Shantenu Jha: it’s good to have PALs

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SAGA is an API that provides the basic functionality required to build distributed applications, tools and frameworks so as to be independent of the details of the underlying infrastructure. SAGA has been used to provide simple access layers for distributed systems and abstractions for applications and thereby address the fundamental application design objectives of Interoperability across different infrastructure, distributed scale-out, extensibility and adaptivity whilst preserving simplicity.

My PAL status has presented me with the opportunity to provide SAGA training and outreach to the international community, to establish connections between the OMII-UK and the US TeraGrid community, and between OMII-UK and the EGEE. As an OMII-UK PAL I was one of the organisers and lecturers at the International Summer School for Grid Computing (ISSGC09), held in Sophia-Antioplis (France). Along with other group members, I presented at the EGEE user's forum (Barcelona) on the development of SAGA-based GANGA-DIANE toolkit and its use by an EGEE lattice-QCD application to concurrently utilise TeraGrid and EGEE computational resources. This work will soon be extended to use the nascent SAGA-gLite adaptors.

I have also used the opportunity provided as an OMII-UK PAL to enhance interactions with Google Summer of Code Students, in particular meeting up with Toronto-based Saurabh, which has enabled the use of SAGA on the Sector-based Open Cloud Consortium's testbed. Last but not least, my role as a co-PI on LONI's TeraGrid project will allow me to represent OMII-UK and assist in the sharing of expertise between the TeraGrid's Science Gateway community and OMII-UK.

The opportunity to be an OMII-UK PAL has been very useful and has enabled me to interact with other scientists in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. I hope to continue to be a PAL over the next year to strengthen and further ties between the different e-Science communities with which I interact.

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