A business model for the establishment of the European grid infrastructure

Abstract

An international grid has been built in Europe during the past years in the framework of various EC-funded projects to support the growth of e-Science. After several years of work spent to increase the scale of the infrastructure, to expand the user community and improve the availability of the services delivered, effort is now concentrating on the creation of a new organizational model, capable of fulfilling the vision of a sustainable European grid infrastructure. The European Grid Initiative (EGI) is the proposed framework to seamlessly link at a global level the European national grid e-Infrastructures operated by the National Grid Initiatives and European International Research Organizations, and based on a European Unified Middleware Distribution, which will be the result of a joint effort of various European grid Middleware Consortia. This paper describes the requirements that EGI addresses, the actors contributing to its foundation, the offering and the organizational structure that constitute the EGI business model.

On Importance of Service Level Management in Grids

“…For such projects, implementation of at least some processes from Service Level Management seems unavoidable. Giving the example of the main customers of the European Grid Initiative (EGI) [7], we show how SLM was necessary for them and how it was realised.…”

“…Usually, this kind of experiments, also known as data challenges, are planned and co-located with a public event or a tight schedule of some research -the International Telecommunication Union Regional Radio Conference in 2006 may serve here as an example. During this event, representatives from 120 countries negotiated a radio-frequencies plan 7 . The conference lasted about one month and required weekly major revisions of the global plan and daily over-night refinements for certain regions.…”