, through Universidad Nacional Autonoma
de Mexico (UNAM) closely working with the Mexican NREN, Corporación Universitaria para el
Desarrollo de Internet CUDI1. Brazil has consolidated the IGALC Regional Grid Operating Center,
however it is working as a single institution and no NREN support has been evidenced so far. But
national Science and Technology ecosystems are very fragile, and policies could change very rapidly
with no possibility to be foreseen.
Recommendation- 7-LA-Short-High
Latin American region should work, in close collaboration with the GISELA project, on
realising the effective embedding of the regional Grid’s operations into CLARA, and finding a
mechanism towards formalising this arrangement.
Recommendation- 61-LA-Medium-High
Work in close collaboration with GISELA to make a smooth transfer of the LA regional Grid
operations into the RedCLARA infrastructure, and find mechanisms to formalise this
arrangement.
Report- 5-GEN-Long-High; Report- 7-LA-Short-High; Report- 61-LA-Medium-High
The RedCLARA and GISELA team have analysed the current evolution of regional VRC using
advanced networks and e-infrastructure for e-Science, and decided to include Grid, as well as
other advanced computational services. The reasoning behind this decision is that, the
scientific and engineering research solutions to problems analysed involve distributed
scalable infrastructures; they require to be mapped to different computer architectures and
usage models; researchers interested in utilising distributed scalable computing resources
1
http://www.cudi.mx/
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need to invest great efforts in training and application porting. RedCLARA communities have
not yet accomplished a mature critical mass to consume Grid Services, except for some
communities like: HEP (CMS, ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb), ESO, Pierre Auger, WRF, e-NMR
and Health Grid Initiatives. Other communities are learning how and when to import their
applications and how to use the Grid e-infrastructure effectively. Moreover, with the
commercial launch of the Cloud services, some communities are exploring combinations of
different high performance computing and storage techniques other than Grid Computing to
solve their needs.
Discussions have been promoted and steps taken to open possibilities to transfer of the LA
regional Grid operations into the RedCLARA, even partially, with the effort centred in
projects developed on the e-Infrastructure, so that as to approach some scenarios that apply
the concept of sustainability at a regional level. The strategy for ensuring the sustainability of
advanced computational services operates on two levels:
1. Ensure the operation of the national or institutional resource centres, and
2. Explore mechanisms to maintain the operation of a Regional Operation Centre ROC.
The first level aims to ensure the availability of resources (hardware, software and manware)
in a federation of academic institutions at national level, while the second level aims to
maintain the organization and operation of those resources at the regional level. To keep
operating resource centres at institution/national level we have devised a two level strategy.
First we got the commitment of the directors of national networks to support RC with national
funding coming from proposal to their Science and Technology Agencies. Presently we have
the commitment of the NRENs from México (CUDI), Costa Rica (CONARE), Colombia
(RENATA) and Ecuador (CEDIA). Thus, four NRENs (México, Costa Rica, Colombia and
Ecuador) and two important institutions (UNAM in México and UniAndes in Colombia) have
committed to support and promote the e-infrastructure in the region. In the other strategy level
we have oriented our efforts to develop a project for information management and early
warning for natural disasters in Central America. This proposal is driven by the Mexican
government and supported by CUDI, also with the participation of national networks and
academic institutions in Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela
and Ecuador. CUDI, with the support of UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Méxio),
has been contacted to ensure the operation of a regional resource centre, so that in
cooperation with ROC-LA2, to take responsibility for the regional coordination.
Recommendation- 59-LA-Short-Medium
Design and develop a clear lobbying strategy to approach the Science & Technology
Authorities with the aim to raise awareness of the importance of e-Science/e-Infrastructures
and their relevance in the development of research or academic projects and proposals that are
funded by regional/national agencies.
Report 59-LA-Short-Medium
The lobbying strategy includes the experience approaching political and decision-making
instances in the science and technology sector in Latin America as well as the agreements
mechanisms with researchers whose common objectives are relevant for the creation of
communities and the design of projects aiming at demands for use of the e-Infrastructure.
These negotiations are being promoted at various levels by RedCLARA.
 Approach to directors of national networks and RedCLARA partners: a series of meetings
allowed to report on the scope of the e-Infrastructure. The progress in the GISELA project
(as well as the CHAIN project) were presented in plenary sessions with the RedCLARA
2
Organization of centres for High Energy Physics, HEP in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil http://www.escience.unam.mx/rocla.jsp
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partners in Tegucigalpa, Honduras (June 2011) and Montevideo, Uruguay (November
2011), as well as in the 1st Conference of Directors of Technology Information and
Communication of Latin American Universities (TICAL) in Panama City, Panama (June
2011). Particularly in the Uruguay meeting there was an extensive discussion on the
business model to provide advanced computing services in the region.
Approach to national S&T officer in the region: as from the meetings in Tegucigalpa and
Montevideo, reunions have been organizing with senior officials of agencies for science
and technology of the region. So far we have visited Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and
Costa Rica. These visits have insisted on showing advanced computing facilities available
in the region thanks to projects like GISELA and CHAIN.
Recommendation- 60-LA-Short-High
Raise awareness of the Science &Technology Authorities in the region on the need to
build/promote national/regional plans and budgets for the provision of advanced computing
services by the NRENs that could help the development of VCRs applications that use these
services.
Report- 60-LA-Short-High
In addition to the lobbying strategy focused on the NREN directors and national S&T officers
we have also contacted the base of researchers and research groups that could promote
national/regional plans and budgets to support advanced computing services. In order to raise
the awareness of researchers, students and interested parties on possibilities of the eInfrastructure, we have implemented Thematic Virtual Days, following similar agendas made
in Mexico by CUDI- and RedCLARA. This experience has been very successful, convening a
significant number of people in Latin America. The central idea is that VRCs are critical for
the NREN sustainability and the NREN have to impact their national S&T to generate
programs to support advanced computing services. Thus, from the CHAIN-RedCLARA side,
a significant amount of efforts have been concentrated on motivating researchers to
collaborate with other colleagues establishing VRCs in LA region. We have started to generate
a demand, from VRC needs (present and potential), of services for both, the NREN and
RedCLARA and both organizations are discovering that they have to satisfy the researchers
requirements through a VRC structure. Most of the present VRC do not really need advance
computing services, but they are starting to recognise the importance of them. One of the main
problems we have faced is the rigid membership structure of the NREN. VRC in LA, as in any
other region of the world, incorporate their members using thematic and competence logic and
not because they are part of a particular institution. The diversity of membership schemes of
the NRENs in Latin America needs to be flexible enough in order to incorporate new
communities. Presently LA NREN have an interesting panorama of VRCs with different
degree of skills and needs, but all of them are starting to demand advanced e-infrastructure
support at national and regional level. The NRENs are learning that the success and visibility
of the VRC are the success and visibility of the supporting NREN (and also for RedCLARA)
and this is a direct and very important by product from promoting VRCs organisation in the
region. Nowadays the VRC panorama that we have in Latin America can be grouped in three
levels: historic, emerging and potential:
 Among the historic VRCs, we can consider the traditional, active and large
collaborations such as: Large Hadron Collider, High Energy experiments (CMS,
ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb), the Astronomy Observatories (Pierre Auger Observatory
and European Southern Observatories).
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
Thanks to the CHAIN and GISELA projects, there are now several emerging project
driven communities, like the Weather Research Forecast (WRF)3 , the International
Network for Digital Cultural Heritage e-Infrastructure4 , Health Grid Initiative5 and
the worldwide e-Infrastructure for NMR and structural biology6. There are also other
emerging communities in the region like Centro International Potato Centre 7 ,
NanoAndes 8 and LAGClima. RedCLARA, by ComCLARA programs, has also
promoted VRCs in Latin America. These communities are 18 groups of researchers,
from at least 5 LA countries members of CLARA9 that use very simple collaborative
tools to do research in our region. There are also three other RedCLARA starting
communities, such as the IDB-RedCLARA in Tropical Diseases, Disaster Mitigation
and BioFuels.
 Potential communities, possible future users of advanced computing services, could be
identified among other EU-LA cooperation initiatives that are working in the LA
region. Among them we could mention:
o The ALFA10 Programme, cooperation between Higher Education Institutions of
the European Union and Latin America, It promotes Higher Education in Latin
America as a means to contribute to the economic and social development of
the region. There are more than 60 communities in LA supported by this
program.
The CYTED Programme, intergovernmental multilateral Science and Technology cooperation
programme, among 19 Latin American countries, Spain and Portugal, to promote cooperation
in Research and Innovation for the development of the Latin America region. Presently, the
CYTED program supports almost 50 communities in the region.
3
http://www.wrf-model.org
http://www.indicate-project.eu/
5
http://www.healthgrid.org
6
http://www.wenmr.eu/
4
7
http://cipotato.org
http://www.nanoandes.org
9
http://www.redclara.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21&Itemid=526&lang=en
8
10
http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/latin-america/regional-cooperation/alfa/index_en.htm
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 India recommendations progress
Recommendation- 2-GEN-Long-Medium
In larger countries, work towards harmonising the various initiatives, with the emphasis on
producing a national-level coherent strategy for the development of DCIs.
Report- 2-GEN-Long-Medium
Most scientific research and developments depend heavily on the international collaborations
and emphasize use of NKN as a main supporting e-infrastructure for large data transfers. The
speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its
researchers collaborate with one another, and how well they are able to benefit from
technologies, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization,
and cloud computing technologies. Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by
advanced computing capabilities that may help researchers manipulate and explore massive
datasets. As per current policy, NKN provides OFC connectivity of 1 Gbps or 100 Mbps to
every institute, which has been approved by the Cabinet. So far 831 institutes are connected to
NKN and we expect by end March 2013 all 1500 approved institutes will be NKN enabled.
One of the very early uses of NKN was remote teaching. At present, stakeholders are looking
at launching formal programs using NKN by sharing classes. Typical high-end users of NKN
Open Source Drug Discovery, interconnecting Earth Sciences Supercomputing centers for
Climate Change modeling and Weather Forecasting, connecting all institutions under
National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT), IITs for spreading engineering
education through active use of the contents generated through National program on
technology enhanced Learning (NPTEL), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for
medical education, GARUDA grid and WLCG grid and access to expensive “beam line” from
synchrotron for crystallographic studies by remotely loading samples with the use of robotic
arms. NKN is seen as the way to do science.
The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) has approved NKN in March 2010 as a 10year project to be implemented by National Informatics Center (NIC) under Department of
Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology. It is fully funded project of Government of India linking 1500
institutes in India by high bandwidth, low latency OFC.
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 China recommendations progress
Recommendation- 2-GEN-Long-Medium
In larger countries, work towards harmonising the various initiatives, with the emphasis on
producing a national-level coherent strategy for the development of DCIs.
Report- 2-GEN-Long-Medium
The Chinese Government attaches great importance to the opportunities offered by high
performance distributed computing. In the past ten years, two large scale Grid infrastructures
in China, i.e. China National Grid and China Education Grid, have been established. China
National Grid (CNGrid) is the largest and the most active one in the region. The
infrastructure will support more domain applications via traditional high-performance
computing service or some new service styles such as cloud and grid society. All these efforts
and measurements are expected to improve the development of distributed computing
infrastructure (DCI) in the country.
During the last few years, the interests of the country are moving to the new technologies such
as cloud computing. But cloud computing will be integrated with grid computing
infrastructure to form the nation-wide DCI. The tasks of CHAIN to harmonize the initiatives
include the communicate with funding agencies to show the importance of sustainability of
distributed computing, to disseminate the distributed computing technology, to develop the
interoperation middleware.
Staffs of CHAIN project have discussed with funding agencies of Ministry of Science and
Technology (MoST), National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of
Sciences, which help to raise the awareness of the distributed computing. The Ministry of
Science and Technology, the one of the largest funding agencies in the country emphasized in
its so called the “twelfth five-year plan”, that the government will invest to develop the core
software for cloud computing, intelligent high performance storage platform. In next five
years, China will upgrade the scale of China National Grid environment on either the
computing power or the covered area or both. Chinese Academy of Sciences, the largest
scientific research organization in the country, started to establish a new generation of
distributed computing infrastructure. The goal is to build a number of cloud computing
platforms, up to 2015, for different research fields like physics, biology, chemistry, high-tech,
and others. All the platforms will be merged into an integrated environment.
In parallel developments, a number of tutorials and workshops supported by the CHAIN and
EPIKH projects have been organized in China. The scientists and officials from funding
agencies were invited. During the tutorial events, different applications were deployed to the
grid computing systems.
As an important task of CHAIN project, interoperability of gLite and CNGrid GOS, a team
from BUAA designed and implemented JSAGA adapter for CNGrid GOS. The works on
interoperability between gLite and CNGrid GOS were investigated. The main issues and
difficulties of the work were analyzed and assessed. The interoperability framework was
defined and the experimental environment was established. The team is also responsible for
the research project of National Natural Science Foundation of China on Grid
interoperability standards. The work was improved smoothly, and the final draft for approval
is to be completed.
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Inspired by CHAIN, a JRU was established with four partners in China. They are Beihang
University (BUAA), Peking University, the Institute of High Energy Physics of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, and the Computing Network Information Centre of Chinese Academy of
Sciences. The four partners have been the active players of grid computing in the country. The
JRU has been also involved in the EU FP6 and FP7 projects. The current JRU is regarded as
the first step to establish a wider one. The JRU actively interact with China National Grid
Operation and Management Centre, the operation centre of CNGrid. The operation centre is
responsible to coordinate the daily operation of CNGrid. But every CNGrid site has to be
financed itself by various funding resources. The JRU worked the CNGrid to investigate the
model to ensure the sustainable development of the distributed computing infrastructure
including the upgrade of resources of computing and network links. To ensure the improved
link between China and Europe an investigation of network requirement was carried out. A
series of discussions with relevant networks shows a good link to Europe with 10Gbps will be
needed for the Grid. A possibility of use TEIN3 is investigated. 5 Gbps in the next two years
and 10Gbps in five years are foreseen.
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 South-East Asia recommendations progress
Since situation of South East Asia is quite different from Europe, the NGI model is not feasible
in all countries in this region. However, based on the experiences of EGEE Asia Federation
and EUAsiaGrid project, the regional collaboration model APGI is proved to be workable and
has been in operation for the past 5 years. APGI has established a stable regional
infrastructure plus some regional e-Science collaborations with APROC support.
For the moment, a virtual regional model like current APGI is the most feasible solution. Only
when there is enough momentum, will the legal body with stable financial model be possible
Recommendation- 9-AP-Medium-Medium
Asia Pacific region should work towards strengthening the established JRU. The development
of e-Infrastructure and e-Science in Asia Pacific region varies a lot county by country. The
best strategy in terms of sustainability is to foster domain-specific collaborations across the
countries based on the APGI. The region as a whole should keep continuous involvement in
European e-Science and e-Infrastructure collaborations.
Report- 9-AP-Medium-Medium
APGI keeps conducting regional e-Science collaborations based on most common concerns
such as the disaster mitigation on earth science, environmental changes and life sciences. This
is the essential approach to reach a stable JRU.
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 Actions on strengthening national structures - report per region
This chapter presents an overview of per-region progress of NGIs. A simple template was
drafted in excel, and now in this deliverable it is provided in tabular format, where the
progress per country is given for each relevant country within the specific region.
 National report template
The national report template is shown below. For every region, the relevant reports per
countries targeted are provided. Each country report considers a number of core issues. One
paragraph is given per each issue.
COUNTRY NAME
Core Entity
Primary Contact (person)
Email address
Champion institutions
NGI maturity status
Core financial support source and duration
Infrastructure supported
during CHAIN
Champion VRC identified
during CHAIN
Overall Support provided by
CHAIN regional
representative
Longer-term perspective
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 Sub-Saharan Africa national report
UbuntuNet Alliance has stimulated many countries across Africa and those following are an
indication of the responses where there is more activity.
COUNTRY NAME Democratic Republic of Congo
University of Kinshasa
Core Entity
Professor Dibungi Kalenda
[email protected]
Email address
University of Kinshasa, Eb@le
Not established but named Eb@legrid
NGI maturity status
Desktop Grid training arranged by Prof Petitdidier of Latmos,
France
during CHAIN
Phytomedicine ( part of NAPRECA http://www.napreca.net/)
during CHAIN
Overall Support provided by Documentation on grids, setting up NGIs and participation in
CHAIN workshop
CHAIN regional
representative
Energetic leadership from Prof Kalenda and the NAPRECA project
but resource constraints
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
COUNTRY NAME Kenya
Masinde Maliro University
Dr Simon Maina Karume
[email protected].
Masinde Mulira University
Not yet established but KENET willing to host it and the KENET
CEO has allocated two technical staff (Kennedy Aseda; Aseda
<[email protected]> and Hezron Mwangi
<[email protected]>) to assist
Part of Unesco BrainGain project
A grid site at Masinde Muliro with technical support from the
UNESCO BGI Initiative
Genomics, Agriculture, Computational Chemistry
They have been arranging Grid training with assistance from
CHAIN personnel. (Looking for assistance in application
porting)We also linked the KENET CEO up with MERAKA and he
held useful talks with Christiaan Kuun of CSIR in South Africa.
Documentation on setting up NGIs was also sent to them and they
participated in the CHAIN workshop in Nairobi in November 2011.
Kenya is the country in the region with most room for optimism
with an NREN CEO who wants very much to be offering value
added services beyond connectivity. Being a coastal country and
the earliest to interconnect to the UbuntuNet London Router they
have a good stable network
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Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Deliverable D2.3
COUNTRY NAME Malawi
University of Malawi
Charlie Maere
[email protected]
MAREN, and University of Malawi, Kamuzu College of Nursing
Still at conceptual stage
Participation in events organised by the UbuntuNet CHAIN team
None
Health information – Genomics, Environmental/Climatic
information, Fisheries (aquaculture)
Documentation about setting up NGIs and encouragement and
trying to identify training opportunities and participation in CHAIN
workshop
Good as AfricaConnect should make a difference and KCN has
good computing capacity
COUNTRY NAME Nigeria
University of Nigeria Department of Computer Science
Professor Collins N. Udanor
[email protected]
http://grid.unn.edu.ng
University of Nigeria Department of Computer Science
HP Unesco BrainGain
None
Not known
Information gathering and documentation
Energy within UNN so with ongoing support, optimistic
COUNTRY NAME South Africa
SAGrid
Dr Bruce Becker.
[email protected]
Meraka Institute
Very mature
Participants in EPIKH and HP Unesco BrainGain, and linked to
EGI
Africa and Arabia ROC
Astrophysics, High energy Physics, Life Sciences (Cell biology and
health sciences)
Training, Cook Book development, Porting applications
http://www.sagrid.ac.za. Well set up to assist other African
countries in setting up their infrastructure
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Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Deliverable D2.3
COUNTRY NAME Sudan
Sudan University of Science and Technology
Dr Muhammad Alkarouri
[email protected]
Sudan University of Science and Technology
Grid computing research group and
SUDREN (Sudanese NREN) (Sudan National Project of HPC and
Grid computing )
Discussions with SUDREN about hosting Sudanese NGI
Ongoing establishment of Grid computing centres coordinated by
Africa City of Technology and funded by the Chinese government.
The expectation is that once completed it will be of a considerable
size. The project also contains software and training, The grid is
expected to be working in September 2012
None
Physics, Chemistry, Weather forecasting, Video rendering, GPU
cluster
Bought Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya to talk together and provided
them with documentation on setting up NGIs
Optimistic in spite of a challenging macro-environment
COUNTRY NAME Uganda
Makerere University
Dr Julianne Sansa Otim
[email protected]
Makerere University and RENU
Working with RENU to host the NGI
Not known
None
Meteorology
Sent documentation about setting up NGIs. They participated in
CHAIN workshop in Kenya and hope they will again in Uganda
Bright as Dr Otim is personally committed and has a strong
academic background in Grid
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 Mediterranean national report
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
Lebanon
Lebanon – CNRS
Hisham Hajj Hassan
[email protected]
Lebanon Universities
No NGI, coordination through HP Brain Gain initiative, Sant
Joseph University
HP Brain Gain Initiative
Towards building Lebanon REN
Several research projects – not a main VRC
Developing plans and feasibility. Promoting best practices.
