European interoperability goes global

By Simon Hettrick

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In October last year, OMII-UK and the NGS began work on a demonstrator to show that open standards adopted by different middleware platforms are the route to interoperability across service providers – potentially from around the world. In December, the Japanese-based NAREGI grid infrastructure provider joined our European-wide partners, and helped OMII-UK to take one step closer to a future of globally integrated computing.

E-Researchers who can harness more compute and data resources will solve scientific problems more quickly. Interoperability could provide researchers with access to the combined resources of service providers from around the world.

Bringing together a widely distributed group of service providers is as much of an organisational challenge as a technical one. The use of open standards significantly reduces the technical challenge, since it allows the different middleware platforms to speak the same language. Interoperability also requires there to be an agreement between institutions on security policies. This is difficult to organise at the best of times, and is a significant challenge when the institutions are separated by thousands of miles and many hours time difference.

Using a single BES++ client provided by Platform Computing, the demonstrator identifies charges in a simulated plasma by orchestrating the execution of a physics application across different middleware deployments (GridSAM, UNICORE, ARC and now BES++).

OMII-UK and the NGS began work on a demonstrator that was initially unveiled at OGF27 in October 2009. It has since been demonstrated in progressively improved forms. The latest version will be showcased at OGF 28 and accompanied by a tutorial showing delegates how to set up the system themselves.

OMII-UK and the NGS would like to thank everyone whose participation made the interoperability demonstrator possible, including: DEISA (Germany), NAREGI (Japan) and NIIF/NorduGrid (Norway and Hungary).

The future for the interoperability demonstrator lies in the incorporation of new partners from other countries around the world. If you are interested in participating, please get in touch with support@omii.ac.uk!