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Sub-SaharanE-Science
Infrastructures :The South African National Grid
Bruce Becker [email protected] Researcher, CSIR
Coordinator, SAGridfor
SAGrid [Operations Team,Joint Research Unit]SANReN Advanced Services
Outline The State of South African e-Infrastructures – a
blueprint for the region Physical infrastructures Human infrastructures
Challenges and responses Towards a continental infrastructure
South African e-Science infrastructure
South Africa has made significant investments in a wide programme of e-Infrastructure for science :
Physical resources and centres of excellence : Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC) Large Data Set Access, Storage and Curation (VLDS)
National Research Network (SANReN) National Grid Initiative (SAGrid)
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Centre for High Performance Computing http://www.chpc.ac.za
South Africa's Supercomputing facility– Situated in Cape Town, managed by Meraka– Designed and managed to tackle exceedingly
large problems, perhaps requiring specialised hardware
– Several different platforms– Used on a project basis, through major
“flagship” projects and collaborative “consortium” projects
Figures from www.chpc.ac.za
BlueGene/pPPC arch~14 Tflops Peak
IBM e1350 clusterAMD Opteron x86_64~3.3 Tflops Peak
Very Large Data Set Initiative
Data infrastructures constitute a crucial aspect of e-Infrastructures
Data is extremely costly to acquire in many cases (experiments, one-time/very long acquisition scales)
Data is publicly paid for – should be available to all scientific communities in principle
Data should be available and usable ”forever” (metadata)
Initiative under way since ~1 year in SA, led by CHPC, extensive consultation with researchers
Any data initiative will inevitably complement SAGrid
SANReN > 10 GB/s backbone reaching all major
metropolitan areas Mission :
service all major South African Higher Education Institutes (”bandwidth”)
Provide the necessary networking infrastructure for South African major research initiatives (”NREN”)
SANReN undertakes mainly deployment and procurement role
Small amount of research currently – will grow as usage increases
Current and planned backbone
SANReN in a ”perfect world”
What the network really means The network is eroding our geographical
separation, making it possible, even inevitable, to collaborate
It is a means to achieving scale at a human level -
Technical experts can efficiently work in virtual teams on large complex projects of common relevance
Researchers can pool ideas and effort by sharing and pooling equipment and other resources
Borders are irrelevant, access is crucial.
SAGrid : making the most of infrastructure
The SAGrid federation is the expression of the desire to collaborate at a resource provider level, to provide the best possible service to scientists
A technical collaboration of 8 Institutions, providing several services
Operations, support, training, management, etc
Based on gLite middleware, allows easy interoperability with infrastructure in other regions of the world
SAGrid can be considered the first ”advanced service” to be deployed
on the NREN...
”the network is the computer*”
*John Gage, Sun Microsystems
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FunctionalSites
DeploymentIn progress
Core Services
7(+3) sites~1300 CPU cores~20 TB perm. Storage~17 permament staff
Proposedextensions
Externalinfrastructure
EUMedEGIEELACERN
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Infrastructure services and interoperability
One of the goals of deploying a standard, widely-used middleware was to encourage access and usage.
Technically very easy to add new sites, even if they are in different countries or continents -
Share similar methodologies and experience Share similar technology stack
In order to make operation of new sites easy, developing AfricaGrid Regional Operations Centre, in collaboration with EUMedSupport
AfricaGrid Regional Operations Centre – roc.africa-grid.org
Central place for all documentation – user and site admin
Operations Databasehttps://gocdb.africa-grid.org
GOCDB in Africa ROC : Making life easier for everyone
Site admins have full control over their site, and full understanding of the entire grid
SANReN support unit integrated already Monitoring/accounting portal to be integrated Downtimes announced in a single place (no
more emails) Can be consulted by users independently of
ops team State published via RSS to www.sagrid, twitter,
More Services / Service Innovation Improvement in SAGrid documentation – result
of several working sessions Inherent feedback loop in Documentation Documentation is shared by all on the ROC.
”Technical Tuesdays” every Tuesday on EVO address some general or community-specific issue
on the grid (MPI, myproxy, licensed applications, etc)
”Application Dashboard” a-la-EGI user-facing integrated application
identification/porting/deployment dashboard
Challenges
Challenges 1 – Demand Current resources will not be able to meet
sustained demand Request for investment from DST to address
service the bottleneck of application and user support, as well as coordination (3 FTE) under way
Services go a long way to alleviating manpower stress but more compute/data resources are needed at the sites
Challenge 2 : Inclusion Many universities are fully integrated into the
grid, but we are missing some UWC, iThemba on the way... Possible site deployment at US... Next EPIKH school to be held at US – aim to
encourage uptake and usage of the services Still missing : ”the coast” ; ”FET”s Message to users must be clear : no matter
whether your particular institute provides resources to the grid, you can use it.
Challenge 3 : Diversity The grid needs to be able to cover all use
cases , measured by many metrics Compute aspects (IPC, paralellism, complexity) Data aspects (scale, complexity, distribution,
ownership) Application aspects (diversity, support, interaction) Interoperability – all services need to be able to talk
to all other services, with no bottlenecks
This is a distinguishing factor of the grid – and should be held up as a design benefit
Challenge 4 : Barriers to Entry Interaction with and maintenance of the grid
can be made far more intuitive and easy Infrastructure-level policy on IaaS Virtual Research Environments for user
communities
Basic web-based grid portal at https://gridportal.sagrid.sanren.ac.za
Advanced community-specific VRE's based on LifeRay / SharePoint in development
(some) Projects to respond to these challenges
EPIKH – http://www.epikh.eu
Exchange Programme to Advance e-Infrastructure Know-How
Vastly increased local capacity thanks to knowledge exchange
Application support and porting team development SPECIAL – http://www.special-project.it
”Supporting virtual research communities across Italy and South Africa”
(some) Projects to respond to these challenges (2)
CHAIN – http://www.chain-project.eu Coordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-
Infrastructures
HP-UNESCO Brain Gain Initiative (see Marc Bellon's talk)
Certainly several more... coordination is the key
Towards a continental e-infrastructure: what have we learned ?
We need several things for a functional continental infrastructure
Network infrastructure Physical and computing resources Capable operations team Capable application and user support team Mobility / exchange USERS/USE CASES (ie – latent demand)
Continental e-infrastructure is ”everybody's business”
An embryonic continental infrastructure for e-Science exists
Http://gstat1.africa-grid.org
Still to come : CamerounNigeriaEthiopiaKenya
An embryonic continental infrastructure for e-Science exists
Africa is sparse : achieving scale cannot be done by ”traditional” means
Share human and computing infrastructure Intense dissemination campaign to get user
momentum Final aim : reduce the divide felt by Africa's
scientists Africa is sparse : far more flexible than other parts
of the world Identify and exploit enabling technology,
exploiting common infrastructure
Thank you
http://www.facebook.com/SAGrid http://www.sagrid.ac.za/
http://www.twitter.com/TheSAGrid
Special (unmentioned) thanks to :
Valeria Ardizzone, Emidio Giorgo, Riccardo Bruno (INFN, CT)
Mario Real & Fulvio Galeazzi (GARR, Rome)
Colin Wright, Christiaan Kuun, Simeon Miteff (Meraka Cyberinfrastructure)
Tiziana Ferrari (EGI)
http://agenda.epikh.eu/events/africa5_workshop