Sustainable NGI in Lebanon and elsewhere
Kuwait
Grid site - Kuwait University
Paul Manuel
[email protected]
Kuwait University
No NGI, coordination through HP Brain Gain initiative
HP Brain Gain Initiative
Implementation and installation of Kuwait Grid site
NA
Implementation, installation, and training
Sustainable NGI in Kuwait
Jordan
Jordanian Universities Network – JUNet
Anwar Al Yousef
[email protected]
JUNet
Government Blessing
Self-Funding
Implementing ROC, Training workshop, application porting
SESAME
Provision of NGI and sustainability guidelines
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representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Deliverable D2.3
Sustainable NGI in place
Egypt
Egyptian Universities Network
Dina Barakat
[email protected]
EUN and Universities, ERI
NGI embedded in the NREN (EUN)
EUN
Core Grid Sites
Earth Sciences
Training and technical support; Provision of NGI and sustainability
guidelines
Consolidation and expansion of the existing infrastructure
Algeria
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CERIST
Aouaouche El-Maouhab
[email protected]
Universities
Legal Entity
Government
Grid Sites, ROC
HEP and Health
Training, follow up and coordination. Provision of NGI and
sustainability guidelines
Consolidation of Services and ROC support
Tunisia
Khawarizmi Computing Center (CCK)
Mohamed Jemni
[email protected]
CCK, University of Tunis
TNGrid
Government
Grid Sites and Voluntary Grid Computing
Sign Language Translation System for Deaf People
Training and follow up; Provision of NGI and sustainability
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CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
Deliverable D2.3
guidelines
Consolidation of a regional eInfrastructure
Morocco
CNRST
Redouane Merrouch
[email protected]
MARWAN and Universities
Legal Entity
Government
NA
HEP
Follow up, coordination and training; Provision of NGI and
Consolidation of the eInfrastructure
UAE
Ankabut
Ahmed Dabbagh
[email protected]
Ankabut
No NGI
Government
Installation of Grid Site and RA
N/A
Technical support, training and follow up; Provision of NGI and
A stable NGI
Oman
The Research Council (TRC)
Said Al Mandhari
[email protected]
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
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Core financial support - source
and duration
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during CHAIN
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Core Entity
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Core Entity
Email address
Core Entity
Email address
Core Entity
Email address
Deliverable D2.3
Provision of NGI and sustainability guidelines
NA
Palestine
MoHE
Amjad Abu Zaid
[email protected]
MoHE, Al Quds University and Islamic University of Gaza
NA
NA
NA
NA
Training; Provision of NGI and sustainability guidelines
NA
Somalia
SomaliREN
Dahir Hassan
[email protected]
NA
Syria
HIAST
Khaldoun Khorzom
[email protected]
NA
Qatar
Qatar Foundation
Sa’di Awienat
[email protected]
NA
Sudan
SudREN
Iman Abu El Maali
[email protected]
NA
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 Latin America national report
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
México
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM),.
Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet, A.C.
(CUDI)
Jesús Cruz / Salma Jalife
[email protected] / [email protected]
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM),.
Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet, A.C.
(CUDI)
Centro de Investigación Científica y Educación Superior de
Ensenada (CICESE)
Instituto Politécnico Nacional - Centro de Investigación en
Computación (IPN-CIC)
Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
(ITESM)
Universidad de Sonora (UNISON)
Mexico is coordinating through its JRU the migration to an NGI
and the consolidation of its GOC, RCs and Network Operation
Centre (NOC) interrelationship, through Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) closely working with the Mexican
NREN, Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet
CUDI.
Funding from National Science and Technology Agency (Consejo
Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, CONACYT) one year starting
January 2012. Possible International Development Bank fundings
GOC and RC organisation
HEP (CMS, ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb), ESO, Pierre Auger, WRF,
we-NMR, Bioinformatics and Health Grid Initiatives, CUDI
Communities and ComCLARA Communities
Science Gateway migration for community software environments
Leader of MesoAmerica Natural Hazard and Mitigation Project
Brazil
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
Leandro Neumann Ciuffo
<[email protected]>
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ),
Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológico Celso Suckow da
Fonseca (CEFET-RJ)
Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica (LNCC),
Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP)
Universidade Estadual Rio Janeiro T2 HEPGrid Brazil:
http://www.hepgrid.uerj.br/
- SPRACE: http://www.sprace.org.br/SPRACE/
- Centro Brasileiro Pesquisas Fisicas (ROC LA)
No interest to have an NGI. Several national projects on Advanced
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NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
Deliverable D2.3
computing competing. National organisation for Advanced
Computing infrastructure CENAPAD
Several National Sources
IGALC: GISELA GOC
HEP (CMS, ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb), ESO, Pierre Auger, WRF,
we-NMR, Bioinformatics and Health Grid Initiatives, and
ComCLARA Communities
Good and strong with national funding, but scattered in different
organisations and group of institutions
Colombia
Universidad de Los Andes (UNIANDES), Red Nacional de
Tecnología Avanzada (RENATA)
Harold E. Castro / Carlos Jaime Barrios
Universidad de Los Andes (UNIANDES),
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ)
Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS)
Red Nacional de Tecnología Avanzada (RENATA)
Consolidated NGI
Funding from National Science and Technology Agency
(Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación
ColCiencias) one year starting February 2012
RC organisation and operation
HEP (CMS and ATLAS), Bioinformatics, we-NMR, RENATA and
ComCLARA communities.
Fragile, depends on the activity of the academic community
demanding Advanced Computing services from regional and
national centres
Costa Rica
Centro Nacional de Alta Tecnología (CENAT)
Consejo Nacional de Rectores RedCONARE
Alvaro de la Ossa O.
[email protected]
Centro Nacional de Alta Tecnología (CENAT)
Consejo Nacional de Rectores RedCONARE
None.
Very limited research projects
NanoAndes
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during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
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Core Entity
Deliverable D2.3
Tex Science Gateway migration for community software
environments
Possible to be the Host of the e-infrastructure for the Mesoamerica
project.
Venezuela
Univ de Los Andes (ULA)
Herbert Hoeger / Gilberto Diaz
Univ de Los Andes (ULA)
Univ Central de Venezuela (UCV)
Univ del Zulia (LUZ)
None, no interest to build an NGI
Inexistent
Not necessary
Seismology, Atomic Physics
Unclear, no optimisms, it is not clear the commitment of the NREN
and it has frequently changed or the responsible contact
Ecuador
Consorcio Ecuatoriano para el Desarrollo de Internet Avanzado
(CEDIA)
Villie Morocho / Ximena Robles
Consorcio Ecuatoriano para el Desarrollo de Internet Avanzado
(CEDIA)
Inexistent, just starting to operate a RC
Funding from National Science and Technology Agency (Secretaría
Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia y Tecnología,
SENASCyT) one year starting Nov 2011.
RC organisation and operation.
ComCLARA Communities
Not clear, very small academic community, it should be expanded
in order to increase the demand of Advanced Computing Services
Chile
Univ de Chile.
Eduardo Vera / Julio López Fenner
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during CHAIN
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Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
Deliverable D2.3
Univ de Chile
Univ de la Frontera
No interest to build an NGI, some recent progress to have a
national initiative of Advanced Computing
Funding from National Science and Technology Agency (Consejo
Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología CONICYT) one year starting
Sept 2011.
None
Bioinformatics, Seismic and structural engineering
None.
Good, several sectors (academic & industrial) interested in
Advanced Computing services
Argentina
Fundacion para la Innovacion y Transferencia de Tecnologia
(INNOVA-T)
Julian Dunayevich / Daniel Bellomo
Fundacion para la Innovacion y Transferencia de Tecnologia
(INNOVA-T)
Univ Nacional de Rio Cuarto
Univ Nacional de la Plata
Emerging from a national initiative for advanced Computing
None today, in 2011 from the Science Ministry
HEP (ATLAS), ESO, Pierre Auger, WRF
Science Gateway migration for community software environments.
Not clear. Several important changes in the board of directors of
the NRENS have affected the relation with the institutions
Uruguay
Univ de la Republica
Ida Holz / Sergio Nesmachnow
Red Academica del Uruguay RAU
Univ de la Republica
None
None
None
Bioinformatics, ComCLARA Community
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Science Gateway migration for community software environments.
Unclear, very small academic community.
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 India national report
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
India
National Knowledge Network
P.S.Dhekne
[email protected]
National Informatics Centre, DEITY
Under development
Government of India Approved project in 2010 with allocation for
10 years (End date 2019)
Garuda Grid available overlaid on NKN
Climate Change
Expert advice and coordination and implementation support
More VRC are in the pipeline for example on Biodiversity Grid and
Cancer Grid are under initial development
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 China national report
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
China
CNGrid
Depei Qian
[email protected]
ICT, CNIC
Not available. There is no correspondent structure in China
MoST, up to 2015.
CNGrid
Life Science, High Energy Physics, Drug Discovery, Meteorology,
Bioinformatics
Coordination, support
Cloud computing and distributed high performance computing
infrastructures will be the main areas supported by the government
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 South-East Asia national report
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
during CHAIN
during CHAIN
CHAIN regional
representative
Core Entity
Email address
NGI maturity status
Taiwan
TWGrid
Dr. Simon C. Lin
[email protected]
Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC)
Combining infrastructure, e-Science collaboration and technology
development, not just the national level e-Science framework ASGC
also work with all Asia partners to extend the regional eInfrastructure and e-Science cooperation framework.
ASGC has routine budget from Academia Sinica as an official
department. In addition, other funding support from National
Science Council and other agencies are provided on proposal basis.
Asia Pacific regional e-Science collaboration (including the
APROC) is included.
TWGrid and APGI regional e-Infrastructure, as well as the
integration with EGI.
Life science, earth science, environmental changes, social sciences,
digital archives and high energy physics are the primary VOs
involved.
ASGC is acting as the APGI (regional e-Science federation)
coordinator and operation centre.
Primary focus are continuous improvement in reliability and the
reduction of operation costs, including simplified and robust
middleware, a sustainability model, and intelligent monitoring in
collaboration with industrial partners, as well as the enhancement
of resource efficiency through the introduction of new technologies.
The advantages of DCI could also be further enhanced through the
continuous development of data distribution and management as
well as networking. ASGC will also place an emphasis on regional
collaboration, which could help address common concerns, such as
disaster mitigation.
Malaysia
National Grid Computing Initiative (NGCI)
Suhaimi Napis
[email protected]
Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)
Based on EUAsiaGrid experiences, NGCI endorses the
development of grid sites for all universities to build their own EGI
certified infrastructure using the approach at UPM. After the end
of EUAsiaGrid Project, two (2) universities are connected and now
there are 6 universities (an increase of 4 universities) and it is
hoped that all 22 public/government-linked company universities
will have EGI Grid Certified Site by the end of EGIInSpire Project.
Ministry of Sciences, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI)
NCGI, UPM and MYREN are building EGI interoperable Grid
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Deliverable D2.3
infrastructure and Cloud services by federating resources from
universities.
Bioinformatics, cheminformatics, medical informatics,
computational chemistry, natural resources informatics, high
energy physics and nuclear simulation, engineering and e-Culture
Infrastructure operation, e-Science collaboration, training and
dissemination, and the APGridPMA/IGTF trust framework
participation, supported by ASGC and APROC.
MYREN 2 will continue to promote its educational purpose in its
regional outreach efforts to countries such as Laos, Cambodia and
Myanmar. A further extension of MYREN 2 to all ministries,
hospitals, libraries and community centers is also intended. And
HybridCloud services will be established on the Malaysian DCI.
Philippines
Philippine e-Science Grid (PSciGrid)
Denis Villorente
[email protected]
Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI)
With aid of EUAsiaGrid, Philippine established the EGI compatible
Grid infrastructure from ASTI in 2008. Philippine e-Science Grid
was initiated from 2008 and now is in its second phase since 2012
with two objectives: (1) to establish a national e-Science
infrastructure in the Philippines, enabling collaborative research
among local educational and research institutions; (2) to provide
seamless access to high-performance computing resources and
applications to life science and Earth sciences.
From January 2008 to June 2011, the Philippine e-Science Grid
(PSciGrid) was funded by the Department of Science and
Technology. The second phase starts from 2012.
The PSciGrid network consists of three sites supported by APROC,
ASTI as the central site, the Ateneo de Manila University, and the
University of the Philippines. The physical network link, which also
connects the sites to the international research community and
other partner sites in the Philippines, is provided by the Philippine
Research Education and Government Information Network
(PREGINET).
Bioinformatics, flood and weather forecasting, physics and energy
There are two projects under the PSciGrid program: (1) boosting
Grid computing using reconfigurable hardware technology; and (2)
boosting social and technological capabilities for bioinformatics
research. In addition, PSciGrid keeps expanding computing and
storage resources; and integrating computing and storage
resources to a Government Data Center and continue to engage
with and support our research communities.
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Thailand
Thailand National e-Science Infrastructure Consortium
Dr. Piyawut Srichaikul
[email protected]
National Science and Technology Development Agency
Thailand National e-Science Infrastructure Consortium (20112015) started after ThaiGrid (2000-2004) and Thai National Grid
project (2005-2009), to federate resources and conduct e-Science
applications development.
3.7M USD for 5 years by the government and member institutes
gLite/EMI-based DCI supported by APROC, and linkage with EGI
Consortiums on particle physics, climate change, water resource,
energy and environment management, computational science and
engineering, as well as computer science and engineering were
formed for e-Science.
National e-Science Infrastructure Consortium is an example of
collaborative infrastructure development that ensures the right
design and sustainability by user involvement and commitment.
Current members are developing a procedure for accepting new
members and expanding the consortium. Other issues to be
addressed are governing, managing and operating procedures; the
admission of additional members and the ongoing expansion of the
current infrastructures as well as the ongoing participation in
CERN related activities. A trend toward an increase of flood and
disaster related applications are also possible.
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 Analysis of a Sustainability Model for a Regional Body for Grid
Coordination
This chapter presents the results of the task that has examined the current and emerging plans
for sustainability and enumerated the opportunities and future plans that could influence these.
Per region, and analysis is carried out and the measures for improvement based on the current
best practices and new opportunities are proposed.
 Methodology
This Section presents the overview of the process. Following Sections present the actual
analysis per region.
Regarding research and education eInfrastructures that are accompanied with governmental
and regional collaboration aspects, long-term sustainability is always an issue of special
importance, dependent on many factors. The complexity further rises if the eInfrastructures in
question is the aggregate of several national ones, even if only for a part of the services of
interest. The fundamental issue addressed in this document is to evaluate what the most
sustainable and reliable scenario for a Regional Body for Grid Coordination (RBGC) could be
in terms of current status and emerging sustainability plans and opportunities.
For this reason a sustainability model template is adopted to be considered by the regions
under CHAIN programme of work, so that their peculiarities can be identified, evaluated and
possibly reconsidered towards more efficient patterns that could enable their full potential and
further development.
The purpose of the present document is to explain the key elements of identifying a
sustainability model and elaborating a sustainability strategy template for a RBGC. The basic
assumptions are: a) Resources Providers (RPs) that are to be coordinated by the RBGC and b)
Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) play the role of the key customers that are to be served
by the RBGC via RPs’ eInfrastructures.
It is clear that such a sustainability planning is essential in the context of a complex
environment within which the demand for state-of-the-art computing services is increasing
while the budgets required to support those activities tend to be reduced year-on-year. Under
these circumstances the role of RBGCs becomes crucial and the strategy to be adopted must
address both the viability of a regional RPs’ planning and the needs that VRCs can have in
accordance to their scientific fields and to the degree of expertise they have been experiencing.
There might be several operation/funding models regarding the management and sustainability
of regional grid resources. There might be RPs that could be governmentally funded or able to
invoice VRCs for their services without being funded by the state. Likewise there might be
RBGCs that could invoice RPs a reasonable commission for their services provisioning to
VRCs, or be provided with a fee by RPs, or even support VRCs at no charge undertaking
responsibilities such as contract management, resources management and allocation, regional
development, promotion to the private sector and specific industries (health, car, banking, etc),
identification of new regional opportunities, dissemination of results, etc so that they can
recover their costs, advertise the capabilities of RPs at a worldwide level and pave the way for
further development.
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The steps described herebelow are the appropriate ones for producing a sustainability model
and planning strategic future activities for the various VRCs served, which should be
identified and segmented accordingly based on their location, scientific fields, computing
needs, etc.
A high level overview of the phases to be followed is:
 Phase 1, Goals Setting
o RBGC Objectives
 Phase 2, Situation Review
o RP and VRC Market Audit
o Segmentation and DPM matrix
o SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis
 Phase 3, Strategy formulation
o Portfolio matrix analysis
o Strategy Directives
A more detailed overview of each phase follows herebelow.
Phase 1
RBGC should comment on its role or purpose being planned for, provide its sustainability
definition as an indication of how each RBGC sees how it can sustain in time and provide
services, coordinate the regional RPs, invoice or be funded, etc. Moreover, RBGC can state its
distinctive competence and indicate what it will/will not or might/might not do in the future.
Phase 2
An audit is a systematic, critical and unbiased review and appraisal of the environment and of
each organization’s operations. It comprises the external and the internal audit. Details about
the audit can be found in ANNEX I.
Part of the audit process could identify the various scientific segments of the VRCs in
accordance with certain criteria. Having completed this segmentation a directional policy
matrix (DPM) can be obtained dictating the strategy to be adopted for various
segments/VRCs. More information about the method followed for creating the DPM can be
found in ANNEX II.
For the Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analysis please consult the
ANNEX III and take into account that theoretically a SWOT analysis must be conducted at a
regional level. This analysis can put a simple framework for generating strategic alternatives
from a situational review. The internal and external situation analysis can result in
information, much of which may not be highly relevant. The SWOT analysis can serve as an
interpretative mediation filter to reduce the information to a manageable list of key issues.
Any assumptions made should be few in number. If a plan is possible irrespective of the
assumptions, then the assumptions can be deemed not necessary. An example of an
assumption can be: The excess grid-computing capacity will decrease from 35% to 20% as
new applications will demand available resources.
Phase 3
The sustainability plan is the intelligence that can be extracted from the audit, the
segmentation and the SWOT analysis mentioned above and can result in a concrete
sustainability strategy/model suggesting what to do and how for a specific timeframe i.e. 3
years. For this step please consult ANNEX IV.
Following the above mentioned three-phase process it is strongly recommended a financial
model be adopted. Practically one-year budgeting and certain reporting processes must be
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employed since the experience dictates that annual approaches can become much easier and
perhaps more realistic. Nevertheless, the budget of RBGCs is typically suggested to be
committed for a longer term, if possible, such as 3 years.
ANNEX I
External Audit
This part is related to the basic macro-features of the environment within which
eInfrastructures market (supply and demand) is positioned as well as to the basic industrial
features that can shape the “micro-environment”. The implementation of the following steps
will be based on one-to-one interviews, which are about to be scheduled, for supporting the
involved entities to shape their responds and organize them in such a way that they could be
helpful for the sustainability analysis.
 Economic environment
o Economic (growth rate, GDP variations, R&D as a percentage of GDP, etc)
o Political/legal (information about the legal and regulatory framework of the
research and education as well as potential development acts for the
competitiveness of the private sector)
o Social/cultural/environmental (penetration of eInfrastructures in the “businessas-usual activities” apart from the pure academic environment)
 The Market (major RPs and VRCs)
o Total market, size, growth and trends in terms of the volume of the resources
used, e.g. CPU time, etc or even of the associated value, if possible
 Competition to the RPs
o Major competitors
o Market coverage and reputation
o Computing capabilities
o Key strengths and weaknesses
Internal Audit
This part is related to internal data of the RBGC that can describe its dynamics within its
current positioning and consequently it brings in light alternative approaches, if applicable.
 Market operational variables
o Volume and categories of services provided (total, by geographical location, by
industrial type, by customer / user)
o Costs of operation and resources
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ANNEX II
The four-box directional policy matrix (DPM) shows how the various segments (or almost
equivalently scientific fields) of the VRCs can be positioned and it is depicted in the below
figure.
 RBGC Strengths 
Low
Low  VRC attractiveness  High
High
The circles represent volumes of computing services provided to a VRC or an industry which
are proportional to those segments’ contribution to consumed/allocated resources. The steps
followed to produce the DPM are:
1. Define the services/segments of the VRCs to be used during the analysis
2. Define the criteria for VRC attractiveness. Possibly some weighted factors can be
adopted for comparing the attractiveness of the various segments under consideration
such as growth rate (40%), demand size (40%), value potential (20%). The factors
adopted can not change during the construction of the DPM.
3. Score the relevant segments
4. Define the organization’s (RBGC) relative strengths for each segment that are related
to service requirements, price and promotion
5. Analyse and draw conclusion from the relative position of each segment
6. Draw conclusions from the analysis with a view to generating objectives and strategies
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ANNEX III
SWOT analysis is a simple framework for generating strategic alternatives from a situation
analysis. In the following diagram a SWOT analysis flow chart is illustrated as fitting for the
strategic situation analysis.
SWOT analysis flow chart
The SWOT analysis classifies the internal aspects of the organization, e.g. of the RBGC, as
strengths or weakness and the external situational factors as opportunities or threats. Strengths
can serve as a foundation for building advantages and weaknesses may hinder them. By
understanding these four aspects of its situation, an RBGC can better leverage its strengths,
correct its weaknesses, and capitalize on opportunities and deter potentially damaging threats.
