15th January, 2007 1

NGS for e-Social Science

Stephen Pickles<stephen.pickles@manchester.ac.uk>

Technical Director, NGS

Workshop on Missing e-InfrastructureManchester, 15th January, 2007

http://www.ngs.ac.uk

15th January, 2007 2

NGS & Partners, 2006

15th January, 2007 3

e-Infrastructure

• NGS provides generic e-Infrastructure for– compute (job submission)

• GT2 & Pre-WS GRAM, GridSAM

– data• storage, file transfer (GridFTP), collection management

(SRB), databases (Oracle, OGSA-DAI)

– a range of supporting services• UK e-Science CA, information (MDS/BDII), MyProxy, portal,

web site, wiki, helpdesk,...

• Not optimised for any particular user or community– requires expertise and commitment to use directly

15th January, 2007 4

User perspective

• Individual users find it hard to– learn to use the generic infrastructure– maintain necessary client software– obtain necessary credentials– negotiate access rights– port and/or adapt their applications to (heterogeneous) Grid

environments– change how they work

• There is a gap between what a Grid infrastructure provides, and what end users can use

• Cost of entry is too high for individual end users– only by banding together into communities (with common goals,

applications/tools, data) can they hope to amortise the costs of filling the gaps

15th January, 2007 5

Provider perspective

• NGS told to grow its user base 10 fold– giving smaller and smaller slices of the cake to less

and less expert users simply won’t work– naïve approaches to user/account management stop

scaling as the numbers of resources and users grow

• NGS can only do so much for any individual end-user

• NGS needs to start dealing with groups or communities of users with common needs– i.e. Virtual Organisations

• NGS will help communities to help themselves

15th January, 2007 6

Virtual Organisations

• Many different understandings of VO• In the NGS view, there is

– a consumer-provider relationship between the VO and the Grid– end users are members of (one or more VOs)

• VOs bring value to their members by:– sharing applications / tools / data– perhaps providing a community-oriented view of the Grid– negotiating community access rights with providers– ...

• Despite free use of VO terminology in Grid– VOs are not yet first class entities in Grids– there is little software to facilitate VO formation/management and

VO-based authorisation, and less that directly benefits end-users

15th January, 2007 7

VOs in NGS

• VOMS (VO Membership Service)– web-based interfaces for managing membership and roles,

delegated to VO admin– issues VOMS proxies (GSI proxies dressed up with membership

and role assertions)

• NGS can host VOs in VOMS now• Full integration with NGS account lifecycle by May 07

– project-based applications mapped to VOs– NGS resources to publish which VOs they “support”– NGS partners to get kick-back allocation mapped onto a VO

• More VOMS-aware authorisation – on-going• VOs can use NGS resources to provision VO services

15th January, 2007 8

What else is NGS doing to help VOs?

• Making NGS Portal software (portlets etc) available for re-use in community portals– available for download February 2007

• Can provide directories for installing community software on NGS resources

• NGS wiki available now for VOs to advertise themselves, their value-adding services and tools, and recruit

• SRB federation – making it easier for communities with their own SRB’s to use both

• Deploying a UK GRIMOIRES registry (from OMII) where community services can be published– will also register GridSAM instances configured for NGS

resources• Providing a “Service Hosting Service”

15th January, 2007 9

Service Hosting Service

Belfast e-Science Centre is newest NGS partner• Approved by NGS Board, December 2006• General announcement is pending final testing and Web

documentation

BeSC service has two components• Basic Execution Services

– GridSAM instances configured for all NGS resources• Service Hosting Service

– BeSC manage various web service containers into which projects or VOs can deploy their own Web or Grid services

• OMII, GT4, Apache/WSRF initially– Gives VOs an option to outsource service hosting, and NGS necessary

experience to develop models for service hosting– Will involve dialog between users and BeSC support staff– If oversubscribed, will have a waiting list

15th January, 2007 10

Some early examples

• BRIDGES portal allows VO members to run tasks (e.g. BLAST searches)– users don’t even know they’re using NGS

• NEBC BioLinux– 100 managed NEBC BioLinux machine situated in community with

value-adding applications and tools– NGS client tools are being added to NEBC BioLinux distribution, and

some key tools are being extended to use NGS resources for execution of more computationally intensive tasks

• Computational Chemists are using the Application Hosting Environment (from OMII) to present certain applications as Web services– application services are managed by a few experts for a larger

community

15th January, 2007 11

Training

• Induction to Grid Computing and the North West Grid– Daresbury Laboratory, 25 - 26 January, 2007

• Workshop on e-Infrastructure and Grid Computing– University of Plymouth, 31 January, 2007

• National Grid Service: Application Developer Training– e-Science Institute, Edinburgh, 21 - 23 February,

2007

15th January, 2007 12

Questions?