Extending e-Infrastructures Globally through Regional Cooperation

By Alberto Masoni, INFN Cagliari, Italy, and Federico Ruggieri, INFN Roma Tre, Italy

The European Commission is investing in the extension of European e-Infrastructures to other regions of the world. A number of different collaboration models have been established, with impacts typically focused on specific regions. Thus although big steps have been taken to extend European Grid technology and principles to other regions, the results have to be leveraged and customised to provide an overall model for sustainable interoperation between the European Grid Initiative/Infrastructure and external e-Infrastructures.

The state of the art
Over the last decade, the European Commission has provided separate funding for different e-Infrastructure layers and their interactions with different world regions. Coordination of different these grid efforts has been restricted to the exchange of basic operational, organisational and technological know-how. In some cases, know-how has been collected in common repositories with the aim of discussing and possibly pushing for interoperability. Non-European e-Infrastructures generally fit into one of three regional situations:

• The region is a completely green field and must be supported from scratch (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa with the possible exception of South Africa)

• A regional e-Infrastructure has been started and there is already a promising level of awareness (e.g. the Mediterranean, Latin America, and the Caribbean).

• The region has autonomously invested in e-Infrastructures and is willing to interoperate with European initiatives (e.g. China, India, USA, Japan, etc.).

In each case, the role of European partnership differs, whether it be in the choice or number of possible activities (training, dissemination, interoperations, standardisation, etc.), or in the mode of addressing these activities (training of users and/or technical people, dissemination towards high level policy and/or communities, etc.).
Two examples are India and Mediterranean.

India
India has two main e-Infrastructures: the GARUDA National Grid Initiative and the National Knowledge Network. The FP6 EU-IndiaGrid project, whose partners were key actors in GARUDA and NKN, worked to coordinate collaboration between these initiatives and existing European e-Infrastructures. This collaboration will be furthered
by the FP7 EU-IndiaGrid2 project, which started in January 2010. The project was launched at the EU-India workshop on Research Infrastructures and opened with a speech from Dr Chidambaran, Principal Scientific Adviser to Indian Government.
In this same month, the Government of India accorded in principal approval for the establishment of the full National Knowledge Network infrastructure. The NKN will have multi-gigabit/sec bandwidth capability, two orders of magnitude more than that provided thus far to India’s scientific and academic community. The infrastructure currently connects about 50 research institutions. The NKN is another step forward in India’s march towards a “developed” country status. This electronic digital network – with its high bandwidth (comparable to that available in developed countries) and low latency – will facilitate interactions between institutions, enabling remote access to
computer resources, databases and even advanced research facilities GARUDA, the National Grid Initiative of India, has been operating since 2004 and aims to provide for the requirements of data- and compute-intensive science in the 21st century. The GARUDA project is coordinated by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and is operated by ERNET (Indian Education & Research Network). Most of the GARUDA network is now operating
within the NKN.

Mediterranean and Middle East
Co-funded by the EC within the Sixth Framework Programme and coordinated by INFN, the EUMEDGRID project supported the development of a grid e-Infrastructure in the Mediterranean area and promoted the porting of new applications on the grid platform, thus allowing Mediterranean scientists to collaborate more closely with their European colleagues. EUMEDGRID promoted grid awareness and competency across the Mediterranean and identified new research groups, helping them to exploit grid’s enormous potential EUMEDGRID aimed to improve the technological skill and know-how of computing professionals across the Mediterranean. A pilot Mediterranean grid infrastructure, today composed of 25 sites in thirteen countries, was set up, and this grid is interoperable and compatible with that of the EGEE project and related initiatives. A new project, EUMEDGRID-Support, began in January 2010 with the aim of consolidating and building on the results of the EUMEDGRID project.

Measuring the benefits of e-Infrastructures
To date there has been limited focus on evaluating the quantitative impact of e-Infrastructures and their influence on research, the economy, and industry.

Qualitatively, e-Infrastructures are actively:

• enhancing international and inter-field collaboration by supporting geographically distributed communities;

• increasing participation in high quality research by improving access to scientific resources.

• fighting the digital divide and brain drain by stimulating local scientific and technical development;

• network connectivity allows scientists to work from their home laboratories and with local universities;

• improving circulation, cross-fertilisation and validation of new ideas and activities across the continents;

• improving industry’s access to research products, developed faster and using fewer dedicated resources;

• enhancing the use of ICT technologies and progress towards effective liberalisation of communication and education, thus contributing to the global economy.

Is it hard to quantify these qualities and produce indicators that mark the success of the investments made? Of course it’s not easy, and one of the issues is how to identify those improvements that are due to e-Infrastructures and not to different economic or political situations. Two projects have been making attempts in this direction: the EARNEST foresight study, funded by the European Community through the Sixth Framework Programme, and the ERINA study, which looks at extending the use of research infrastructures to e-Health, e-Learning and e-Government domains. Follow-up projects ERINA4Africa and EUMEDGRID-Support plan to work in cooperation to survey relevant North African and Middle-Eastern case studies.