Internal analysis is a comprehensive evaluation of the internal environment’s potential
strengths and weaknesses. Factors should be evaluated across the RBGC in areas such as:
organization culture, organization image, organization structure, key staff, access to resources,
position on the experience curve, operational efficiency & capacity, financial resources, etc.
Specifically regarding regional Grid eInfrastructures, strengths can be such as:
 ROC experience and technical know-how
 Regional dissemination of Advanced Computing Services
 Increase of national and regional Grid usage
 Core competencies in key areas
 Positive track record of service delivery
 Efficient cost management
 Strong expertise across staff and management
 Governmental support
 Existence of national-level or regional-level projects in eInfrastructures
 Existence of the regional certification authority
 etc
Example weaknesses could be:
 Research community has to accept switching to a “cloud-wise” service portfolio
 Obsolete facilities
 Lack of computing resources
 Competition from commercial cloud/computing providers
 Lack of management depth
 ROC-national coordination issues
 Increased cost in developing ROC management tools
 Increased personnel training cost
 Lack of financial support
 etc
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In the context of external analysis an opportunity is the chance to introduce a new or
innovative concept, process, product or service that can generate superior returns.
Opportunities can arise when changes occur in the external environment. Changes in the
external environment may be related to: users, technology trends, suppliers, partners, social
changes, economic environment, political and regulatory environment, etc.
In the present case, Opportunities can be such as:
 Increased collaboration within the regions
 Ability to serve additional users
 Ability to adapt to user demand
 Increased collaboration within certain programs
 Specialization in ”killer application areas” such as seismology, biogenetics, etc.
 Increase scientific mobility
 etc
while Threats can be such as:
 competition as to the Advanced Computing services from commercial grid/cloud
providers
 Unstable funding
 Reduction of services demand
 Lack of political commitment
 Low prioritization of eInfrastructures
 Lack of motivation to follow the regional trend
 etc
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
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ANNEX IV
The strategies suggested by the portfolio matrix analysis could be examples such as: (Each
region will have its own recommendations as final result of this exercise)
a. Invest in further R&D for growth, defend leadership, accept moderate short-term
revenues/grants and negative cash flow, consider geographic expansion and service
differentiation, aggressive dissemination and advertisement
High
Low
b. Maintain position in most successful service lines, prune less successful service lines,
manage for sustained revenues, stabilize pricing and commissions
High
Low
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Low VRC attractiveness  High
c. Selective, acknowledge low growth, emphasize service quality to avoid “commodity”
competition, systematically improve productivity, assign talented personnel/managers.
High
Low
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d. Manage for cash, prune service line aggressively, maximize cash flow, and maintain
pricing and commissions at the expense of volume.
High
Low
e. Opportunistic development (move it to the left if resources are available, keep a low
profile until funds are available, divest to someone able to exploit this opportunity)
High
Low
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 Sub-Saharan Africa sustainability analysis
 Goals Setting
Much of Sub-Saharan Africa apart from South Africa can be regarded as “Greenfield” as far
as the use of advanced eInfrastructures is concerned, however as the uptake of e-science
expand in the need for and role of the Regional Body for Grid Coordination (RBGC) in
ensuring sustainability will become very acute. The identification of the appropriate body to
take on this role should begin immediately, in consultation with all stakeholders. The
UbuntuNet Alliance or the Africa Arabia ROC may be potential candidates, but others may
emerge. The UbuntuNet Alliance has since 2006 been working on improving the data
communication infrastructure and is coordinating 13 NRENs in the region. On the other hand,
the Africa ROC, which was primarily created as a coordination and support point for all sites
in Africa and the Arabia regions wanting to participate in the stimulating and challenging
endeavour of creating a common Grid infrastructure to foster e-Science. The roles of these
bodies overlap, rather than conflict in terms of coordination of underlying infrastructure. If the
ROC were to be continued to be supported by regional infrastructure coordination bodies, the
higher-lying services offered to researchers in the region (computing and data infrastructure,
videoconferencing, etc) would in turn be better supported.
When we consider the evolution of Grid uptake in the Latin American CLARA region, we see
a process that went in tandem with the roll out of the physical network and resulting
interconnections. Prior to the availability of a stable network where bandwidth is not an all
consuming concern, the transition from human research networks to VRCs (Virtual Research
Communities) is unlikely to roll out rapidly.
Now with the AfricaConnect project rolling out UbuntuNet, the regional academic network in
Eastern and Southern Africa, collaborative research is expected to increase the demand for
Grid computing. The RBGC should thus, on cost recovery basis, be responsible for
coordinating Grid service providers (SPs) and providing the services to VRCs that use the
infrastructure. The risk, in the absence of this coordination, is that the investment made in
connecting people via the network is diluted by the fragmentation in tools and services
adopted independently by communities across the continent.
The Objectives of the RBGC for Africa should be:
 To raise political awareness for uptake of advanced computing in research;
 To nurturing the development of NGIs in the region;
 To coordinate and manage an African Grid federation on behalf of National Grid
Initiatives;
 To coordinate capacity building activities in distributed computing, e.g. Grid;
 To stimulate scientific research over federated computing resources;
The RBGC would run its operations using service fees, participation in projects; and grants
from the development partners. The RBGC will act as the middle man between the resource
providers and the users, VRCs.
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 Situation Review
In this Section, a situational analysis of the Sub-Saharan regional grid infrastructure is
presented, providing a systematic and concrete appraisal of the region-wide grid environment
and operations. Various scientific segments of the VRCs are identified. A directional policy
matrix (DPM) is outlined to facilitate directions for a strategy to be adopted for various
segments/VRCs. Finally, a SWOT presentation is provided to assist in evaluating risks and
opportunities for success. We make an assumption that the RBGC for Sub-Saharan Africa will
be dealing only with the countries where there is some grid activity or potential grid activity.
External Audit
Economic Environment
According to the Library of Congress (US)11 the Sub-Saharan Africa region comprises of 52
countries as shown in Table 1 below. The region is hugely diverse, geographically,
linguistically and culturally. However the dynamism of a youthful population, expanding
education and a vast natural resource base is a source of great optimism. Within the last two
years major energy sources are being identified and are being rolled out e.g. the Mozambican
coal and gas fields.
The processing of Africa’s wealth off shore has been a long story but the current move of the
De Beers group to upscale some diamond processing to Botswana from Europe can be taken
as a first step to a more equitable future.12 Also the emergence of an African urban middle
class with many entrepreneurs and reasonable disposable income has taken some sectors by
surprise.13 The amazing uptake of mobile phone technology and the innovative applications
developed on African soil has been transformative.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that the Sub-Saharan Africa region is
maintaining a growth rate of around 5%. South Africa which has closer economic ties to
Europe is more sluggish. Also those countries with civil strife and cross border disputes
especially in West Africa are not growing at the same rate. The report says, “There are no
‘one-size-fits-all’ policy recommendations”. 14 This is an optimistic decade for the SubSaharan African region considering there was almost negative growth in the ‘1990s.
11
http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/guide/afr-countrylist.html,
http://www.diamondintelligence.com/magazine/magazine.aspx?id=10784
13
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/africa-s-growing-middle-class-drives-development-a-842365.html
14
http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2012/pr12168.htm
12
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Table 1: List of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Angola
Benin
Botswana
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Central African
Republic
9. Chad
10. Comoros
11. Congo
(Brazzaville)
12. Côte d'Ivoire
13. DRC
14. Djibouti
15. Equatorial
16. Guinea
17. Eritrea
18. Ethiopia
19. Gabon
20. The Gambia
21. Ghana
22. Guinea
23. Guinea-Bissau
24. Kenya
25. Lesotho
26. Liberia
27. Madagascar
28. Malawi
29. Mali
30. Mauritania
31. Mauritius
32. Mozambique
33. Namibia
34. Niger
35. Nigeria
36. Réunion
37. Rwanda
38. Sao Tome and
Principe
39. Senegal
40. Seychelles
41. Sierra Leone
42. Somalia
43. South Africa
44. South Sudan
45. Sudan
46. Swaziland
47. Tanzania
48. Togo
49. Uganda
50. Western
Sahara
51. Zambia
52. Zimbabwe
Some regional macroeconomic data, coming from the World Bank database (2012), can be
found in the following table. The table is structured in four parts:
 Macroeconomic data and social indicators
 The ICT sector structure in the region of reference
 The ICT sector efficiency in the region of reference
 The ICT sector efficiency in the region of reference
Wherever in the present document similar data are provided, possibly for other regions, the
structure followed is the same as the above mentioned.
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Table 2: Macroeconomic data for Sub-Saharan Africa
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Infrastructure Overview
As already noted, much of Sub-Saharan Africa apart from South Africa can be regarded as
“greenfield” as far as the development and use of advanced eInfrastructures is concerned. The
region is split two sub regional blocks in terms of eInfrastructures: the Eastern and Southern
Region falls under UbuntuNet Alliance as the regional Research and Education Network; and
the West and Central Africa falls under WACREN. Since 2006, UbuntuNet Alliance has been
working to foster the development of NRENs in its membership region and today 13 countries
have NRENs at various stages of development. WACREN was registered in Ghana in 2010
and today has a membership of 8 NRENs, also at varying degrees of development. Table 3
below shows the memberships of UbuntuNet Alliance and WACREN.
Table 3: WACREN and UbuntuNet Alliance membership
UbuntuNet Alliance
WACREN
Country (NREN)
Grid activity
Country (NREN)
Grid activity
1. DRC (Eb@le)
Yes
1. Togo (TogoREN)
Not yet
2. Ethiopia (EthERNet) Supercomputing 2. Mali (MaliREN)
3. Kenya (Kenya)
Yes
3. Cote
d'Ivoire
Yes
(RITER)
4. Malawi (MAREN)
Yes
4. Niger (NigerREN)
Not yet
5. Mozambique
Not yet
5. Senegal (snRER)
Yes
(MoRENet)
6. Namibia (Xnet)
Not yet
6. Nigeria (ngREN)
Yes
7. Rwanda (RwEdNet)
Not yet
7. Gabon (GabonREN)
8. Somalia
Not yet
8. Ghana (GARNET)
Yes and
(SomaliREN)
Supercomputing
9. South
Africa
SAGrid
Other Countries
(TENET)
10. Sudan (SudREN)
Yes and
Zimbabwe
Yes
Supercomputing
11. Tanzania (TERNET) Supercomputing Burkina Faso
Yes
12. Uganda (RENU)
Yes
Cameroon
Yes
13. Zambia (ZAMREN)
Not yet
Burundi
Yes
Since 2008, UbuntuNet Alliance has provided connectivity into GÉANT for members who
could reach London. Mainly coastal NRENs have been able to take advantage of this. This is
illustrated in Figure 1 below.
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Terrestrial Ring:
Nairobi 
Kampala 
Kigali  Dar
Khartoum
Kinshasa
Backbone:
Kinshasa 
Mtunzini.
Kampala
Kigali
Nairobi
Mombasa
Dar es Salaam
Lusaka
Blantyre
Windhoek
Maputo
Backbone:
Windhoek 
Mtunzini
Cape Town
Mtunzini
Backbone Ring:
Nairobi  Dar 
Maputo 
Mtunzini
Figure 1: UbuntuNet Alliance interconnections
Today, KENET (Kenya), TERNET (Tanzania), TENET (South Africa) connect to UbuntuNet
in London and Amsterdam. ZAMREN (Zambia) has the only research and education crossborder link to TENET. However, with the coming of the AfricaConnect project, funded 80:20
EU and African NRENs a regional network will be built, interconnecting the member NRENs
and greatly increasing collaborative opportunities. The first links should be available in March
2013 and the network should be complete (at least Phase1) 2 years later.
Initiatives such as UNESCO Brain Gain and EPIKH have since spearheaded the advancement
of Grid computing, conducting Grid Schools and building human capacity. Within the
framework of the CHAIN project, development of NGIs and VRCs has been a special focus.
Regulatory Framework and Competitiveness
Since 1990 much of Sub-Saharan Africa has been undergoing a regulatory transformation,
moving from monopolistic to liberalized telecommunication regimes. To flatten the playfield
for telecommunication companies, regulatory authorities have been established in many
countries. The development of the many NRENs listed above in the region has been in part
the result of ongoing engagement with the Regulatory Authorities. Most of the regulators
recognize the role of NRENs and as a result they have facilitated the granting of the necessary
licenses for the NRENs to build infrastructure and transit traffic across borders. To this effect,
the regulators are normally invited to the annual UbuntuNet-Connect conference to make
presentations and arrange panel.
Each NREN has to work with the ISPs in the country and sometimes has played a role in the
establishment of the Internet Exchange Points (IXP). For example in Malawi the IXP is
housed at a MAREN member site. But work in reassuring the private sector is ongoing and
requires a positive dissemination role.
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A map (Telegeography) including international (commercial) Internet routes with at least 4
Gbps of aggregate capacity follows.
Figure 2: Internet bandwidth connected across international borders. Domestic routes have
been excluded. Data as of mid-2010
RP and VRC Market
Computing as an important tool for research has been recognised by the SADC community,
promoted internally and externally by prominent research centres.15 However, the attitude
towards the use of eInfrastructures for collaboration is far less concrete. Therefore, the grid
computing landscape is yet to be developed and exploited in Sub-Saharan Africa, however we
consider this a latent potential.
With the strides made by SAGrid in South Africa and the training sessions conducted by the
UNESCO Brain Gain, and EPIKH initiatives, awareness is continuing to trickle down to the
research communities that are used to the “business-as-usual” type of research with limited use
of networks due to high costs of connectivity and unreliability of the networks. Countries that
showed interest after the training sessions have been able to commence work on setting up
Grid sites. Other countries were able to unilaterally or with support from development partners
such as ICTP or CERN able to install HPC facilities.
15 See for example http://africa.ictp.it/ictp-in-africa/experimental-activities/information-and-communication
technology
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Today, HPC facilities and Grid sites exists in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Sudan and Tanzania. Apart from those sites in
South Africa, the rest are not interconnected or connected to any research network. The active
institutions in these countries would eventually become the resource providers (RP) for Grid
infrastructure. Many other countries that have participated in Grid initiatives have shown
interest and are at different stages of development. These include DRC, Malawi, and
Zimbabwe.
As the Grid infrastructure front is making progress, the users’ front is lagging behind. It is
generally observed though, that the situation is not uniform as countries are at different levels
of development presenting three scenarios: a) some have Grid infrastructure and users (e.g.
South Africa); b) others have interest, but no infrastructure (e.g. DRC); and c) others have
infrastructure, but no users (e.g. Kenya). One role of the RGCB should be to try to close the
gap. It is anticipated that once connectivity improves in the region and Grid infrastructure
becomes available and accessible, many VRCs will emerge.
There are no VRCs in Africa per se which define themselves as such. However, those that
come close to the definition are High Energy Physics; Astrophysics; Climate; Bioinformatics;
and Environment. These are all in South Africa. In the rest of the region, core research
disciplines such as Health including genomics, Crop production, Climate change,
Pharmabotany will yield VRCs through sustained dissemination and awareness raising of the
new possibilities by all stakeholders including the RBGC. And of course, Astronomy will be a
stellar discipline in the region! Although the output from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)16
is some years away, the SKA pathfinder projects are already generating large sets of MonteCarlo and observed data. These are collaboratively analysed both within Sub-Saharan Africa
and across the globe.
UbuntuNet Alliance has within the CHAIN project been reaching out to members and further
a field administering the Grid questionnaire and furnishing data, working to stimulate interest
and demand and encourage development of NGIs. Again, the UbuntuNet-Connect Conference
in 2011 and planned for 2012 is an opportunity for focused dissemination.
Since both sides of the Grid computing community (service provider- and user-side) is still yet
to be developed, it is difficult to identify competitors at this stage where so many factors are at
play and there is a welling of goodwill for the development of NRENs and the utilization of
the forthcoming network for meaningful collaborative research. The Grid initiatives, i.e.
UNESCO’s BrainGain, and EPIKH project are better perceived as a partners other as
competitors. 17 The project has exposed approximately 20 institutions in 16 countries to
advanced computing and related training. The website says: “In 2009 UNESCO and HP
agreed to scale up the initiative to help create a sustainable university eInfrastructures for
science, bringing together higher education institutions and research centres in Africa and the
Arab States region and allowing them to pursue innovative education projects. By the end of
2011, this infrastructure could span some 20 higher education institutions in 16 countries
provided like-minded corporations and organizations join UNESCO and HP in this initiative.”
\
16
(Africa component)
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/higher-education/reformand-innovation/brain-gain-initiative/
17
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Internal Audit
The Africa-Arabian Regional Operations Centre has been initially developed during the
EUMEDGRID-Support project (ended on 31 December 2011) in cooperation with the CHAIN
project, in the context of WP4, along the lines of the EGEE and EGI-definition of ROC. The
ROC consists of software, information and grid services, operated by a collaboration of
institutes in the region. Note that services in this case refer both to automatic services
implemented in software as well as human-provided services. The ROC presents itself to
various sets of users in terms of the services it offers, however does not explicitly operate any
resources – the main goal of the ROC is to coordinate the operation of resources in the region,
by monitoring them, supporting their users and providing decision makers with usage,
accounting and other figures justifying continued investment.
By having an overview of the full operational state of the entire set of resources available to
researchers in the entire region, Virtual Research Communities are more inclined to invest
their time, effort and indeed own resources in the Centre.
In terms of interoperability the ROC also acts as a central point for exchange of security,
monitoring and usage data, allowing entire infrastructures and NGI's to trust each other to
mutually exploit their resources. This trust in turn promotes collaboration at a scientific level,
allowing users in one region (and using resources belonging to one NGI) to share data and
compute time with their collaborators in other regions.
ROC Audience
The ROC responds essentially to the following category of customers:
1. End users: They are distributed across the entire continent, which is currently the
geographic range of the ROC, in the absence of any other coordinating body.
2. Technical support staff: The technical experts and site administrators are located at the
participating institutes of the ROC and are thus more well-defined and confined than
the end-user group of customers. This group is special in the sense that it both
consumes services and provides services via the ROC
3. Policy and decision makers
Segmentation and VRC Directional Policy Matrix
Below are directional policy matrices for the top 5 VRCs.
High Energy Physics
The HEP community in Africa is very well-established and strongly supported in the region.
The most visible example of this is of course the participation of African research institutes
and universities to the LHC experiments – specifically ATLAS and ALICE experiments.
Algeria, South Africa Morocco, Egypt have formal relations with CERN18 and recently Ghana
has expressed similar ambition in becoming an associate member of CERN. In addition to
these formal participants, students and individual researchers participate to LHC experiments
from all over the African continent, with strong coordination being provided by not only
CERN, but also CNRS19, DOE in the US20. There is strong external support for this VRC, and
while the members of the VRC tend to be aware of each other and mutually supportive, there
18
http://international-relations.web.cern.ch/International-Relations/office/listcountries.html
The CNRS is the French national of research centres
20
The Department of Energy in the United States funds several HEP laboratories, such as Fermilab, and BNL,
which have scholarship and exchange programmes with universities in Africa.
19
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is some lack of coordination regarding the provision of eInfrastructures in support of this VRC
– both in terms of quantity and technical requirements. Due to the perceived “blue-sky” nature
of the research activities, researchers have to actively promote the practical side-effects of
participation to these large experiments, which further contribute to their visibility and level of
collaboration.
Also, due to the fact that the grid paradigm is heavily used by this VRC, there is a great need
for the RBGC, and thus any such activity is highly appealing to the community.
High
Low
Astrophysics
In the Southern-African region particularly, astronomy and astrophysics have a historical and
geographical advantage. Large investments have consistently been made at all levels of
research in this domain, led in particular by South Africa. The SALT and HESS telescopes in
South Africa and Namibia respectively are two examples of African research communities
which directly benefit from the direct international investment in African research
communities, demonstrating a significant confidence in local partners, both scientific and
governmental. This has been further established with the recent decision to host a large part of
the SKA dishes in the SADC region. The infrastructure necessary to lead a cutting-edge
observatory like the SKA goes far beyond basic computing, data and network resources, and
involves telecoms regulatory frameworks, multilateral scientific cooperation between African
countries as well as human capital development from high-school upwards, to provide a
significant scientific base. All of these have been carefully planned and executed within the
region, led mostly by South Africa.
Astronomy being a data-driven science to a large extent, there is a long history of HPC and
data-mining based research in the astronomy and astrophysics domain. This has seldom been
perceived as “grid-enabled”, but specific sub-communities (more related to astro-particle
physics) are well-aware of the benefits of an RBGC. This awareness is actively being
promoted through the South African Astronomical Observatory, which has a significant
presence in other Sub-Saharan countries.
