Europe's Grid infrastructure shifts from EGEE to EGI

Within little more than a year the organization of Europe's Grid infrastructure will be transformed. For EGEE's user community, its new face, the European Grid Initiative (EGI.eu), will mean more of a shift in "behind the scenes" focus and responsibility than a radical transformation in the software and services that they currently use. This future model will be primarily sustained by national funding, with each national grid initiative (NGI) supporting and maintaining its own resources as part of a European partnership and integrated with international partners by supplementary funding from the European Commission.

A lot has recently happened to make this plan a reality and in the next few months new developments will continue. The current picture is as follows:
• In January representatives of the emerging NGIs in Europe formally endorsed the "EGI Blueprint", which sketches the form of the EGI model, a signal that the community is moving in a united direction.
• In March Amsterdam was selected as the location of EGI's coordinating organization, EGI.eu, and the local hosts (NCF, SARA and NIKHEF) have become fully involved in the transition planning.
• EGEE has revised the project's second-year plans in alignment with the EGI Blueprint, to prepare for optimal handover to the EGI.eu and NGIs in May 2010.
• Athens hosted the first meeting of groups interested in forming Specialized Support Centres (SSCs). SSCs form part of the EGI model to support user communities and will fall within the scope of an upcoming EU funding call. A further meeting is planned on 1 July in Paris for these groups and others involved in EGI proposals, to present work plans for broader discussion. CERN, along with other HEP organizations, intends to form an SSC and is working to ensure that the broader physics community is involved.
• The ARC, gLite and UNICORE middleware teams have held four meetings since December 2008 (in Rome, Munich, Oslo and Geneva) to understand the interactions between the EGI Middleware Unit and its main software providers. A further meeting is planned before the Paris meeting in July to discuss the content and structure of a combined proposal.

In parallel, the board managing the preparations for EGI has nominated candidates for the coordination of the EGI project proposal editorial board and the interim EGI.eu project director. The following persons have been agreed:
• Laura Perini (INFN, Italy), coordinator of the EGI project proposal editorial board, focusing on Operations and the EGI.eu construct part/proposal.
• Cal Loomis (LAL/IN2P3, France) coordinator of the EGI project proposal editorial board, focusing on the Applications and Scientific Support Cluster part/proposal.
• Steven Newhouse (CERN), interim EGI.eu project director.

Next steps

Over the next six months the e-infrastructure community within Europe will be focusing on two main activities.
• Preparing and submitting the EGI, Application and Middleware proposals for the upcoming EU funding call.
• Finalizing and then starting the migration towards the EGI model.

If you are a user or a provider of the infrastructure, what will all of this mean for you? Hopefully very little.

"The key objective in all of these discussions that we are having about EGI is to maintain the level of service currently delivered to the EGEE user community," said Steven Newhouse, EGEE's technical director. "Also, by starting to make these changes now within EGEE we can phase them in gradually over the next year and help EGI in its learning process".

Stay tuned to www.eu-egee.org and www.eu-egi.org for more updates.

A version of this article was originally published online in the Spring 2009 EGEE Newsletter, available at http://eu-egee.org/newsletter/spring09/spring09.html.