Caring for research, now and for years to come

By Steven Newhouse, EGEE-III project, Switzerland

It is a thrilling time to be a researcher. This fall at CERN, Europe’s organization for particle physics research located in Geneva, Switzerland, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, successfully re-started.
In our best estimates, LHC researchers will have enough data for solid analysis to make a confident announcement of the Higgs Boson (if it is there) in 2012, give or take a few years. If the Higgs is nowhere to be found, this could yield something even more interesting: a complete revolution in our understanding of how space and time are woven together. Peering beyond the horizon of particle physics however, is a rich landscape of exciting research: observatories, machines, projects and research facilities still in their infancy, but similar in ambition to the LHC. These projects appear on the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap and are as high profile in terms of data as the LHC at CERN.  LHC experiments and researchers use distributed computing resources managed by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project. This same infrastructure – made of distributed computing clusters and storage devices connected via high-speed networks – also supports research in the earth sciences, life sciences, humanities and more. It is very probable that many of the data-intensive ESFRI projects will also use this infrastructure for their data storage and computing needs.

BUT HOW TO RUN IT?
In April 2010, EGEE will draw to a close. Care for this infrastructure will be continued by a new organisation: EGI.eu. EGI.eu will be initially supported by the EGI-Inspire project and is tasked with coordinating the European Grid Infrastructure. In this new phase, the longevity of the high-quality production infrastructure will be ensured as funding for its operations switches from short-term project cycles to a permanent organisation. The current state of e-Infrastructures like that coordinated by EGEE mirrors what we saw in research networks twenty years ago: these high-speed dedicated research networks began as independent systems, using protocols and tools as different as the grammar and punctuation in different languages. Trans-network tasks were difficult if not impossible. Independent national initiatives led to the EU-EC promoting common standards, resulting in the GÉANT network infrastructure and the creation of the DANTE organization in 1993. As a result, these highquality networks have assumed an essential role in European and global scientific cooperation. As e-Infrastructures become more formalised, the issues related to their governance are not technologyspecific, but issues that any organization must make decisions about. This is a signal of their maturity. Broadly speaking, these issues are sustainability of funding, sharing of power, and security of usage.

SUSTAINABILITY OF FUNDING
Just as a nation relies on taxes to fund itself, e-Infrastructures need steady sources of money for operation and maintenance. EGEE has been dependent on project funding from the European Commission, reapplying for this every two years. The European Grid Infrastructure will become more sustainable by moving towards the self-sufficiency of its central coordinating organisation EGI.eu. EGI.eu will support the organisational, technical and operational governance of Europe’s production-quality distributed computing infrastructure by asking its members (the representatives of national or community resource providers) to make a financial contribution to the organisation’s running costs. During the transition to the EGI model, EGI.eu will be supported by the EGI-InSPIRE project, funded by the EC. EGI.eu is expected to explore other mechanisms for distributing the cost of the non-profit organisation, such as service charging. 

SHARING OF POWER
e-Infrastructures, like any sovereign group, must set rules for power sharing. EGI members are all represented in the EGI Council, which controls EGI.eu – deciding each year on the longer-term priorities and direction of the organisation. The EGI.eu Executive Board, which forms the legal representation of EGI.eu, provides regular guidance to EGI.eu and the EGI.eu Director. The governance of EGI.eu reflects that of many public companies: the shareholders (the EGI Council) elect a board of directors (the EGI.eu Executive Board) that supervises the work of the senior managers (the EGI.eu Director and staff). As within a company, in the EGI Council the number of votes is related to the financial contribution each member makes to the running of the organisation.

SECURITY OF USE
Security is the last primary issue e-Infrastructures will come to grips with, balancing efficiency for all users with an appropriate level of caution. As EGI.eu and the activities it represents assume a higher profile, they need to fit within national legal structures and global political safety issues. We must be prepared to deal with complicated questions: Who is allowed to view data? Should all countries have access to e-Infrastructures, regardless of their politics? Should all data move freely across national boundaries and between different legal jurisdictions? These infrastructures are potential targets—how do we safeguard them? Who is accountable when something goes wrong? None of these issues represent an unscalable barrier to the establishment of a sustainable pan-European infrastructure, and through the work of projects such as EGEE, possible solutions to many of these issues have been established. As EGI establishes itself with the national legal frameworks of the European Union, its member states and international collaborators, it will inevitably adjust and finetune itself to best serve the needs of the research community.