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Low
High
Climate
African stands to suffer significant stress at many levels due to climate change. The problem is
vastly complex to study, and developing public policy is not strictly linked to research output,
rather political agendas. However, the gravity and computational complexity of the problem
has led research groups in Africa to self-identify and collaborate on specific issues, such as
climate modelling, localised impact of climate change, and climate change scenarios. This has
given rise to specific VRCs, such as CORDEX21, which are heavily dependent on computing
resources, and have specifically chosen the grid paradigm to enable their collaborative
research activities. However, this specific case does not represent the entire community and
there is great fragmentation and diversion in how access is obtained to eInfrastructures by
research groups, with some having the lion's share of HPC resources and others excluded
entirely.
The climate change sector is so wide ranging that it's quite possible that the needs of this VRC
could never be satisfied, either by one coordinated eInfrastructures or several independent
ones. There is however an urgent need to increase at least access to the minimum required set
of resources to be able to conduct meaningful research, as well as help researchers coordinated
their activities through collaborative tools, in order to communicate coherently and timeously
with decision makers. This is an area where CHAIN could make a large impact.
Since the funding of climate-change e-Science research has tended to include funds for standalone computing equipment, the need for an RGCB has been perceived to be low. However,
with the increase in awareness of distributed resources and researchers, as well as their
increasing connectedness thanks to network penetration, we predict that funding agencies will
21
Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment – see http://www.meteo.unican.es/en/projects/CORDEX
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tend to reconsider this model of providing resources to individual groups and expect instead
that access be allowed to them at grid sites.
Low
High
Bioinformatics
New developments in bioinformatics are transforming our understanding of the genetic
biodiversity of the African continent, identifying compounds and species which could be
exploited for economic and social development, etc. The research communities are quite
tightly linked to commercial or industrial partners in several parts of Africa; however, it is not
necessarily African research, commerce or industry which benefits from this output. By its
very nature, bioinformatics is enabled almost entirely by reliable, relevant and competitive
access to eInfrastructures, which is lacking in most of the African continent. The new
developments in fibre networking will certainly bring access to information (gene and protein
banks, e.g.) to a growing number if researchers, however the generation of knowledge and
hence the commercial exploitation of this knowledge still requires access to HPC and data
facilities. What is more, the community is typically fragmented into large numbers of small
groups focussing on specific issues, which rarely communicate or collaborate. This makes it
challenging to assess their needs and provides them with one-size-fits-all solutions to the
problem of access to eInfrastructures.
Low  VRC
attractiveness  High
High
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Environment
Along with climate change, the understanding and advocacy of the environment represents an
area of great socio-economic impact. The study of environmental issues such as pollution,
erosion, agriculture and livestock management, clean water and air, etc are topics of great
concern for many of the world's poorest nations, almost all of which are on the African
continent. Addressing these issues in a data-driven way is rare in Africa, but examples can be
found, even amongst the small sample of research projects funded by the HP-UNESCO Brain
Gain initiative referred to previously
High
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SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
 The Africa & Arabia ROC is functional and the
technical know-how exists there
 UbuntuNet Alliance is a trusted agent on the
African continent with a wide network of
contacts
 There are attempts at regional dissemination of
advanced computing services particularly
through the training carried out through EPIKH.
 The EU –funded AfricaConnect project building
the regional backbone (with UbuntuNet Alliance
as local implementing partner) has the potential
to be a major catalyst to collaborative
eInfrastructures-based research
 The implementation of the SKA
 The absence of Regional Body for Grid
Coordination;
 There is a huge legacy of underfunding of
tertiary education and research;
 Brain drain;
 Loss of critical mass of researchers to
consultancies and the NGO sector; and therefore
not a huge body of research to gridify
 The current underdevelopment of the network.
 Inadequate human capacity to address requests
for development and training
Opportunities
Threats
 Visibility of research communities in areas that
demand high processing power such as
genomics/bioinformatics
 The existence of SAGrid, from which a great
deal can be learned and shared
 Because of coming late on the scene, opportunity
to learn from early adopters and avoid earlier
pitfalls
 Willing partners across the globe
 Existing regional coordination bodies for NRENs
which could be tasked with creating and
stabilizing the RBGC in various regions.






Tough economic times for certain sectors
Lack of awareness by the political cadre of
the opportunities available
Nationalistic rather than regional or global
embracing by national decision makers
Lack of sustainable funding model for
computing resources
Perceived fragmentation of international
DCI's
Slow response to many researchers' requests
due to capacity constraints could present a
negative picture of the RBGC
The implementation of the AfricaConnect project will construct the UbuntuNet regional
backbone. The CHAIN project has presented some opportunities for introducing Grid to the
technical community in the region. A great challenge still exists in reaching out to the research
communities
 Strategy formulation
UbuntuNet Alliance should work with Africa and Arabia ROC to provide coordination and
management functions. Efforts will be made to convince the Grid stakeholders in Sub-Saharan
Africa to support this process.
The core activities then should be:
 Disseminate at the policy level, the role of Grid computing and establishment of VRCs
through presentations and demonstrations at appropriate high level regional fora;
 Work with the eInfrastructures owners to develop sustainable business models;
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Identify and support champion e-science leaders and projects to become lighthouse
demonstrators in the region;
Supporting the development of NGI in every country within the framework of the
NREN where appropriate
Regular reflection will be necessary to mark progress and refocus resources where results can
be maximized. The expertise in the CHAIN-REDS team should assist in moving the region to
the next level.
Below is the directional policy matrix for Sub-Saharan Africa RBGC. The RBGC has to be
selective, acknowledge low growth, emphasise service quality to avoid “commodity”
competition, systematically improve productivity, and assign talented personnel/managers.
High
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 Mediterranean sustainability analysis
 Goals Setting
As a clarification, this region comprises Middle East and North Africa, but is referred to
Mediterranean for consistency with other chapters – terms are interchangeable.
Today’s research imposes new requirements not only in the way it is being conducted, but also
in the complexity of the computational aspects. Grid computing has an amazing potential in its
impact on enabling institutions to “boot up” research on the region’s most pressing problems
related to health, environment, energy, culture, and economics.
ASREN’s grid-oriented goal has been focused on:
“Widening access to grid resources across the Arab region while facilitating sharing of
common data repositories and fostering VRCs of regional relevance”
ASREN related objectives are:
a. To build, maintain and consolidate regional grid Infrastructures dedicated to eScience across the Arab Countries, by
i. Developing, managing and operating a regional operation centre (ROC) that
interconnects Grid sites of the Arab Countries
ii. Promoting harmonization of policies and standards in relevant Grid
computations at regional level
iii. Advocating on the importance of National Grid and Regional grid
initiatives amongst decision makers and stakeholders at the regional level
b. To contribute to create and sustain National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) by
i. Supporting them to implement leading-edge technological solutions
ii. Promoting the exchange of expertise and best practices amongst the NGI’s
c. To facilitate the collaboration and cooperation among the researchers in the Arab
region by:
i. Increasing the availability and accessibility of knowledge resources for
researchers
ii. Promoting the development of Arabic contents and their availability
iii. Facilitating knowledge exchange and transfer processes across the region
and with relevant partners in Europe and worldwide
iv. Promoting the adoption and usage of eInfrastructures and services among
the scientific community, also through training and tutoring activities
v. Strengthening regional partnerships and encouraging joint scientific
research at all levels.
 Situation Review
In this phase, a situational analysis of the Arab regional grid infrastructure is presented,
providing a systematic, critical and unbiased review and appraisal of the region-wide grid
environment and operations. Various scientific segments of the VRCs are identified. A
directional policy matrix (DPM) is outlined to facilitate directions for a strategy to be adopted
for various segments/VRCs. Finally, a SWOT presentation is provided to assist in evaluating
risks and opportunities for success.
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External Audit
The Arab growth rate (GDP per capita) recorded for the period 2000-2009, reaches an average
annual rate in excess of 2.8% for 10 countries, less than 2% for 5 countries, between 2% and
2.8% for 4 countries, and less than 0% for the remaining 3 countries. GDP variation is
relatively high for low income and oil-rich countries, defined by a coefficient of variation in
the range between 6 and 10. With the exception of Egypt and Tunisia, none of the growth
processes of the Arab countries was characterized by very low variation. The lowest variation
is recorded a coefficient of variation of 1.9. The average government spending for R&D is
much less than 1% of the total GDP.
Some macroeconomic regional data (World Bank, 2012) follow in the Table 4 below.
Table 4: Macroeconomic data for Middle East and North Africa
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Public university structures are dominant in the Arab region constituting over 65% of the total
number of Universities. Unfortunately, government spending on higher education is limited
with an average cost per student per year not exceeding 5% of the spending of governments in
the industrialized countries. Student enrolment in the Arab region has reached 20 million in
about 1000 Arab institutions mainly universities, community colleges, and teacher-training
institutes. About 9 million of the students have been enrolled in universities. A part
approximately 10% of them has been enrolled in postgraduate studies (8% master, 2%
doctorate degrees). This shows low enrolment in doctorate programs, which impact
dramatically R&D. It has also been reported that 80% of the undergraduate students have been
enrolled in humanities, and only 20% in scientific programs. This creates a disproportionate
number of graduates mainly in humanities and very little in science and technology.
The above facts show a critical status of Arab higher education. Challenges and issues are
tremendous, including limitations on funding, localized quality standards, lack of policy
directions and inadequate educational resources. Arab governments have made several efforts
to improve performance. New trends in establishing different types of educational structures
have emerged. This is mainly through cooperation agreements with foreign universities and
increasing of internationalization. On research spending, efforts have been limited to policy
directions at the regional and national levels. The key to succeed is to collaborate for a transfer
of foreign knowledge, technology and expertise. Few governments launched research
initiatives, including scientific research commissions, centres of excellence, science councils,
business and technology parks, and incubators.
The plans for improvement in higher education have always been given a priority. A common
space for an Arab Higher Education System remains a challenge. The only existing space for
recognition of academic degrees in the Arab countries was signed by 14 countries in 1978. In
contrast to many regions in the world, there are no common references to the degrees and their
granting institutions for the whole Arab region.
The main purpose of eInfrastructure facilities is to support academic institutions and research
centres with large capacity networks and highly sophisticated computing environment for
research problems that require complex data analysis and intensive computations. In the Arab
region, there have not been yet any reports on the uses of business communities of these
facilities. Some businesses began to use cloud computing services for their computational
needs, but still very limited. It can be argued that there is no clear picture on the different
business domains, which would need such a sophisticated computing environment.
Total market, size, growth and trends in terms of the volume of the resources used, e.g. CPU
time, etc. The available grid infrastructures have been reported mainly in Jordan, Egypt, Syria,
Algeria, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. The Jordan JO-01-JUNET grid has 2
CPUs, 3250 memory size, and 90.00% availability. The Egypt EG-02-EUN grid values are: 4,
144000, and 95.00%, respectively. The Syrian SY-01-HIAST grid values are: 4, 48000, and
70.00%, respectively. The Kuwait KU-01-KUGRID grid values are: 8, 26000, and 10.00%,
respectively. The Algerian DZ-0\03 1-ARN grid values are: 3\4, 48000\152000, and
95.00%\95.00%, and UAE AE-01-ANKABUT grid values are: 2, 3000, and 10.00%,
respectively. The main VRCs are: High Energy Physics, which consumes 85% of Grid CPU
time; Life Science, which consumes 1%; Computational chemistry, which consumes 7%, and
Infrastructure which consumes 7%.
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Regulatory framework and Competitiveness
International bandwidth usage increased by an average of 82% per year between 2002 and
2009 (Telegeography) in the Middle East and North Africa. A primary driver of this demand
growth has been the increase in broadband subscribership in the region. The number of
broadband subscribers in the Middle East and North Africa has jumped 362% between 2005
and 2009, from 3.7 million to 17.2 million subscribers.
There are no major competitors, except for the international cloud computing service providers
such as Amazon and Google. It should be noted that these service markets are pre-mature and
represent no threat to eInfrastructures in the short term.
In the Arab region, it can be argued that there is no massive demand from the scientific
community to cloud computing, but rather the demand is linked to grid computing
infrastructures. Under specific conditions that could put the framework for a R&D
collaboration between the industry and research institutions these infrastructures could
represent a revenue generator if large corporations could use them for their research and
development activities. The main reason is the viability of resource sharing, economies of
scale, and availability of professional expertise. This is a trend that needs further attention and
nurturing at the policy level.
Internal Audit
Since eInfrastructures are at their preliminary stages in the region, there is no detailed data for
the Arab region on the volume of services. Large-scale oil/energy companies operating in the
region can use an array of services that facilitate sharing and running of computing resources
on the grid eInfrastructures. However, the success of EUMEDGRID-Support project can help
motivate establishing sources of information and data for the research community. As large
business corporations began to evolve, higher demand for eInfrastructures will be expected,
hence higher demand for eInfrastructures in a larger context.
Costs of operation and resources: Several parameters of the RBGC need to be identified and
coordinated for operating available grid sites. Currently, each country takes the full
operational and financial responsibility of its National Grid sites. Costs of operation and
coordination at the regional level are currently facilitated by ASREN/ EUMED funds. In the
long term, some sort of membership fees would be imposed on all ASREN partners to cover
operational costs of coordinated grid sites.
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Taking into account that the main criteria for evaluating the various VRCs in the Arab region
could be dissemination, awareness, capabilities as well as that the HEP VRC consumes the
majority of the computing resources it is reasonable to conclude that the HEP is the most
active VRC in the region. As HEP become more attractive with more eInfrastructures
required, stronger policy directions have to be made to meet its increasing demand as well as
demands of other growing VRCs.
High
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SWOT Analysis
The SWOT analysis of ASREN in leading Grid regional infrastructure efforts follows.
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Strengths
Emerging NGIs in some Countries with
advanced services
Availability of Grid experts who can install,
operate and manage grid sites
Dissemination activities at both regional and
national levels
Efficient cost management
Growing demand on scientific computing
services
Availability of scientific applications
Core competencies in key areas
Positive track record of service delivery
Existence of national-level or regional-level
projects in eInfrastructures
Opportunities
Emerging Science Gateways
Regional disseminations, sharing knowledge and
experts exchange activities
Regionally supported research initiatives and
infrastructure support based projects
More applications are being made available to
the researchers
Emerging identity federations
Increased collaboration within the region
The capability of serving more users and adding
more applications
Increase scientific mobility
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Weaknesses
Lack of NGIs in many countries
Lack of regional operations expertise
Weakness in applications porting
Governmental support is not enough
Regional coordination is very difficult
Sharing resources (expertise) across the region
Lack
of
information
about
research
communities, projects, and initiatives
Lack, and in many times, no financial support.
Training and knowledge transfer
Threats
 Lack of political commitment, especially at the
regional level
 Unstable, and in most of the cases, unavailable
funding
 Inability of NRENs to allocate resources for
regional cooperation
 Lack of motivation to follow the regional trend
 Less priorities of grid to decision makers in most
cases
 Low cost internet access motivate NRENs to
purchase higher bandwidth as a replacement of
R&E networks
 Availability of many social, cloud and
communities services
 Strategy formulation
The sustainability plan is the intelligence that can be extracted from the audit, the
segmentation and the SWOT analysis mentioned above and can result in a concrete
sustainability strategy/model suggesting what to do and how for a specific timeframe i.e. 3
years. The strategy elements defined in this manner are as follow:
Strategy line I: Dissemination and awareness
- Formulate an awareness plan on Grid computing among scientific communities
- Stimulate interests at the decision making level towards NGIs
- Increase awareness at the regional level through contact databases, newsletters,
brochures, conferences, and workshops.
Strategy line II: Expand NGIs to cover the whole region
- Develop NGI initiatives in countries where such initiatives do not exist
- Facilitate sharing of experiences of NGIs and best practices as well as collaboration
with other regional VRCs
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Strategy line III: Policy directions to stimulate innovation in science and technology
- Develop environments to stimulate science and technology through technology parks
- Open up science and technology programs at the doctorate level
- Increase government spending on R&D with funding focused on projects that are
computationally intensive with focus on problems and issues of regional importance
For each of the strategy elements, a detailed activity/directive structure is presented in the
following paragraph with a specific time frame for implementation.
1. Awareness Plan
i. e-AGE 2012 : United Arab Emirates
ii. Newsletters: ASREN September issue
2. Policy makers’ involvement: Proposals to Ministries of HE and ICT for
developing Grid sites in the Arab countries where such sites do not exist.
3. Sharing of experiences:
i. Training sessions – MENOG 11, 09/10 2012 – Amman, Jordan
ii. Grid school
4. Facilitate the creation of R&D programs in science and technology
5. Stimulate developing joint programs at the Ph.D. level through partnerships
6. Stimulate R&D spending through League of Arab States and other active
regional organizations
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 Latin America sustainability analysis
 Goals Setting
The Latin American academic community has promoted for 6 years the use of the Grid
eInfrastructures in different countries. Three projects proved of key importance as to
understanding and disseminating Grid Computing and eInfrastructures vision and developing
new applications.
 EELA22 (EInfrastructures shared between Europe and Latin America) in 2006;
 EELA223 (E-science grid facility between Europe and Latin America) in 2008;
 GISELA24 (Grid Initiatives for e-Science virtual communities in Europe and Latin
America) in 2010, and
 CHAIN (Coordination and Harmonization of Advanced eInfrastructures) currently
The participating institutions in the GISELA project have recognized that, at least in Latin
America, grid computing would not be able to survive in the research and education
environment on its own, unless it is offered as part of a series of advanced computing
services25.
Latin America has centred its main goal in the evolution of the original CLARA Model into an
Advanced Computing Service (ACS) architecture based on a Science Gateway Approach
(SGA).
This multi-purpose flexible architecture will comply with different objectives for the potential
users:
 To solve different needs, which may vary from the use and manipulation of specialized
instruments to storage and/or processing information;
 To provide different tools for data analysis, simulation and problem solving, as well as
virtual resource management;
 To keep old users interested while providing them new tools;
 To attract new and different users, such as, individual researchers, small research
groups, or large virtual research communities.
 To provide Final Users with “ready-to-use” tools and Advanced Users with
customizing tools for their applications
The effort put forward by GISELA’s CLARA TT to consolidate the ACS architecture in Latin
America will have the following specific goals in the short, medium and long terms:
Short Term
 To configure the GISELA Science Gateway with the help of Instituto Nacional
deFísica Nuclear at Catania, Italia (INFN) (first pilot launched);
 To have the commitment from CLARA’s NRENs in the support of new projects (5
NRENs have committed as of 01/07/12);
 To maintain a stable Grid infrastructure during and after the transition from GISELA to
22
http://www.eu-eela.org
http://www.eu-eela.eu
24
http://www.gisela-grid.eu
25
See CLARA Business Plan D1.4 at http://www.gisela-grid.eu
23
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the RedCLARA/NRENs/communities Front End (accomplished on 11/09/12);
To consolidate the main operations and functions of the Grid infrastructure in the
ROC-LA with participating institutions from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, led by
UNAM (started on 15/08/12 -in process-);
Medium Term
 To transform the GISELA Science Gateway into a Latin American ACS SGA;
 To reach a regional balance in skills and number of trainees on resource administration
and AC applications porting (ongoing);
 To establish skilled teams, to help countries in the organisation of their NGIs or
equivalent national structures on ACS;
 To launch the first LA regional initiative in Mesoamerica for Natural Disaster services
using the ACS SGA eInfrastructures and pertinent VRCs;
 To build an inventory of ACS needs in LA;
 To register all LA ongoing projects that need ACS and contact the project managers to
offer a SGA and the regional eInfrastructures and VRC support;
Long Term
 To increase government spending on R&D with focus on projects that use intense
ACS;
 To gain visibility in the Ministerial Summits to raise awareness of S&T (Science and
Technology) authorities in the importance of collaborating with RedCLARA, NRENs
and VRCs to take advantage of ACS SGA eInfrastructures for regional social,
economic and cultural development;
 To continue disseminating ACS SGA through NRENs at the national level and through
Venezuela at the regional level;
 To cover all Latin American countries with ACS SGA eInfrastructures.
 Situation review
This Section presents a general view of the economic development of the Latin America
region and its ICT commercial infrastructure; it shows the current status of Internet
connectivity and its penetration. In contrast, there is a summary of RedCLARA and the
NRENs role in the build-out of the regional eInfrastructures for e-Science. An explanation of
the development of the GISELA Grid infrastructure is given with emphasis on the transitional
period, when GISELA hands over the operation and functions to the CLARA Transition Team
or CLARA TT.
External Audit
As reported in World Bank data, Latin American economies have remained stubbornly
resilient to the global economic turmoil but face an uncertain scenario going forward. Even as
the region is expected to stay strong in 2012 and a dose of stability has been injected into
global financial markets, many challenges remain ahead in the medium term, notably the
projected slowdown of China’s economy – the supercharged engine that has contributed to
the region’s growth and market diversification over the past few years.
