e-IRG White Paper 2008: Join the discussion on the future of e-Infrastructures!

Passionate about the future of Europe’s e-Infrastructures? Want your voice to be heard? The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) is about to release its new White Paper, and is inviting policymakers, service providers and user communities to participate in the discussion. The e-IRG White Papers provide a “snapshot” of developments in the e-Infrastructure domain, and makes related recommendations. The 2008 White Paper examines seven key issues requiring policy action at the national and European Union levels: global collaboration, education and training, grid and cloud computing, security, virtualisation, remote instrumentation, and sustainability.

Clouds and virtualisation
Cloud computing and virtualisation are among the most promising and innovative of the emerging ICT technologies, and we must account for developments in these areas when re-assessing the future of e-Infrastructure and related policies. Cloud computing enables on-demand and pay-per-use access to leased computing power and services, and represents a new paradigm in distributed computing. The e-IRG believes that the long term interests of the research community would be best served by increasing access to and use of a mixture of grid and cloud based services and technologies, and the White Paper encourages the integration of cloudbased services into existing e-Infrastructures.

Remote instrumentation
The development and spread of techniques and technologies that allow virtualised and shared access to remote scientific instruments is opening new opportunities for scientific communities. The White Paper recommends support for further research into these technologies, and their progressive integration into the e-Infrastructure framework.

Education and training
Education and training of European citizens in the use of e-Infrastructure is essential if we are to maximise the benefits that derive from investments in e-Infrastructures. The White Paper builds on the work of the e-IRG Education and Training Task Force, proposing a plan of action that includes a call for harmonisation and standardisation of knowledge and skills related to distributed computing, in accord with the Bologna framework. To maximise the use of computing facilities available within e-Infrastructures, relevant user communities must have access to a seamless computing ecosystem.

Sustainability
The goal of securing self-sustainable funding for European e-Infrastructure services requires careful analysis of the organisational and funding models embraced by all stakeholders, including resource users and providers. The White Paper suggests that the models and experience of existing National Research and Education Networks (NRENS) can guide the computing components of the e-Infrastructure and future data-related initiatives. As an interim step, connecting the proposed new capacity and capability computing service schemes will provide an integrated computing service environment  capable of fulfilling the diverse requirements of the end-users.

Security and global collaboration
The White Paper also addresses the issues of security and global cooperation, in particular in terms of their organisational aspect. To achieve and maintain an acceptable level of overall security in a costeffective manner, the e-Infrastructure community needs to develop common ways of specifying and measuring security across grid, network, supercomputing and data domains. The need to deepen global collaboration is driven by the expanding user community, which includes scientific domains with well-established institutional structures governing the intercontinental collaboration activities, as well as disciplines with more fluid collaboration models. These new and globally collaborative activities pose additional challenges at political, organisational and technological levels. The absence of a clearly defined, hierarchical organisation for bringing together and prioritising the needs of the user community means that it is necessary to establish other venues for exchanging information about best practices and future plans on the global scale. The e-IRG intends to play a major role in this information exchange. For further information, visit the e-IRG website: www.e-irg.eu