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Overall, the region will quickly need to adapt to changing global circumstances in order to
remain competitive and continue to grow at a solid clip. Immediate challenges span the
region’s social and economic agendas. Socially, Latin America and the Caribbean remains one
of the most unequal regions in the world with social spending still relatively low and, in some
cases, still untargeted – for example, in parts of Central America subsidies reach poor and rich
populations equally. Economically, the region can use its strong record to continue to build
value into commodity exports, while addressing other practical issues such as production
capacity constraints, modernizing its infrastructure and logistics, boosting innovation and
modernizing the State.
Some draft macroecononic figures for the region are provided in the following Table 5 (data
from World Bank).
Table 5: Macroeconomica data for Latin America and Caribbean
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Infrastructure overview
The National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) or advanced networks are not part
of the above statistics; they constitute private academic networks that concentrate the most
demanding research and education-oriented users of the Internet. CLARA the regional
corporation of advanced networks has consolidated a high speed network throughout the
region.
CLARA has a membership of 18 National Research and Education Networks (NRENs).
Eleven Latin American countries are represented in GISELA, either by NRENs (five), or by a
NREN and an Academic Institution (1), or only by Academic Institutions. It is worth noting
that these countries / institutions have different levels of maturity in Grid eInfrastructures
skills. During this first year of GISELA, the representatives of CLARA concentrated in raising
awareness of the objectives and the evolution of the project to Policy and Decision Makers, at
both national and regional levels. NRENs Directors and Network Services Directors have been
advised of the importance to support the creation and the operation of eInfrastructures and,
more generally, to foster the development of e-Science in Latin America. Some initiatives
have been accomplished successfully. For instance, CLARA has supported Virtual Research
Communities, potential users of advanced computing services such as Grid computing, at the
regional level. Furthermore, CLARA, through its NRENs, has supported the creation of a solid
national group of institutions that are either preparing to become the NGI (National Grid
Initiative) or the EDGS (Equivalent Domestic Grid Structure) of their country, or they have
already become one.
However, Grid knowledge and skills maturity in the region need to further improve. Slight
individual progress has been accomplished in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Panama and
Uruguay. Greater progress has been observed in Colombia that has already formed its NGI and
deployed its Grid Operation Centre (GOC). Mexico is also consolidating a GOC, RCs and
Network Operation Centre (NOC) interrelationship, through its Joint Research Unit (JRU).
Moreover, with the commercial launch of the Cloud services, some communities are exploring
combinations of different high performance computing and storage techniques other than Grid
Computing to solve their needs. As a result, the CLARA TT proposes the evolution of the
original CLARA Model into an Advanced Computing Service (ACS) architecture based on a
Science Gateway Approach (SGA). The new model includes a multi-purpose flexible
architecture designed to solve different needs. They can vary from the use and manipulation of
specialised instruments to storage and/or processing information, providing tools for data
analysis, simulations and problem solving, as well as virtual resource management. The targets
are different users, individual researchers, small research groups or large virtual research
communities. From these targets two groups are distinguished: the final users looking for
“ready to use” tools and advanced users who generally need to customise their applications.
For example, ACS could involve the use of simultaneous intensive computing processors
(hundreds, perhaps thousands), massive data storage or the capacity to interact visually with
the stored data to better understand the interpretation of results from analysing the data. ACS
also considers being part of an intensive use of parallel computing of hundreds, even
thousands of processors being integrated through different technologies that are available, in
various levels of development. Nevertheless, much of the technical and organisational
infrastructure needed to implement ACS, could be used to help other activities opening
possibilities in order to develop sources of sustainability. This is the case for the virtualisation
of servers that can support services provided by the NRENs and/or CLARA itself. Also the
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authentication organization and process needed to access to AC Grid services can profit from
other project or activities in the regions.
The new CLARA Model provides the final user with a single interface – Front-End - with
access to services hosted by RedCLARA / NRENs / communities sites as shown in Figure 3
below).
Figure 3: The new CLARA Model and its ACS architecture based on a SGA
The new model includes a multi-purpose flexible architecture designed to solve different
needs, which can vary from the use and manipulation of specialised instruments to storage
and/or processing information, providing tools for data analysis, simulations and problem
solving, as well as virtual resource management. The targets are different users, individual
researchers, small research groups or large virtual research communities. From these targets,
two groups are distinguished: the final users looking for “ready-to-use” tools and the advanced
users who generally need to customise their applications.
The evolved CLARA model is able to accept requests from non-expert AC users (in orange) as
well as application developers (in blue). The SG can handle either pre-set services, with
already available or customised applications with different levels of accompaniment or support
(consulting), if necessary. It is important to acknowledge that those applications developed by
EELA, EELA-2 and GISELA will be ported and considered as part of the offer. Applications
developers will also benefit by using shared resources for the development of particular
applications (sourceforge). Consulting services include different levels of advice,
accompaniment and support in the customisation and development of e-Science applications
and eInfrastructures utilisation.
In GISELA one of the main objectives, having been supported by CHAIN, has been to achieve
a sustainable model for Grid services in Latin America. CLARA and several LA NRENs are
playing a collaborative role in establishing a regional model. The GISELA-CHAIN
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Conference held in Mexico City by the end of June, 2012 and the TICAL 2012 meeting held
by CLARA in Lima, Peru at the beginning of July gave clear lines of action to continue to
achieve the sustainable model for Grid and other AC services in the region. Through
CLARA’s participation in CHAIN Latin America will be able to exchange views with other
regions and test its model.
According to Telegeography reports in 2010, Latin American international Internet capacity
rose 75%, a slight increase over the 68% in 2009. In the past five years, capacity to the region
has increased more than 11-fold, from 317Gbps in 2006 to 3,6 Tbps in 2010. Much of this
growth is attributed to connectivity with the USA, which increased 93% between 2009 and
2010. In 2010, 83% of all Latin America’s international bandwidth connected to the USA &
Canada. Conversely, intra-regional links accounted for just 24%, having increased by 22%
over the previous year. A few key operators made changes to their network topologies in 2010,
factoring as one cause of the low intra-regional growth rate.
The below map (Telegeography) includes international Internet routes with at least 25 Gbps of
aggregate capacity.
Figure 4: Internet bandwidth connected across international borders. Domestic routes
excluded. Data as of mid-2010.
According to the data base of World Bank the Research and Development expenditure (% of
GDP) of Latin America can be found herebelow. So can the relevant figures of other regions
under consideration, provided all in a comparative manner.
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Table 6: R&D expenditure per region
East Asia & Pacific
1.47% 2008
Euro area
2.09% 2009
European Union
2.04% 2009
Europe & Central Asia
0.96% 2009
Latin America & Caribbean
0.65% 2007
OECD members
2.45% 2008
South Asia
0.75% 2007
Sub-Saharan Africa
0.58% 2007
World
2.14% 2008
RP and VRC market
CLARA has been successful in establishing diverse Virtual Research Communities that are
potential users of ACS. In fact, three communities, Grids/ACS, Natural Disasters and Spatial
Data Infrastructure have been put together to work in their respective disciplines in the
formulation of a project for the region of Mesoamerica 26 . The first approach with the
government has been through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, one of the major
financing entities of the Mesoamerica region. They showed great interest, and explained they
would need to socialise the draft project with the rest of the other nine participating
governments.
CLARA TT and other relevant LA personnel has benefited from the EPIKH Grid Schools.
There are at least a dozen trainers that can start a program to train the trainee. However, in
order to achieve a reasonable number of trainers and personnel with expertise in applications
porting, Latin America will continue participating in future EPIKH Grid Schools together with
other pertinent programs. Brazil, Colombia Mexico and Venezuela have PhD experts who are
able to install, operate and manage grid sites and have core competences in different areas of
expertise on ACS and SGA. As part of its responsibilities, the ROC-LA is relying on the
functions that the Mexican JRU is conducting to gain expertise in areas such as Identity
Federation and Science Gateway. Personnel from UNAM have been trained in both areas to
transfer this knowledge to the rest of the countries. ULA-Venezuela is coordinating the
dissemination of activities at the regional level and NRENs help at the national level.
Internal Audit
In its mid-term, CLARA TT find out that there were no new LA VRCs or individual users
trying to access the Grid infrastructure in LA. After a series of meetings with researchers and
the S&T authorities, CLARA TT finally decided to move to a new CLARA Business Model.
Grid Computing would not survive on itself, at least in LA, so a right decision was taken, to
move the offer from a single service to multiple Advanced Computing Services (ACS) based
on a Science Gateway Approach (SGA). This approach includes Grid Computing and CLARA
TT is comfortable with its finding. Offering Grid Computing plus other ACS requires more
26
Mesoamerica comprises Mexico, 7 Central American countries, Dominican Republic and Colombia
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skilled personnel and a wide diversity of services. CLARA TT has an initial group well
prepared for the challenge. However, as a starting point in the handover of functions and
operations, it is necessary to maintain the same level of services that were offered since the
beginning of GISELA. As the IGALC (Iniativa de Grid de America Latina – Caribe, Latin
American and Caribbean Grid Initiative) operation and functions are transferred to the ROCLA the personnel should keep the eInfrastructures up and running while at the same time be
trained for the future activities they’ll be undertaking. Mexico personnel is leading the
handover, however, it is expected that by the end of the year more countries will have
participated in the sustainability of the eInfrastructures with resources and human capacity
building. For those VRCs that are currently using GISELA’s IGALC infrastructure the
handover has been transparent and smooth.
Funding has been the main concern for CLARA TT. Five out of twelve NRENs have
committed to support the build-out continuity of the infrastructure and two academic
institutions committed to support the operation of these type of infrastructures based on their
longstanding expertise: UNAM and UNIANDES. Even though this is a good starting point,
the absence of the NREN of Brazil, Chile and Peru needs to be evaluated. The Academic
Manager of CLARA did every reasonable effort visiting different countries to meet S&T
authorities and raise the awareness as to the need of stronger collaboration and funding for
these initiatives. Some showed interest in the initiative but have not expressed any support of
funding available to continue expanding the eInfrastructures. Further interaction with the S&T
authorities will be pursued in early 2013 using a different strategy.
By applying the principles of DPM development the following matrix can be obtained using
information drawn from the GISELA VOs. It is important to note that in the upper left
quadrant there are three circles that represent the VRCs of Astrophysics, as the left circle of
the upper quadrant, HEP-Infrastructure representing the circle in the middle of the same
quadrant and Life-Sciences located to the right of this quadrant, these VRCs are the most
active VRCs in Latin America.
At the bottom and just in the middle and right bottom quadrant two circles are depicted. The
first circle represents the multidisciplinary applications VRCs and the remaining circle
represents the rest of the applications of different disciplines; both VRCs are not as intensive
in the use of grid computing as those mentioned above.
The assumptions adopted are following:
1. Disciplines/CPU time (kS12K-hours) a period of 1 year was selected from June 2011
to June 2012
2. VRC attractiveness is high because of demand size
3. Astrophysics (HH) HEP–infrastructure (HM), Life-Sciences (HMH), Multidisciplinary
(LML), others (LL)
4. Promotion is the only strength as the RBGC (GISELA) does not charges for demand
5. Astrophysics, HEP and Life-Sciences are disciplines that are aware of the benefits
derived from using distributed computing, they have built infrastructure for their
applications and understand about advanced computing, they are highly independent
from the reliance on computer scientists or technologists to resolve their problems with
any kind of computer architecture. The amount of CPU time used by these three VRCs
has been high and consistent within the three projects developed for the integration of
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Grid eInfrastructures in Latin America with the support of Europe (EELA, EELA-2
and GISELA). Other disciplines or multidisciplinary VRCs tend to use local systems
and need to understand the benefits of using distributed computing. Researchers in
these VRCs recognize that the computer interface used to port applications in a Grid
environment is very difficult to understand when an expert does not accompany them.
They have experienced this difficulty even after they have taken basic courses to
accomplish these tasks. Very few cross the line to become confident with porting
applications into grid eInfrastructures. The Science Gateway may become the interface
to solve in part this problem.
6. The RBGC (GISELA) needs to gain more expertise in accompaniment for the different
potential VRCs that are willing to use distributed computing. Its main objective is to
gain expertise in the development of tools for the Science Gateway and test
applications that are more popular with students of different levels (undergrad, and
grad) to enhance the potential of the Science Gateway. This in turn will open
alternatives for problem-solving when these students become young scientist and
researchers.
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SWOT
Strengths
Weaknesses
 Mexico and Brazil with long expertise in the
operation of a ROC and technical know-how
 Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela have
Grid experts who can install, operate and
manage grid sites and have core competences
in key areas
 Venezuela coordinates dissemination activities
at regional level and at the national level
through NRENs
 The Americas project has identified nationallevel or regional-level projects in
eInfrastructures
 Availability of a GISELA Science Gateway
 Availability of some scientific applications
 Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela have
national certification authorities and there is a
regional Certification authority (TACMA)
 RedCLARA and its associated NRENs are
committed to incorporate grid services as part
of the portfolio service of the CLARA Model
 Inventory of the potential market well defined





Opportunities
Lack of NRENs in 6 countries of Latin
America (Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Paraguay and Rep. Dominicana)
Lack of continuous Governmental support to
the NRENs at the national level except for
Brazil, Costa Rica and Venezuela
No permanent financial support, because EU
generally finances two and sometimes even
three times the same topic in its calls, Grid
Computing in LA has been financed in three
different periods of two years each
Few experts in applications porting
Slow training and knowledge transfer
Threats
 Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico’s
NRENs committed to find funding for the
sustainability of the RBGC
 Gaining Science Gateway expertise
 Regional disseminations, sharing knowledge
and experts exchange activities with the
support of the NRENs and RedCLARA
 Regionally supported research initiatives and
infrastructure support based projects (OAS)
 Testing and making available more
applications to the researchers
 ID federation implementation
 Greater participation in training and technology
transfer programs
 Participation in Hemispherial Ministerial and
High Authorities initiatives to attract interest of
the decision makers
 Look for regional collaboration with other
regional organizations
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




Lack of political commitment, at both the
national and regional level to support
eInfrastructure for e-Science
Unstable, and in most of the cases, unavailable
funding
Inability of NRENs to allocate resources for
regional cooperation
Cheap Internet broadband access as a substitute
to build eInfrastructure in an academic
environment
Availability of many social, technical and
communities services which can be utilized by
researchers through commercial networks
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 Strategy formulation
The Latin American RBGC will have a combined strategy of the types (a) and (c) of the
graphs suggested in Annex IV.
The LA RBGC strategy will allow for:
1. Strengthening the skills of the personnel/managers
2. Dedicating resources for further R&D to develop simple tools and interfaces for the
different type of users and clients and differentiate advanced computing services
3. Distributing leadership in thematic applications to enhance communities’ skills
4. Concentrating infrastructure leadership in those countries where there is a solid basis
(Mexico, Brazil, Colombia) and supporting the other countries to enlarge their
infrastructure in the medium term
5. Improving productivity and quality of service (QoS) to make a difference from the
commodity competition
6. Increase manpower in the region and expand the type of services to be offered through
specialized training or development of new skills
7. Building regional and sub-regional projects with impact on social development to be
able to get fresh financing from different sources
For each of the strategy elements, a detailed activity/directive structure is presented in the
following paragraph with a specific time frame for implementation.
1. Train personnel on Federation of Identities. Two representatives of UNAM were
trained for one month at the INFN in Catania, Italy in July 2012. The Federation of
Identities group has been created in Mexico as of September 2012; this group will
report a pilot Federation of Identities for the GISELA project. From mid-September
to December 2012 this group will work with two other institutions on building a pilot
test to share resources. In 2013, the regional Federation of Identities will be
implemented. After the pilot test period is finished the knowledge and skills will be
transferred to the LA RBGC to implement Federation of Identities throughout LA,
equivalent to EDUROAM After the pilot test period is finished the knowledge and
skills will be transferred to the LA RBGC to implement Federation of Identities
throughout LA, equivalent to EDUROAM.
2. Train personnel on Science Gateways. Two representatives of UNAM were trained for
one month at the INFN, in Catania, Italy in July 2012. A program to develop skills in
the implementation and development of new tools will start in October 2012 with the
participation of CLARA TT. It is intended to test different tools and applications and
adapt them to LA needs.
3. CLARA TT led by RedCLARA’s Academic Manager will identify thematic
applications and specialists that could test these applications in a SG environment;
this is an ongoing activity that will start in October 2012. A pre-selection of
applications will be done, to test and approve at least two applications by the end of
2012.
4. At the time of writing GISELA’s IGALC handover to UNAM ROC-LA has taken
place. The VOMS server has been successfully migrated on 11/09/12. All services
have been installed and configured. The CHAIN SG endpoints for tests and
demonstrative applications are ready, the robot certificates needed had been correctly
registered at ROC-LA. Next step is VOMS replication at CIEMAT and UNIANDES.
In the medium term more involvement from UNIANDES and the Brazilian
institutions is expected.
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5. RedCLARA and the NRENs NOCs will be monitoring the infrastructure to maintain
the QoS of the network at international standards. The former entities with CLARA
TT will be participating in the ticketing of network resources needed for specific
applications. Multiple videoconferences will take place between the participating
NRENs and CLARA to achieve maximum efficiency of the network and agree on
common procedures addressing failure restoration and/or troubleshooting when QoS
degradation happens.
6. The Mesoamerica project has been proposed. A meeting with the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of Mexico is expected to take place by the end of September, to either restructure the project or start it. It is a two year project with six components. Two
services are proposed, the design of risk maps for the different areas of interest and
the generation of Spatial Data Infrastructures.
7. The Latin American RBGC will be promoting the participation in S&T Ministerial
Meetings and a second round of interviews with high level S&T authorities
promoting the Mesoamerican Project strengths and benefits from collaborating with
the Academia and using NRENs.
8. Ensuring funding for the RBGC.
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 India sustainability analysis
 Goals Setting
GARUDA is a collaboration of scientific and technology researchers on a nationwide grid
comprised of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments. It provides an
abstraction layer above High Performance Computing System, facilitating co-ordination and
distributed sharing of resources across different geographical locations and under multiple
administrative domains.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is the premier R&D
organization of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry
of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT) for carrying out R&D in IT,
Electronics and associated areas. Different areas of C-DAC, had originated at different times,
many of which came out as a result of identification of opportunities. C-DAC is an incubator
for several HPC enabling technologies.
GARUDA is funded by Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of
Communications & Information Technology, Government of India. The project has been
developed and maintained by C-DAC, in collaboration with its partnering institutions.
GARUDA stands for Global Access to Resources Using Distributed Architecture.
 GARUDA aims at
o Providing eInfrastructures for scientific and technological advances required to
enable data and intensive computations for the 21st century.
o Building Virtual Communities for Large Scale Collaborations
 The Operation Phase of GARUDA endeavours to provide a stable, robust and efficient
grid environment with guaranteed Quality of Service for various applications. Current
day applications require interrelated demands of compute storage, and high bandwidth,
for guaranteed co-scheduling of expensive distributed resources and instruments (such
as Telescopes, Microscopes and Simulators) and Virtual distributed collaborations on a
global scale. For example the medical research requires dependable, secure and
predictable connections for collaborative research, remote access to expensive
instrument and supercomputing function such as simulations, visualization, etc.
 A number of national problems namely collaboration, remote access, virtualization
will all be much sought after by user in solving their problems.
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Figure 5: GARUDA network infrastructure
 Situation review
In this Section, a situational analysis of India grid infrastructure is presented, providing a
systematic appraisal of the grid environment and operations. Various scientific segments of the
VRCs are identified. A directional policy matrix (DPM) has not been outlined. Instead
important accounting information on VRCs has been provided for strategy shaping purposes.
Finally, a SWOT presentation is provided to assist in evaluating risks and opportunities for
success.
External Audit
Economic environment
India is the world's largest federal republic, comprising 28 states, 6 union territories and one
national capital territory, headed by a president who serves a five-year term. India is the
world’s second most populous country and has the second largest area of arable land in the
world, making it one of the world's largest food producers. Following the dramatic
contractions of the 1990s, the Indian economy rebounded, and followed a sustained growth
trend, with five years of average growth of 8.75%. More recently, however, the economy has
slowed, due in part to the global economic downturn. Advanced estimates put GDP growth in
2009/10 at 5.25%, reflecting the deteriorating global outlook, but it appears that the country
has escaped the brunt of the global troubles, in part thanks to its cautious banking policies and
a relatively low dependence on exports for growth. Domestic demand meanwhile, driven by
purchases of consumer durables and automobiles, has re-emerged as a key driver of the
economy, helping offset the fall in demand for exports. Another contributing factor to the
economic improvements is the USD 6,46 billion fiscal stimulus package announced by the
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state in December 2008; the package entailed additional spending and excise duty cuts aimed
at increasing consumption.
Table 7: Macroeconomic data for India (World Bank, 2012, ICT)
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Infrastructure overview
The initial phases of Garuda Grid were targeted at providing the scientific community with the
required facilities enabling them to seamlessly access the distributed resources. GARUDA has
successfully completed all the initial phases. The Proof of Concept (PoC) phase, initiated
along with ERNET (Indian Education & Research Network), accomplished its deliverables by
connecting 17 cities across 45 academic and research institutes country wide along with the
required software for managing grid computing applications. The Foundation phase
successfully achieved the goals of developing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
framework, improving network stability and upgrading grid resources.
The GARUDA Operational Phase successfully completed the implementation of the Service
Oriented Architecture, migration to National Knowledge Network (NKN), tools and services
development, applications enablement of national importance and interoperability with
European Grids. There are more than 66 partners, connecting more than 30 cities. Applications
such as Aerosol modelling, Seasonal Forecast Model, weather Research & Forecasting,
Bioinformatics, Collaborative learning, Open Source Drug Discovery, Health informatics,
Cheminformatics, etc, have been enabled and utilized over the GARUDA grid. Most of the
GARUDA grid information could be found at http://www.garudaindia.in/
Grid resources are the key factors for GARUDA to achieve its main objective of providing a
stable and robust grid environment for broadening its uses. However, they are not sufficient to
attain other objectives namely efficient and guaranteed QoS. Progress in these areas relies on
two additional architectural elements:
 A set of core system components that provide system-wide services
 A set of common interface definitions that resources or services may implement in order
to provide users with familiar and consistent interfaces on which they can build
applications and infrastructure extensions.
The entire GARUDA software architecture can be depicted in the following picture.
Figure 6: GARUDA software architecture
The National Knowledge Network (NKN) is a state-of-the-art multi-gigabit pan-India network
for providing a unified high speed backbone network for all knowledge related institutions in
the country. The purpose of such a knowledge network goes to the very core of the country's
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quest for building quality institutions with requisite research facilities and creating a pool of
highly trained professionals. The NKN will enable scientists, researchers and students from
different scientific fields and diverse geographies to work closely for advancing human
development in critical and emerging areas. The NKN has the capability to handle high
bandwidth with low latency and provision to overlay grid computing. Some of the grid based
applications are climate change/global warming, science projects like Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) and ITER. The GARUDA Grid has enhanced its power and stability by migrating to
NKN. The GARUDA Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) mechanism has been enabled in
the NKN routers for the GARUDA participating organizations.
India continues to be one of the fastest growing major telecom markets in the world. It is also
one of the largest. Sweeping reforms introduced by successive Indian governments over the
last decade have dramatically changed the nature of telecommunications in the country. The
fixed-line market, which had grown strongly for a while, has been experiencing zero and
negative growth late. There has been a fresh effort made to promote broadband internet access
throughout the country; after a period in which broadband development languished and the
government became concerned, there was new hope for a serious expansion phase in this
segment of the market. In the meantime, the government has been continuing to push to
complete the restructuring of the telecommunications regulatory regime. The opening up of
the market to full scale competition has been dramatic; however, some major challenges
remain.
India has a huge national telecommunications network. With fixed-line penetration falling
below 3% coming into 2012, the country has nevertheless achieved a remarkable coverage,
98% of the population having some form of access to a telephone. Despite the heavy
investment in telecoms infrastructure over the last decade, servicing the huge population has
presented major difficulties. As well as its huge national network, India’s investment in
telecommunications infrastructure over the last decade has extended to a heavy involvement in
the international market. Under the leadership of International operator VSNL/Tata Indicom
the country has been assembling an extensive infrastructure of gateways, satellite earth
stations and fibre optic submarine cables.
RPs and VRC market
GARUDA grid is formed by pooling the computing and storage resources as well as special
devices such as the telescope provided by C-DAC and its partners. By computing resources we
mean a set of computers combined to form a cluster. Every cluster will have a Head Node with
many Computing Nodes attached to it. Every centre, be it of partners’ or of C-DAC, will have
one Gateway which can act as entry point. There will be one or more access terminals through
which users will access the GARUDA resources. Optionally, every participating entity may
deploy firewall protection. This process has already begun happening and the current
architecture has some part of implementation incorporated. The computing resources available
within GARUDA are as follows:
Table 8: Garuda Grid resources
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Location
Resources
Nodes
Computational
Average
(Number of Power in Giga computational
CPUs)
Flops
power
More than 66 All
across Heterogeneous Over 6100
Over 70 TF
10 to 15 TF
including
India
including
CDAC
Network
There are over 1000 users from all over India from more than 67 partnering institutes. The
user community is largely organized into VOs. A VO enables a collaborative environment
where communities of researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and others come together to
share knowledge and information, analyze data and solve problems through sharing of
resources. Basically a VO is a group of users (consumers of grid-services) and resource-sites
(provider of grid-services). GARUDA has many VOs such as Bioinformatics, Climate
Modelling, Computer-aided Engineering (CAE), EUIndia, etc.
Internal Audit
In today’s world although the speeds and the capacities of the processors continue to increase,
resource intensive applications proliferate too. Employing grid-computing applications, which
previously run hindered by constraints on computing power, have become feasible to yielding
results in reasonable time. Grid resources include high speed network, computational
resources, storage solutions, instruments, etc. The GARUDA grid resources utilization is as
follows:
Table 9: Garuda Grid resources utilization
Details
Jobs submitted
CPU hours utilized
2010
24278
110589
2011
49173
259078
2012 (Projected)
17704
369759
Total
91155
739426
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Accounting Information
Garuda resources are spread across its number of partners and their utilisation is listed as
below from year 2010 onwards:
Table 10: Garuda Grid resources allocation to various VRCs
Sl.
No
.
2010
2011
Jobs
CPU
submitted hours
utilized
8648
48699
Jobs
CPU
submitted hours
utilized
16430
112018
Jobs
submitted
7168
CPU
hours
utilized
194852
6087
29484
9307
58091
2538
101380
5357
15717
10075
72419
4843
68424
12565
144119
5905
74254
2136
54612
9
0
2002
4
1602
56
8
IISc,
Bangalore
IIT, Delhi
554
1
554
239
624
2
9
IIT, Guwahati
1104
8113
1879
9463
1186
7780
10
50
2486
0
0
0
0
11
IMSC,
Chennai
JNU, Delhi
0
0
2096
1
614
0
12
MIT, Chennai
0
0
125
0
168
28
1
3
4
5
7
Location
C-DAC,
Bangalore
C-DAC,
Chennai
C-DAC,
Hyderabad
C-DAC, Pune
2012 (till now)
13
PRL,
0
0
361
0
916
14
Ahmedabad
TOTAL
34374
248619
48734
326489
21795
427148
Note: for the remaining period in the year 2012 it is estimated the total jobs would cross
50,000 mark and the CPU hours would cross 525000.
At the moment this policy matrix may not be possible to draw as the actual utilisation nodewise, cpu-wise and VO-wise is being collected. In the past the utilisation was available as per
the Table 8 only. However the tables 8 and 9 indicate clearly that the utilisation is increasing
and more and more users are in the network to utilise the resources offered by GARUDA. It
may be noted that from the original goals set for the GARUDA activity is not the actual CPU
utilisation but the number of users and the number of jobs (indirectly the factor indicating the
spread of usage). This has been clearly achieved in the process and the progression indicates a
clear growth in the community and usage.
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SWOT Analysis
The SWOT Analysis of GARUDA as a Regional Body for Grid Coordination follows.
Strengths
Weaknesses
 Well established and maintained Grid
 Availability of Grid experts who can install,
operate and manage grid sites
 Availability of experts to help porting the
applications to Grid environment
 Dissemination activities at both regional and
national levels like boot
camps/Conferences/workshops
 Number of VOs are already using the Grid
 Growing demand on scientific computing
services
 Core competencies in key areas
 Positive track record of service delivery
 Existence of national-level or regional-level
 Applications porting takes long time
 Sharing resources (expertise) across the region
is not happening at large
 Lack of information about researches and/or
research projects and/or research initiatives
 Lack, and in many times, no financial support.
 Not enough training and knowledge transfer
 Many have to come forward in sharing the
resources
 Network is still a bottleneck
Opportunities
Threats
 Emerging Science Gateways
 Regional disseminations, sharing knowledge
and experts exchange activities
 Governmental initiatives like eGov,
Infrastructure etc
 More applications are being made available to
the researchers
 Increased collaboration within the region
 The capability of serving more users and
adding more applications
 Many universities are now offering a course on
this subject





Large funding may not be available
Lack of motivation to follow the regional
trend
Availability of many social, cloud and
communities services which can be utilized
by researchers
Technology obsolescence
Gearing up infrastructure to growing needs
 Strategy formulation
As part of the Garuda initiative the following steps are taken to popularize and increase the
utilization and to develop developer community along with the user community:
 Boot camps are organized at partner locations amounting to more than 12 in a year
 A dedicated team is available always to help the developers and users to help in
development, testing and porting applications
 A dedicated team to develop tools and technology to promote usage and application on
GARUDA
 Organise at least one National/International conference in a year
 Organise one or two Partners meet to address the need and to promote partnerships
 Regularly update on the developments through emails and printed material
 A dedicated website to interact, submit jobs and to help support activity under Garuda
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Apart from the above activities currently handled there are several initiatives planned for the
near future. This will certainly help to build the key resources including the manpower to run
and operate VOs and application areas. It is also intended to enhance the utilisation drastically.
o Partners Meet: To share knowledge, Garuda experience by partners and non partners
o Garuda Boot Camp: Training Application enablement on Garuda, demonstration of
tools and services, requirement gathering & interaction.
o System administrators’ workshop: Demonstration of tools and services, knowledge
sharing, interaction.
o Help Desk support through Portal, Telephone, videoconference
o Garuda Forum and Wiki for user communication
o Promoting more Garuda Virtual Organization
o Development of domain based Access portals for users easy access
o Regularly update on the developments through emails and printed material which is
Garuda bulletins
o Organise at least one National/International conference in a year
o Application enablement support through collaborations
o Providing Cloud interface to Grid
o Provisioning latest technologies like GPGPU/FPGA etc interfaces
o Focusing more on Grid stability and reliability to built confidence in user community
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 China sustainability analysis
 Goals Setting
Starting in ‘1990s, Chinese government has been making great efforts to develop its domestic
grid computing infrastructure. The China National Grid (CNGrid) is a project of China’s
Ministry of Science and Technology to promote grid development. The CNGrid comprises
resources from high-performance computing centers located around the country, mainly in
research institutes and universities. CNGrid plays an important role concerning both the
establishment and support of eInfrastructures by aggregating high-performance computing and
transaction processing capabilities. Through resource sharing, work in coordination, and
service mechanisms, CNGrid effectively supports many applications such as scientific
research, resource environment, advanced manufacturing, and information services. CNGrid
promotes the construction of national information industry and the development of related
industries by technological innovations. To promote and ensure the sustainable development
of grid computing, the grid software, namely CNGrid GOS (Grid Operating System), has been
developed by the CNGrid software R&D project team. CNGrid also acts as coordinator of the
negotiations with funding agencies for the financial support required for the resources upgrade,
both hardware and software. Additional important tasks of CNGrid are the dissemination and
support of the grid technology.
In the last few years, grid computing has been progressively replaced by the cloud computing,
which is being perceived as one of the hottest topics of eInfrastructures. In the rapidly growing
Chinese market, there is the largest number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which
could adopt the cloud computing model to address the issue of the low return on investing in
building in-house data centers. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that computing
clouds will bring $800 billion new business income, which includes more than 1105 billion
Yuan ($159 million net new business income) to China. Cloud computing is expected to
integrate middle and lower reaches of enterprises.
As the awareness and acceptance of grid computing in China tends to become lower, CNGrid
should participate in various technical forums, industry summits, executive dialogues and
other activities of grid and cloud computing, showing the advanced technology concepts and
reliable, safe, cost-effective solutions to potential customers, expanding distributed computing
influence, and cultivating the potential market. At the same time, interacting effectively with
the stakeholders, CNGrid is in the position to identify potential partners and shares customer
resources aiming at providing high value-added solutions, and supporting enterprises to grow
faster via distributed computing services. Indicative suggestions for further development are:



Evaluate the impact of grid and cloud computing comprehensively and select key areas
for demonstration trials
Combine policies and market operations to drive applications
Form good interaction with each part of the value chain
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 Situation review
In this Section, a situational analysis of the Grid infrastructure in China is presented, providing
a systematic and concrete appraisal of the nation-wide grid environment and operations.
Various scientific segments of the VRCs are identified. A directional policy matrix (DPM) is
outlined to facilitate directions for a strategy to be adopted for various segments/VRCs.
Finally, a SWOT presentation is provided to assist in evaluating risks and opportunities for
success.
External Audit
China is the world's second largest economy by net GDP and by purchasing power after the
United States. It is the world's fastest-growing major economy, with growth rates averaging
10% over the past 30 years and this growth is spurring on the development across the ICT
industry. On a per capita income basis, China is ranked 90th by nominal GDP and 91st by GDP
(PPP) in 2011. Science and Technology in China have developed rapidly in the last decades.
The Chinese government has placed emphasis through funding, reform, and societal status on
S&T as a fundamental part of the socio-economic development of the country as well as to
improve the national prestige. China has made rapid advances in areas such as education,
infrastructure, high-tech manufacturing, academic publishing, patents, and commercial
applications.
Between years 2000 and 2008, Gross Domestic expenditures on Research and Development
(GERD) rose by an average of 22.8% annually, which increased the share of GERD to GDP
from 0.9% to 1.54%. China aims to increase this to 2.5% by 2020. In 2008, 82.76% of GERD
went to experimental development, 12.46% to applied research, and 4.78% to basic research.
Business enterprises contributed 59.95% of GERD in 2000 and 73.26% in 2008. The
contribution of enterprises mostly addresses the experimental development.
Some macroeconomic data with emphasis on ICT figures for China, not including Hong Kong
SAR, Macao SAR, and Taiwan follow (World Bank, 2012, ICT)
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Table 11: Macroeconomic data, China
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One of the important missions of CNGrid is to build a grid service environment and facilitate
grid and HPC applications in the selected areas. There are 11 CNGrid sites in the country,
equipped with more than 450 TFlops computing power, and 2900 TB storage capacity. The
research applications supported by the CNGrid ranges from urban traffic studies to geological
surveys to aviation manufacturing. Among the 11 sites, Shanghai Supercomputing Center
(SSC) and the Supercomputing Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences (SCCAS) in Beijing
are the two largest ones. SSC has about 33,000 CPU cores providing about 240 Tflops of
computing power. SSC supports the national science advancement and innovation, public
utilities services, industrial & engineering and commercial users. The applications address
various scientific fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, civil engineering,
automobile and aircraft designs, material and energy. In 2008 SCCAS procured and installed
the super computer Lenovo DeepComp which was equipped with 13,600 cores supporting 142
Tflops of computing power.
China sees S&T as vital for achieving economic and political goals. Despite the Chinese
economic reforms, the Chinese state continues to strongly lead both the public and the private
economy and research with various ways such as national plans, regulations, taxes, and
subsidies achieving their protection and guidance. The importance of the nationalistic topdown governance as compared to the importance of other factors, such as the economic
liberalization, for the rapid progress of Chinese S&T is uncertain.
The State Council of the People's Republic of China is the top administrative organ in China.
Several ministries and ministry level organizations involved with various aspects of S&T
follow right after it having direct report lines to it. The State Council Science and Education
Leading Group consists of the major science bodies leaders to organize the national policy.
The Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) of China is the primarily responsible body
for developing S&T strategies and policies. It also administrates the national research
programs, S&T development zones, and international cooperation. The Ministry of Education
of the People's Republic of China oversees education as well as research institutes at
universities. The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) provides grants to
scientific institutions or individual researchers. Research is carried out by governmental
research institutes, higher learning institutions, and by private enterprises. Local governments
have become increasingly important in R&D funding and may now contribute up to a half of
government spending.
The government has been making great efforts to establish eInfrastructures not only for
supporting the pure scientific research but also to backup the activities of the various
industries. The new technology emerged from grid computing has been largely transferred to
industries. For example, about 10% of the computing services of CNGrid are for the industrial
development and engineering. The industrial applications include ecological research,
automobile, aircraft, steel industry, etc. The major users are Shanghai Automotive Industry
Corporation (SAIC), Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute (SNERDI),
Baosteel, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd. (COMAC) and some other
industrial companies. CNGrid provides them high performance and grid computing services.
These users are partially invoiced to support the operation and maintenance of CNGrid. The
service to industry also is partially supported by governmental funding. The dissemination of
computing technology also helped the development of the information technology in the
country. In 2009, China manufactured 49.9% of world’s mobile phones, 60.9% of personal
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computers. Indigenously the market of electronic components has become an important source
of the recent growth. The Chinese software industry in 2010 had a higher than 15% share of
the world's software and information service market and it grew by an annual 36% on average
during the previous decade. Chinese IT companies have been moving away from narrow
downstream services and products to having a full range. According to the China Internet
Network Information Center there were 505 million Internet users in November 2011 (37.7%
of the population). In 2011 23% of the world's internet users were Chinese, which was more
than double the share of any other nation. In 2012 China has achieved to double its ecommerce market projections by 2015 and become the world's leader.
Aimed at achieving quality and sustainable growth, China's 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015)
highlighted seven major emerging strategic industries which include energy-saving and
environment protection, new-generation information technology, biology, high-end equipment
manufacturing, new energy, new materials and new-energy cars. The focus of the newgeneration information technology industry will be on next generation telecommunication
networks, next generation internet technologies, internet of things, triple network convergence
(telecom, computer and cable TV networks), cloud computing, integrated circuits, new
generation displays, high end software, high end servers and information services.
RP and VRC market
The disciplines supported by SSC are computational physics, chemistry, biology, atmospheric
physics, geophysics and many others. The other 9 smaller computing sites, scattered across the
country, provide about 100 Tflops of aggregated computing power. The major grid
applications supported by CNGrid include drug discovery, weather forecasting, scientific data
grid and its applications in research, water resource information systems, grid-enabled railway
freight information systems, Chinese medicine database applications, HPC and Grid for
Aerospace Industry (AviGrid) and National forestry project. The following figure shows the
five major disciplines supported by CNGrid.
Figure 7: The major applications supported by CNGrid
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Internal Audit
The financial support of grid computing in China is mostly based on grants to periodical
project, making the funding sustainability uncertain. Every grid site has to individually
communicate with various funding agencies, on a case-by-case basis, pursuing the possibilities
of being provided with financial support. The following figure illustrates the funding parts of
SCCAS. According to the current funding framework of the country, it is very hard to find a
coherent scheme of financial support to the grid computing infrastructure, this being the major
challenge to be addressed.
Figure 8: Funding resources for CNGrid infrastructure and operation
In the last 10 years or more, significant progresses in HPC and grid services environment have
taken place. The sustainability of grid computing in China might be challenged since in the
new 5-year plan, China has identified priority topics in both HPC and cloud computing. As a
result the human resources and funding required to support the legacy grid computing
infrastructure and software might not be adequate. Following the market trends, cloud
computing may reflect the dominant scenario of distributed computing infrastructure in China.
A key project in the field of cloud computing named “Key technologies and systems of cloud
computing (1st phase)” funded by MoST has been launched. The project is about to deliver
new network operating systems, network search engines and others. Moreover, a strategic
analysis study has been conducted about high productivity computers and application
environment. A proposal for new HPC key projects has been submitted to the MoST, which
gives more focus on a balanced development in high productivity computers, application
environment, and HPC applications.
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Low
High
Physics
Molecular Dynamics
Biology
Material Sciences
Industry & Engineering
As a scientific field, Physics has an inherent nature of collaboration. In the last years the
physics research has become more complicated and larger in scale. Biology presents similar
characteristics. eInfrastructures have proved strongly supportive of computing and data storage
in physics and biology researches. Molecular dynamics and material science need very
intensive computing power. The new development of CPU technology attracts the applications
requiring multi-core platforms. The molecular dynamics and material science are likely to
build dedicated computing systems mainly HPC. For the industrial and engineering sectors, a
limited number of Chinese enterprises currently examine to outsource their computing
applications.
According to the statistics of CNGrid by the end of July 2012, the physics research community
has occupied about 23% of CPU time of CNGrid, while biology and molecular sciences have
used about 11% CPU time each. At the same time CNGrid has provided similar computing
services to material sciences and industries estimated at 9.6% each.
The VRC attractiveness mainly depends on the following factors:
 Willingness to share the scientific data
 Collaboration amongst the research teams
 Hunger for computing resources
 Difficulties to build their own computing infrastructures and
 Size of VRC.
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Much of the physics research is related to fundamental sciences. In China the important
sectors of physics research include high energy physics, astrophysics, cosmology and
frequently demand international collaboration in large scale and high volumes of computing
and storage resources. Additionally, there is not always enough budget to build dedicated
computing infrastructure for every project. Molecular dynamics is an active discipline of
research in the country. Collaboration was not an important concern of the relevant research
but many projects depend on the computing power of CNGrid. Biology is very similar to
physics research. As the technology to collect data becomes more advanced, biology
community needs more and more computing resources. Material sciences and industry largely
emphasize on the profits incurred as tangible and measurable results of applied research given
that sometimes research outcomes must be sensitively handled. Industry and engineering need
more computing resources but in many cases they can find the budget required. The following
Table 12 shows the estimated contribution of major factors to the VRC attractiveness and their
final scores.
Table 12: VRC attractiveness criteria
VRC
Collaboration
willingness
Hunger for
computing
resources
Difficulty to
build its own
computing
infrastructure
Size of VRC
VRC
attractiveness
Physics
0.3
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.8
Molecular
Dynamics
Biology
0
0.1
0
0.05
0.15
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.70
0
0.2
0.2
0.05
0.45
0
0.15
0
0.05
0.20
Material
Sciences
Industry &
Engineering
The construction of grid infrastructures like CNGrid was totally supported by governmental
funding agencies such as Ministry of Science and Technology. However, the operational cost
of the grid infrastructure should be covered, even partially, by its users. As mentioned in the
above paragraph, physics and biology heavily rely on the services provided by grid
infrastructure while other research communities have more dedicated computing resources.
Physics research is fundamental in nature and thus very sensitive to the cost of computing
services. For molecular dynamics and biology it is not easy to support the cost of computing
services. For material sciences and industries grid computing can be an economic solution of
computing. Advancement of infrastructure is much more concerned for molecular dynamics
since the last demands higher performance (super computing power). The recent development
of the grid infrastructure in CPU is more attractive to the users of molecular dynamics. The
following Table 13 gives the list of estimated contribution of major factors to the RBGC
strengths and their final scores.
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Table 13: RBGC strengths criteria
Service
Cost of
Advancement
requirement
service
of
infrastructure
VRC
RBGC
Strengths
Physics
0.4
0.3
0.1
0.8
Molecular
Dynamics
Biology
0.15
0.2
0.2
0.35
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.6
Material
Sciences
Industry &
Engineering
0.1
0.05
0.1
0.25
0.05
0.05
0.05
0.15
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
 China has been working on the development
and implementation of software and
infrastructure of grid computing so that it
accumulated much experience and technical
know-how
 Advanced Computing Services are widely
accepted as the key supports to scientific
researches and industries.
 Strong
expertise
across
staff
and
management
 Dissemination activities at both regional and
national levels
 Efficient cost management
 Growing demand on scientific computing
services
 Availability of scientific applications
 Government has been supporting Grid
computing in the last decade
 Existence of national-level or regional-level






Opportunities
Unstable funding
Political commitment is difficult to be
implemented
Lack of motivation to follow the regional
trend
Governmental support is not enough
There are some independent Certification
Authorities for different purposes. But there
is no national level or coherent Certification
Authority.
No enough human resources and funding to
support the grid middleware upgrade and
maintenance.
Threats
 Emerging Science Gateway
 Disseminations, sharing knowledge and
experts exchange activities
 Support to research initiatives and
infrastructure support based projects
 More applications are being made available
to the researchers
 International collaboration with Europe
 The capability of serving more users and
adding more applications




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Lack of political commitment, especially at
the regional level
Unstable funding
Inability of NRENs to allocate resources for
international cooperation
The top priorities of the decision makers to
support are cloud computing and supper
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 Strategy formulation
China has strongly supported the development and construction of eInfrastructures. It is still
necessary to seek additional domestic support and improve the awareness of importance of
eInfrastructures. Communications with governmental policy makers and funding agencies
should be implemented during CHAIN project.
As the country’s interest has been moved from grid computing to new technology like cloud
computing, efforts have to be made to support the integration of new technology like cloud
computing and migration to new generation of eInfrastructures. In the last years many cities
have built large scale cloud computing centers addressing primarily business users and with
lower priority they examine the possibility to be involved in scientific applications.
Efforts should be made to develop or adopt the effective gateways for applications. A Science
Gateway can provide users with an easy-to-use interface to deploy scientific applications. This
can be implemented by collaborating with European partners of CHAIN project. For these
purposes the comprehensive collaboration with Europe should be facilitated. CHAIN project is
one of the appropriate instruments.
Training activities have been carried out by CNGrid in the past years. CNGrid will continue to
organize training events in the future. CHAIN can collaborate with CNGrid to facilitate
disseminations and trainings in the country.
To guarantee the sustainability of grid computing in the country, the core activities in China
based on the preceding analysis can be focused to the followings.
1. Escalate the awareness of policy makers on grid computing for scientific communities.
Continuously communications with governmental officials and funding agencies will be
implemented. The officials from the Ministry of Science and Technology, National
Natural Science Foundation will be invited to the workshops, conferences and other
relevant events. This should be carried out during the period of CHAIN-REDS project
and beyond.
2. Investigate the machinery to integrate Grid computing, cloud computing, volunteer
computing and other technologies to build a distributed computing infrastructure for
scientific computing. The goal is to build coherent infrastructure in integrating all
distributed computing resources.
3. Dedicated network for distributed computing will be allocated. There are two main tasks
for this goal. The first task is to improve the network performance of international links
and the inter-connection between CSTNET and CERNET. The second task is to develop
the way to use IPv6 as the alternative backbone.
4. Facilitate the development of NGI in the country. Show the policy makers the importance
of NGI in China. The NGI should be national initiative of distributed computing
infrastructure integrated with grid computing, cloud computing and volunteer computing,
etc.
5. Dissemination and sharing the experience. Trainings and tutorials will be organized on
relevant events and targeted to applications.
6. Enhance the collaboration to develop the science gateway. This will be implemented with
collaborations with European partners. Enhance the interactions with international
collaborations. One possibility is to extend the collaboration with the bilateral virtual
laboratories like France-China Particle Physics Laboratory (FCPPL) and the similar ItalyChina Laboratory. FCPPL is currently collaborating between IN2P3 and IHEP on the so
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called desktop grid to provide a coherent platform of distributed computing. Within the
umbrella of CHAIN and future CHAIN-REDS, a science gateway
Attract more applications to be deployed on to grid computing infrastructure.
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 South-East Asia sustainability analysis
 Goals Setting
Asia Pacific Grid Initiative (APGI) is building regional distributed computing infrastructure
(DCI) for e-Science and collaborating with the world. Started from 2005 for the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) experiments, LHC computing grid (LCG) was deployed in Taiwan, Japan,
Korea, India, Pakistan, Australia and other Asia countries. The Asia Pacific Regional
Operation Centre (APROC) was established alongside the LCG Tier-1 centre in Academia
Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) of Taiwan in the same year, to extend the grid DCI
and e-Science collaborations in this area.
ASGC takes the leading role of APGI from the start. ASGC is one of the leading high
performance computing and communication centres in Taiwan and provides advanced
computing support for data-intensive sciences. In 2005, ASGC formally became one of the
eleven WLCG Tier-1 centres (the only Tier-1 centre in Asia), providing services, coordination
and support to high energy physics scientists worldwide. Based on these experiences, ASGC
joined the EGEE project, extending grid services to wider disciplines such as biomedical and
earth sciences, and digital archives. Acting as the Asia Federation Coordinator and the
APROC in EGEE, ASGC not only provides WLCG/EGEE regional operation and Certificate
Authority services, but also participates in technology development, such as GSTAT, gLite
certification and distributed analysis tools for WLCG. ASGC has also provided over 20 EGEE
training courses and symposia with more than 1000 participants in a variety of Asian Pacific
countries during 2008 to 2010. Based on the regional framework, ASGC keeps close
cooperation with APGI members aiming at the following tasks:
 Conduct the scientific applications development and collaboration in Asia Pacific
region by leveraging the current production Grid e-Science infrastructure.
 Facilitate the setup of new resource centres, new services and new platforms in Asia
Pacific countries based on application requirements.
 Disseminate EMI middleware in Asian countries by means of public events and
written/multimedia materials, and Organize education and training events for Grid
users in Asia Pacific region.
Sustainability relies on the momentum generated from the equilibrium process between user
communities and solution providers. Without achieving the critical mass, it is not possible to
prevail. The virtuous cycle to keep the momentum through time is also critical to the
sustainability. Based on the e-Science development experiences in past years, the best model is
to be driven by the requirements of the user communities, and to be pushed by the evergrowing IT and resources.
APGI is conducting the collaboration amongst user communities, middleware technology and
eInfrastructures, and resource centers, from national level to regional as well as world level.
Objective is to maintain a reliable distributed computing infrastructure for e-Science and the
collaboration environment. Extension of the eInfrastructures to wider disciplines and
expansion of the eInfrastructures to every country in this region are the key activities to
enlarge the momentum. Applications of regional importance were targeted first in the past few
years, such as earth science, life science, environmental changes, and high energy physics.
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 Situation review
In this Section, a situational analysis of the Asia-Pacific regional grid infrastructure is
presented, providing a systematic appraisal of the region-wide grid environment and
operations. Various scientific segments of the VRCs are identified. Extending from current eScience collaborations to make the eInfrastructures able to support multidisciplinary largerscale data-intensive analysis is the primary direction. Although a directional policy matrix
(DPM) has not been outlined, accounting information has been provided to facilitate directions
for a strategy to be adopted for various segments/VRCs. Finally, a SWOT presentation is
provided to assist in evaluating risks and opportunities for success.
External audit
With the one of strongest growth rates among all regions in recent years, the East Asia and
Pacific region now accounts for close to 20% of total global growth. However, growth varies
across the region, and on average, it is slowing, with downside risks increasing as the global
economic slowdown continues. After expanding 9.7% in 2010, GDP growth in East Asia
slowed to 8.2% in 2011 and is projected to be 7.8% in 2012 and 2013.
The region faces four common challenges: natural disasters and climate change; poverty and
inequality; infrastructure and urbanization; and governance. Despite the region's success in
lifting people out of poverty, about a half billion people—a third of the region's population—
are still living on less than $2 a day.
In particular, exports of computers and office machines remained almost flat, growing 2.4% in
nominal value terms in 2011 compared to an average 15.1% in 2005–06. Electrical machinery
and appliances and telecommunications apparatus and equipment performed marginally better,
but are still at rates 40–60% of their pre-crisis average. Over two-fifths of the region’s
electronics exports are shipped directly to the G-3, about one-fifth to the EU alone. Another
two-fifths are traded intra-regionally, a substantial portion of that— more than a third —as
parts and components that feed into regional and global production networks.
ASGC runs the Asia Pacific Regional Operation Centre (APROC) to extend the EGI
infrastructure in Asia Pacific region and maximise the eInfrastructures reliability to support
various e-Science user communities. At this moment, there are 29 sites from 13 countries
(excluding China and India) joining 29 VOs in the EGI Asia Pacific regional infrastructure.
Around 10,696 cores, 8.1 PB disk space are available from the Asia Pacific resource centres.
Currently, there are about 1,600 registered users in total according to APGridPMA statistics in
February 2012. In terms of normalised CPU time (HEPSPEC06), the monthly average
resource utilisation in 2012 of this region is 34.35M normalised CPU time (in
HEPSPEC.hours). The daily average finished jobs have greatly increased from 49,408 in 2010
to 69,762 in 2012.
Over the past 7 years, the regional production grid DCI grew over 2200 times in terms of CPU
utilization as illustrated in the below Figure 9.
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Figure 9: Evolution of Grid in Asia by the infrastructure extension and CPU utilization over
time.
Regulatory framework and competitiveness
In South East Asia, business process outsourcing (BPO) is at the forefront of ICT services
being provided. Operators are in some cases quite advanced as they started with their ICT
efforts more than a decade ago Regional operators are appearing with diverse product offering
and they leverage their socioeconomic conditions to offer competitive BPO services. The map
below (Telegeography) includes international Internet routes with at least 20Gbps so far
aggregate capacity (as of mid-2010).
Figure 10: International Internet routes with at least 20Gbps
The map below includes international Internet routes with at least 30Gbps of aggregate
capacity. Figures represent Internet bandwidth connected across international borders.
Domestic routes excluded. Data as of mid-2010
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Figure 11: Internet bandwidth connected across international borders. Domestic routes
excluded. Data as of mid-2010
RP and VRC Market
A vigorous cycle composed by the users, technology developers and infrastructure operations
is formed and keeps evolving to meet users’ needs with advanced technology. The
infrastructure itself, the operation technology, the application tools and components, and the
software are getting more generic to support wider application domains. More resources will
be invested to the infrastructure alongside the e-Science collaboration, by increasing site
capacity, or establishing new resource centre, or contributing to technology evolution. With
experiences in several production e-Science collaborations, APGI focus is shifting from eScience enabling only to cover the sustainability planning concurrently.
APROC coordinates and supports the infrastructure security issues in Asia Pacific region by
aligning with both EGI-CSIRT and EGI SPG teams as a member. APROC serves as a
consultant and follows up every security event in all partners, including operating system and
middleware vulnerability patching, verification and follow ups, as well as rapid reporting
channel. Regarding site level trust framework building, ASGCCA acts as regional ‘catch-all’
certificate authority (CA) to support any country without any production domestic CA and to
help establishment of a new CA in addition to the APGridPMA support of national CA
establishment.
APROC is in charge of site certification and also application environment verification to
maintain consistent APGI regional collaboration framework as a whole. The middleware
support is now migrating from gLite to EMI in APGI. ASGC provides resources serving the
EMI pre-production environment and shared with APGI members for testing, evaluation and
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training purposes. Operation and middleware practices workshop is held routinely in ISGC
when most sites representatives are getting together. ASGC also tracks and helps member sites
on middleware and Grid services updates from EGI. In addition, APROC also coordinates and
supports middleware layer interoperation among partner sites and user communities, such as
VDT, Globus and Condor, etc. In short, APROC coordinates and supports the regional
infrastructure management, accounting, technical consultant and service quality monitoring to
maintain a reliable eInfrastructure in this region.
In the application level, core services such as MPI environment, compiler, and specific
application programs and packages from regional e-Science collaboration, are all deployed
and supported by APROC. Currently, EUAsia VO is the primary and ‘catch-all’ VO for the
regional collaborations of APGI.
The core competence of APGI is the solid regional collaboration framework, the persistent
regional operation and e-Science supporting centre, as well as the visionary leadership. The
International Symposium on Grid and Cloud (ISGC) has provided “the primary international
distributed computing platform where distinguished researchers and collaboration partners
from around the world share their knowledge and experiences” for ten years. Started from
2005, Asia Pacific Regional Operation Centre (APROC) hosted by ASGC has been supporting
more than 30 sites in 15 countries. Moreover, the e-Science application development and
enabling of virtual research environment are also conducted by ASGC working with regional
partners in the past decade. With the close cooperation of world leaders on e-Science and DCI,
APGI is confident in the path forward based on the stable DCI and growing e-Science
communities.
Internal audit
In APGI, user communities has been expanding from LHC to other high energy physics
experiments, biomedical and bioinformatics, earth science, climate change, computational
chemistry, and humanities and social sciences.
System utilization is an essential metric reflecting the effectiveness of eInfrastructures and the
engagement of user communities. Started from LHC collaborations, the Grid DCI established
rapidly in many Asia countries. Then wider-disciplinary user communities were engaged to
explore the new infrastructure and participate in international e-Science collaborations, mainly
through the EGEE Asia Federation and EUAsiaGrid project during 2007 to 2010. Since 2011,
the regional eInfrastructures has successfully supported the large real data analysis from LHC
experiments. Not only the regional eInfrastructures reliability and operation coordination
mechanism are demonstrated, but the knowledge and best practices to do big data analysis
over the Grid DCI are also developed.
In 2012, the regional Grid utilization has been further growing 1.5 times than 2011, as the
statistical chart of the figure below.
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Figure 12: Regional Grid Utilization in 2012
According to the EGI Accounting Portal, there are 32 production resource centres joining 31
VOs in Asia Pacific Regions from 2005 (excluding India and China). All sites stably
completed over 1.7M jobs per month on average from January 2010, and the maximal monthly
completed-job reached 2.9M in September 2011. Although LHC experiments (ATLAS, CMS,
and Alice) are the largest resource consuming user communities, many national, regional and
bilateral collaboration VOs were established. Disaster mitigation is the most common
concerned topic in this region, including earthquake, landslide, flooding, typhoon, climate
change, volcano and pandemic diseases. All the CHAIN partners in this region join the eScience collaborations on earth science and environmental changes. Drug discover on Dengue
Fever is also a hot topic for most partners. In addition, next generation sequencing is also of
high interest in regional user communities in the life science field. Malaysia and Thailand are
also working on the digital cultural heritage preservation by the DCI with the experiences of
Taiwan. Remote medicine is also a fast growing area to build up a medical network over
broadband infrastructures to support tele-consulting and e-Health.
Table 14: VRCs in Asia-Pacific
e-Science
Life
Earth
Environmental
Humanity
High
Remote
Applications Science Science
Changes
& Social
Energy
Medicine
Sciences
Physics
VN
X
X
X
X
PH
X
X
TH
X
X
X
X
X
MY
X
X
X
X
X
ID
X
X
TW
X
X
X
X
X
X
Remark
+KR,
+AU, NZ,
+JP, KR,
SG
PK, JP,
LK, CN,
KR, CN, SG, HK, IN
IN
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SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
 Experienced production e-Science collaboration
within APGI and with outside partners;
 Profound e-Science application development
knowledge;
 Reliable e-Science infrastructure and APROC
operation support framework are in place;
 Visionary leadership by ASGC persistently
contributes to the close linkage of users,
infrastructure and technology providers.
 Right strategy on e-Science: focus on regional
common interests;
 Constant dissemination and training activities;
 Some partners already have long-term funding
on e-Science or the infrastructure.
 Absence of regional funding model.
 User communities in some countries are not
well motivated;
 Networking for DCI in some partners is not
sufficient for big data.
Opportunities
Threats
 International collaboration could create good
funding opportunities;
 Wider user communities would be engaged by
applications of common regional needs first.
 With more users involved, more local resources
and technology capacity could be consolidated.
 500M+ population and energetic economical
potential are positive for the sustainability
development.
 Insufficient country level funding support;
 Regional and global economic stagnation;
 Keep synergy to drive more users, resources and
complementary capability to APGI.
 Non-persistent country-level user and
application support
 Strategy formulation
In short, the best sustainability model is built on the four core components:
 the user community,
 the distributed computing infrastructure,
 the technology and solution provider and
 the visionary coordinator.
The focus is to keep as much synergy as possible by the vigorous interactions of the four
cores. The primary goals from the internal are to:
 broaden the disciplines of user communities and continuously collect requirements and
feedback from the VRCs
 maintain a reliable infrastructure with improved operation technology and remain the
highest-level interoperability with the worldwide DCI
 aggregate and encourage technology providers to work together with standards
compliance. Sustainability model for the strategy planning of APGI is summarized as
the figure below.
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Figure 13. Sustainability model of APGI
In addition to the internal efforts, the external support from outside is also indispensable. The
most essential contributions from outside are international and industrial collaborations as well
as funding opportunities from each country and from any potential sources. The cultivation of
the younger generation and well-trained staff are also necessary from all the perspectives.
In summary, international collaborations with WLCG, EGEE, EUAsiaGrid, EGI and CHAIN
are the major and best drivers of APGI in the past few years. With the efforts of Asia
federation and APROC by ASGC, the regional DCI and e-Science collaboration framework
had been founded. The persistent leadership of ASGC and the continuous international
cooperations are the solid ground of APGI sustainability. Applications of most common
interest such as natural disaster mitigation, next generation medical and bioninformatic
studies, environmental changes and digital cultural heritages, etc. are the best approach to push
the widening user communties and the reliable DCI and advanced technology. Dissemination
and training events such as ISGC and country-based activities would be held from time to
time to keep closer human network and technology sharing network within APGI and with the
outside partners. Both the funding opportunities and the industrial collaborations should start
from partner countries and expand to regional or wider coverage whenever possible.
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 Overall analysis and insights
The detailed sustainability study has been provided for each region in the preceding Sections.
Here we provide a one-paragraph summary for each region, followed by overall summary and
vision.
The macroeconomic growth rate, which Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing for the last
years, is beneficial for the developments in the field of research and education networking and
grid computing. Though a lot of progress has been made in this context, there is still a lot to do
in the near future to overcome the difficulties related mostly to the establishment of regional
eInfrastructures and their transition into production. The participation of several Sub-Saharan
countries in EU/international grid computing projects has resulted in increasing the awareness
of the regional interconnection vision and in starting training activities. The opportunities for
setting up VRCs of regional reference and sharing regionally intensive data repositories have
been identified as well as the threats due to brain drain and loosing scientific potential as low
financing consequences. It has become obvious that the sustainability of any initiative in the
research field is strongly dependent on the awareness of the policy and decision makers and
the availability of funds in the longer term. Hence, a lot of efforts have to be made towards
informing the policy making community for the needs and benefits of developing regional
eInfrastructures and deploying long term plans for their operation as they can further
positively contribute to both national and regional growth. Regarding the establishment of the
RBGC itself, the key issues to be resolved are the choice of location, as well as its
organizational structure and its financial support. These are the three key issues in examining
the fundamental initial conditions. Additional training is required so that the scientific
community to be up-to-date regarding the developments in the field of advanced computing
services. New models of revenue generation, such as IXP services to the telecom market
provided by NRENs and grid computing services (including cloud-type) available to large
corporations and provided by NGIs, could support self-sustainable methods for off-loading
funding needs from the weak state budgets, therefore they could be considered.
The Middle East and North Africa region has made significant progress in regards to
participating in EU/international projects or initiatives in the field of eInfrastructures. Few
years ago, EUMEDCONNECT was the beginning of a more systematic cooperation and
interconnection of the eInfrastructures of several Arab countries to GEANT. The recent
strategic decision of establishing ASREN has had positive implications for the regional
networking/connectivity plans. ASREN has been doing a lot of efforts to advertise the
strategic vision of the Arab community in regards to science and technology activities.
Moreover, including Grid coordination activities on ASREN’s agenda is a big step towards a
further development of the regional eInfrastructures. There is no doubt that the Arab region
can number a lot of experts and competences in the field of grid computing with experience in
international operations. Moreover, a strong intention towards establishing new NGIs, setting
up VRCs of regional interest, increasing the collaboration among the Arab community,
leveraging social and cultural commonalities at regional level are some of the challenges that
ASREN, being RBGC, should address having developed a clear strategic plan for the near
future. However, steps have to be taken for a more efficient and effective involvement of the
decision makers and stakeholders. The main issues concern the sustainability of financing. The
policy makers have to be aware of the benefits to be brought about and collaborate at both
national and regional level to empower the plans of the research community and provide a
stable financial support particularly for activities that have a regional importance such as the
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climate change, water inventories or oil industry. Finally, NGIs have to be established in more
countries.
There is no doubt that Latin America can present high growth in the field of grid computing
from both the technical and the organizational perspective. The multi-country membership
nature of CLARA, which is a non-profit organisation, and the multi-diversity of technical
skills of its members, derived from dissimilar Academic Communities in the Latin American
region, have led, taking into account the regional peculiarities, to a new model and its
advanced computing services architecture based on a Science Gateway Approach. CLARA
has supported VRCs at the regional level. Furthermore, CLARA, through its NRENs, has
supported the creation of a solid national group of institutions that are either preparing to
become the NGI or the EDGS (Equivalent Domestic Grid Structure) of their country, or they
have already become one. Two groups within LA have acquired the knowledge to manage a
ROC (ROC-LA and ROC IGALC). However, the consolidation of NGIs has not been as
successful as expected for various reasons. The strategic directions to be followed in the
context of sustainability for a RBGC address the most important points such as the
improvement of the personnel’s skills, the development of appropriate and targeted training
sessions, the communication of the needs for stable and adequate funding to the policy makers
and stakeholders and the formulation of regional projects with regional importance aiming at
know-how and thematic leadership transfer. The recently signed MoU under which the
prolongation of the regional Grid operations is agreed is of high institutional importance.
Practically the new CLARA model is accompanied by a relevant business model that can
contribute to the viability of the regional grid infrastructure as it recommends service
propositions to 3rd parties that can generate revenues supportive of the regional
eInfrastructures and ROC sustainability.
Due to its size India is addressed as a region in the present analysis. The demand for
networking and computing resources is getting higher and the collaboration amongst the
research community generates new needs in emerging scientific fields. There is a clearly high
growth of grid computing in India documented by the increase of the researchers involved and
of VRCs established. Towards a sustainable RBGC, however, various strategic guidelines
could be brought in light. India would further benefit by capitalizing its operational expertise
through participating in international scale projects, such as CHAIN. A more standardized
mechanism of importing foreign experience and cultivating international collaborations can be
formed leading to a greater and more effective use of the existing grid infrastructure. Financial
sustainability is one of the most important issues to be addressed also in India, though the
government has taken steps for supporting the development in the field of ICT such as the first
Public Private Partnership (PPP), an Indian Telecom innovation hub, which aims at turning
new initiatives into successful ventures. From this perspective the involvement of the policy
and decision makers is required as they can endorse a stable and sustainable funding that is
required to operate and maintain such eInfrastructures. However, self-financing models should
be examined taking advantage of neutrality and advanced knowledge that the academic
community has been experiencing. Finally a more systematic marketing of the advanced
services provided through grid computing and the relevant benefits should be planned and
executed so that to increase the number of the active VOs and their users. Additionally,
parallel training activities can improve the skills of the scientists involved and further increase
the derived demand for grid computing.
It would be unbelievable for China, the world's second largest and fastest-growing economy,
to experience those growth rates without spurring on the development across the ICT industry.
Likewise, S&T in China have developed rapidly in the last decades. The Chinese government
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has placed emphasis through funding, reform, and societal status on S&T as a fundamental
part of the socio-economic development of the country as well as to improve the national
prestige. In this context it can be admitted that China has done well with the eInfrastructures
and has on-going plans for further development. Its huge population and volume of
networking and computing requirements can justify its treatment as a region. Although China
has strongly backed up the development and construction of eInfrastructures, it is inevitable
not to keep on improving the awareness of the decision makers about them and seeking
additional domestic, public and/or private, support. The plan of involving the industry into the
grid computing activities as one of the major requestors of such services strategically assists
the academic community to advertise the new capabilities available, capitalizing on the
scientific leverage, and examine possibilities of self-financing that are of high importance as to
the sustainability of the grid operation, maintenance and further development. Efforts should
be made to develop or adopt effective gateways for applications providing users with an easyto-use interface. Technology know-how should be transferred by European players more
systematically. Training activities should be continuously organized to improve the skills of
the people involved. Moreover, the harmonization between the existing Grid activities an the
upcoming Cloud capabilities can result in effective synergies in both the academic and
industrial environments.
Challenges of e-Science development in Asia include the divergence of networking
infrastructure, production e-infrastructure operation, close interaction with the user
community, and the collaboration culture. The quick global e-Science infrastructure
establishment addresses the challenges of regional cooperation in the Asia Pacific region. The
progress recorded in the field of eInfrastructures in Asia-Pacific region the last years is very
significant. Paricularly regarding grid computing the resources have increased a lot; so do the
users of the grid. New Virtual Communities have been established and a serious research boost
has been experienced. There is a right focus on scientific objectives of regional importance
and experienced personel to deal with as well as advanced computing services for the user
communities to take advantage of. To facilitate long-term operations of the regional Grid
infrastructure, strengthening of the local certification authorities, domestic operation structure
establishment, virtual organizations of application development and production services with
regional interests, and training and dissemination services is recommended. More business and
industry cooperation for new business models and opportunities are also required. The major
problem seems to be the sustainable funding. Although there is operational experience in
running the regional grid eInfrastructures the business continuity has not been secured. This is
an issue to be brought into the attention of the policy and decision makers who should plan
permanent funding mechanisms to the extend possible of supporting the important scientific
potential that the region seems to accommodate. Possibly, self-financing models can be
adopted for contributing to the funds required for a sustainable operation and maintenanace of
the RBGC. Moreover, trainings and dissemination activities within the region and outside of it
should take place for developing the skills of the user community and keeping their synergistic
attitude active despite the funding obstacles.
Some general conclusions referring to all regions follow.
On the technical level, the researchers interested in utilising distributed scalable computing
resources need to invest great efforts in training and application porting while their access to
the resources is frequently done only through CLI; thus flexible approaches have to be worked
on. The RCs and their personnel are definitely essential components in the provision of Grid
Services. Effective trainers are required in each region to setup administration RC sites, and to
support VRCs or individuals in the customisation of their applications to use the Grid
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infrastructure. Although most Grid projects have a heavy emphasis on the development and
integration of middleware, it should not be invested less focus and effort in the deployment,
operation, and interoperability of the infrastructure, which is the key to grid system reliability.
Grid interoperation is also noteworthy for a federation of heterogeneous systems employing
security mechanism, information service system, job management, and data management, etc.
Regarding funding, the sustainability of a RBGC depends mainly on the knowledge and
experience of the staff that will run it as well as on the funds required. A stable funding
scheme at national level that could support the regional operation in the form of e.g. an annual
fee adapted to usage based rules assumes that the national policies should be supportive of the
domestic grid initiatives and ensures the minimum funds required for both the national and
regional operation.
If the above requirement is not met the regional operation is at risk and lack of sustainability
appears. Any scheme that could lead to self-finance, as the primary method ensuring operation
budgets, it should be examined starting from the NRENs. They are older in age and more
mature in the processes than the new emerging NGIs, where and if any, and they can perform
closer to commercial network models due to the nature of the services they provide the
academic and research communities with.
There is no silver bullet when planning sustainability strategies. This extensive analysis has
provided some directions forward for each region covered by the CHAIN project. Some
general best practices can be summarised as follows.
 Communicate the role of Grid computing to the policy and decision makers along with
recommendations towards the establishment of VRCs at a regional level
 Develop sustainable business models in consultation with the eInfrastructures owners
 Advertise leading show cases in the e-science regional community
 Support the development of NGI in every country within the framework of the NREN
where appropriate
 Give policy directions to stimulate innovation in science and technology
 Increase government spending on R&D with funding focused on projects that are
computationally intensive with focus on problems and issues of regional importance
 Strengthen the skills of the personnel/managers
 Maintain a reliable infrastructure with improved operation technology
 Maintain the highest-level interoperability with the worldwide DCI
 Aggregate and encourage technology providers to work together with standards
compliance.
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 Sustainability-oriented workshops
The CHAIN project, in the context of WP5 “Dissemination and Outreach”, has organised a
series of dissemination activities, in collaboration with the other Work-Packages, which had,
as focal point, a number of workshops and conferences that addressed the Virtual Research
Communities, the e-Infrastructure stakeholders and the policy makers. Some of these events
were conceived to have a session dedicated to sustainability and were organised in cooperation
with WP2. A general report on the events organised during the first 12 months of the project is
available in the deliverable D5.2 “Analysis of the outcomes of the first year workshops”. In
the following paragraphs we focus on the most recent events where sustainability-oriented
topics have been addressed or provide some information on the yet to come events already
foreseen.
 Overview of the process
As part of, and often directly mapped to, CHAIN workshops in all participating world regions,
WP2 has contributed with focused sustainability-oriented dissemination actions, customised
for the region. Some regions, especially those with nascent national grid activities, required
more detailed suitability-oriented dissemination than the others. As a rule, in each regional
dissemination event, specific CHAIN sustainability recommendations were presented. For
nascent regions and those not so stable in terms of national sustainability activities, typically a
national-level best-practice presentation was also given, both policy-level and technical
aspects included. For more stable regions, the workshops’ focus shifted away from WP2 to
more relevant (for those regions) technical workpackages.
 Sub-Saharan Africa
In Sub-Saharan Africa, a need for a specific sustainability-oriented session was identified early
on and overall CHAIN vision was presented, followed by the CHAIN sustainability
recommendations for Africa and a case-study for best practice from the region – that of South
Africa.
The focal event was the Workshop organised on the 23 November 2011 at the UbuntuNet
Connect 2011 conference in Nairobi, Kenya (http://www.ubuntunet.net/uc2011_programme).
The number of participants (133 in total of which 108 from Africa) was very high with a
relevant participation of ICT Directors from several countries in Africa. The presentations
introduced the concept of eInfrastructure, the need for such infrastructures and the benefits for
the Research and Education community and the society at large. Then the “SEE-GRID model”
was presented to give some guidelines on the path to be followed to create NGIs in Africa
based on the experience of South East Europe, and enhanced by CHAIN recommendations on
sustainability. The experience made in South Africa with their National Grid Initiative was
then presented to show an on-going successful experience in an African country. Then
followed a presentation on “Latin American CLARA experience, CHAIN advances and their
implementation in Africa” making a useful comparison of LA and African situations. Then, a
presentation on eb@leGrid and the need for introduction of Grid technologies in the
Democratic Republic of Congo was given by Prof. Dibungi Kalenda of the University of
Kinshasa. The last presentation on “e-Applications Tutorial and Round-up” by Prof. Roberto
Barbera addressed the panorama of the many possible applications already available on the
Grid Infrastructures and the possibilities to port new ones.
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 Mediterranean
The e-AGE platform organized by ASREN on December 12-14, 2011 has set among its
priorities, the development of pan-Arab e-Infrastructure, coordination with regional einfrastructures, and enhancement of research and education cooperation in a wide range of
activities, among the Arab countries and with communities in Europe, the US, Canada, Latin
America, Africa, and the world at large. e-AGE was attended by esteemed speakers, policy
makers, experts, and scientists representing all the Arab countries, Turkey, Europe, the US,
Africa, Latin America, Canada, Asia, and international organizations and companies in a
larger audience scale, representing over 30 countries. e-AGE platform was the most important
venue for networking among experts and scientists from all over the world.
His Majesty King Abdullah II deputized HE Dr. Ruwaida Al Ma’aitah, Minister of Higher
Education and Scientific Research to inaugurate the Conference.
HE Eng. Basem Al-Rossan, Minister of Information and Communications Technology,
delivered a speech, addressing in details Jordan experience in the field of e-infrastructure.
Other speeches were delivered by:
- Dr. Fa’eqa Al-Saleh, Advisor to the Secretary General of the League of Arab States –
Directorate of Research and Education, conveyed the greetings of HE Dr. Nabeel AlArabi and his wishes for the forum success.
- Mr Kostas Glinos, Head of GEANT e-Infrastructures Unit, DG Information Society &
Media-European Commission
- Mrs. Jowana Weronika, Head of the EU delegation to Jordan
- HE Dr Khaled Toukan, “e-Infrastructure based research: SESAME Case Study”,
Chairman of JAEC, Jordan
- Mr Dave Lambert, “Highlights on the US Internet 2 advanced networking consortium”,
Internet2, USA
- Mr Niels Hersoug, “Experiences of Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to
Europe”, UK
- Dr Robert Klapisch, “ASREN as a tool to scientific cooperation in the Arab World”,
SKF, Geneva (Chair)
- Dr Anna Paolini, “Towards an era of e-Infrastructure”, Head of UNESCO office,
Jordan
- Ms Samia Melhem, “Best practice cases of eGovernment projects”, Chair of eDevelopment, ICT Sector, World Bank
- Mr Ayman El-Sherbiny, “Regional Backbone Initiatives”, Chief of ICT Policies,
United Nations - ESCWA, Lebanon
- Mr Leonardo Flores, “e-Infrastructures in a regional context”, European Commission
- Dr Fabrizio Gagliardi, “Cloud computing technology impact on e-Infrastructure for
science”, Microsoft, Geneva
CHAIN sponsored a session in cooperation with EUMEDGRID-Support: “EUMEDGRIDSupport & CHAIN - Sustainability of e-Infrastructures” where Dr Ognjen Prnjat, WP2
Manager, gave a presentation: “CHAIN eInfrastructure sustainability recommendations and
existing Sustainability guidelines”.
 Latin America
The workshop activities in LA have been concentrated in two events in Mexico City and Lima
respectively 27-29 June and 3 July 2012.
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The event in Mexico was co-organised with the GISELA project as their Final conference and
was mainly devoted to reaching a final agreement on the sustainability of the existing
infrastructure in LA. Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia signed the first regional agreement to
continue the operation of the e-Infrastructure in Latin America, in order to make available for
research and education advanced computing resources for the benefit of e-Science, impacting
and promoting opportunities in strategic sectors of society such as health and environment.
CEDIA, CUDI, RENATA, the National Research and Education Networks of Ecuador,
Mexico and Colombia respectively, as well as Universidad de Los Andes (Uniandes Colombia) and Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM - Mexico), are the first institutions
that aim to boost cooperation in the search of financial and organizational mechanisms for
Latin America to undergo a process of consolidation and sustainability of the e-Infrastructure
in the region and encourage its use by the academic communities. The agreement was signed
as a result of the GISELA-CHAIN Conference held in Mexico City.
\
Figure 14 - CUDI, RENATA, Uniandes, CEDIA and UNAM signed the first declaration of commitment in LA
The second event was a one day workshop on 2 July co-located with TICAL 2012 (2-3 July)
in Lima (Peru), an annual conference organised by CLARA. TICAL 2012 was the second
version of the Conference of Directors of Information and Communication Technologies of
the Latin American Institutions Higher Education.
During the two days conference together with the 181 participants there were other 170 people
connected by HD streaming (thanks to the Peruvian academic network, RAAP). The
conference saw about 30 high level presentations.
The CHAIN Roundtable “Sustainability of Grid Services” on the afternoon of the first day was
one of the most attended sessions with two sustainability-dedicated presentations:
- Inter-regional e-Infrastructures coordination - The CHAIN project. Federico Ruggieri,
Project Director INFN.
- Advanced Computing in Latin America, Alvaro de la Ossa, RedCONARE, Costa Rica
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 India
The CHAIN Project, its aim and achievements, were presented at the International Conference
on Trends in Knowledge and Information Dynamics (ICTK 2012) 10-13 July, 2012 in
Bangalore, India by Roberto Barbera (CHAIN Technical Manager).
A very important event is being organised in co-location with the National Knowledge
Network conference in Mumbai from 30 October to 2 November 2012. During this conference
a specific CHAIN session is foreseen.
 China
CHAIN has organised a dedicated workshop within the framework of the IEEE CLUSTER
2012 conference in Beijing on the 28 September 2012.
The full day workshop, divided in four sessions, has seen many presentations from the WP
managers. In particular a specific presentation was given by the WP2 Manager: “CHAIN
recommendations to Regional infrastructures” - Ognjen Prnjat (GRNET).
 South-East Asia
After the first workshop organised in Taipei in 2011, another CHAIN Workshop was
organised at the International Symposium on Grids & Clouds - ISGC2012 in Taipei organised
by the Academia Sinica. The title of the Workshop was “Sustainability & Interoperability Step 2” and it was organised as a full day on Monday 27 February 2012. In the first session a
dedicated talk on sustainability was delivered by Kostas Koumantaros: “CHAIN sustainability
guidelines” (O. Prnjat / K. Koumantaros).
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 Conclusions
The core results of this deliverable consist of four sets of developments regarding the longterm sustainability support.
All the recommendations defined in deliverable D2.2 have been followed and reports given in
the previous sections. Key regional-level achievements are the establishment of ASREN as a
legal body and its explicit involvement in Grid coordination activities; establishment of the
ROCs for Africa&Arabia and China as core operational bodies; and the commitment of Latina
American NRENs/NGIs in continuing the Grid operations in Latin America, via a clear
Memorandum of Understanding.
The regional and national developments are supported by the strong lobbying strategies and
approaches adopted in the Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Regarding the main national-level developments given in the second part of the deliverable,
the biggest developments areas are as follows. First, initial actions on kicking off National
Grid Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa have started, which is of crucial importance in this
greenfield region. The exemplary developments in South Africa, which is converging to a very
stable and structured NGI, are being also used as guidance for other countries in the region. In
the Mediterranean, ASREN, as the centre of gravity, is actively supporting the existing
National Grid Initiatives and has started crucial Kuwait, with some initial activity in Lebanon.
In Latin America and South-East Asia, the NGI model does not seem to be the optimal
solution, and majority of effort is focused on sustaining the established Joint Research Unit
(South-East Asia) and ensuring continued support for regional grid operations through a
targeted MoU (Latin America). Progress is steady in India and China with long-term defined
programmes support the development of network, Grid and related computing efforts.
Third, a detailed sustainability analysis per region has been carried out, via the internal and
external audits, directional policy matrices, SWOT analyses, and strategy formulations. There
is no silver-bullet solution or best practice that fits all regions, thus the result of analysis
provides a set of suggested measures for improvement and new opportunities for each region.
Finally, the sustainability-oriented support has been provided via the targeted workshops in all
regions, which had embedded a focused sustainability component, proving effective in raising
awareness and providing support the sustainability-related recommendations.
Overall, sustainability support is one of the most complex activities in any infrastructure
project, cutting across a number of fields from operations, user communities, dissemination
and training, and naturally the financial and political-level support. The WP2 activity worked
over a number of strategic lines of action, producing a set of key recommendations,
sustainability guidelines, detailed analysis and suggestions for way forward, but also in a
number of concrete actions described here, yielding long-term sustainable results.
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Transcription

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