PART 1 – The Empirical Picture
4.6 DEISA
Case Overview
What does the project do mainly? DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, connects the leading supercomputing centres in Europe—
extending from Italy and Spain through Central and Western Europe to the UK and Finland—
through high speed network empowered by GEANT2 and the national research networks (DEISA 2008). The fundamental objective of DEISA is to provide services which enable the high
performance operation of remote computing platforms on remote data sets.11
Motivations for setting it up: The integrated supercomputing power of DEISA is intended to bring a boost in competitiveness for Europe in scientific areas where extreme performance is needed. The provision of high performance computing resources to researchers has
traditionally been the objective and mission of the national HPC centres in Europe. However, the increasing global competition between Europe, USA, and Japan is inducing growing demands for computational resources at the highest performance levels, as well as a need of fast innovation. To stay competitive, major investments in replacing supercomputers are needed every five years—an innovation cycle that is difficult to follow even for the most prosperous countries because of the enormous costs. The limitations of national approaches became increasingly clear to policy makers and practitioners. In 2002, the idea of combining resources across countries emerged in order to overcome the fragmentation of
supercomputing resources in Europe. According to this logic, aggregated supercomputers would offer both better system availability and the necessary skills for more efficient supercomputing support (Lederer 2008). In 2004, DEISA1 started as an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative of eight leading European supercomputing centres. The project substituted the available resources for networks and computers with a higher performance, installed HPC architecture and gave the users and communities access to combined resources.
DEISA2 started in 2008 and continues to develop and support the computing infrastructure.
Main goals of the project: The purpose of DEISA is to enable scientific discovery across a broad spectrum of science and technology, by enhancing and reinforcing European capabilities in the area of high performance computing (DEISA 2008). Grid technologies are used to
integrate national supercomputing platforms, and to provide to scientific users transparent access to a European pool of computing and data resources. The joint and coordinated operation of this environment is tailored to provide enhanced computing power and resources to end users, and to enable new, ground breaking research activities in science and
technology. DEISA operates as a virtual European supercomputing centre.
Project maturity: All important elements for a distributed system exist and are functioning.
However, several processes are still being optimized and automated. Further associated partners are still expected to be integrated, a process which is likely to be challenging. Three types of European-wide expert teams have been established.
Project funding: The project cost for DEISA1 was 24,351,100 EUR, the EU funding 13,976,000 EUR. The project cost of eDEISA (an additional interim project) was 13,145,700 EUR, the EU funding 7,000,000 EUR. The project cost of DEISA2 is 18,733,200 EUR, the EU funding 10,237,000 EUR. The difference is financed by the national supercomputing centres themselves.
11 Published materials and papers, documents and videos available on the DEISA website and the project's newsletters were used in preparing this case report in addition to interviews with 3 informants totalling 120 minutes of interview time.
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Organizational Structure
Size and composition: Eleven principal partners, all leading national supercomputing centres, are involved in DEISA2. Each site is strongly integrated to form the DEISA HPC infrastructure.
In addition, four associate partners act as coordinators of HPC activities in each participating country, as well as Russia.
Governance: The project's "governance" structure includes groups, functions and roles like Principal Partners, Associate Partners, DEISA Executive Committee, Extended DEISA Executive Committee, Technical Board, Advisory Scientific Committee, Project Management Team, Project Coordinator, Technical Coordinator, Quality Assurance Coordinator and Presentation Team. The management of the DEISA project is the responsibility of the DEISA Executive Committee and the Project Coordinator who, as the chairman of the Executive Committee, represents the DEISA project. The Project Coordinator is responsible for the day-to-day management tasks and assisted by the Project Management Team. He receives support from the Technical Coordinator.
Managing internal and external relations
Management of the project: On the operational level, 1—2 hour video conferences were held every two weeks, and 1—2 face-to-face meetings were arranged every year. Furthermore face-to-face meetings of the executive board and other strategic and management committees and teams take place regularly. An internal wiki is used to monitor frequently changing issues. In addition, a document management system provides more persistent information, e.g. on proposals and deliverables. The newsletter, founded in 2005, is aimed mainly at the scientific community and HPC end users at large, but it also spreads useful information for the Grid technology development community in Europe and the rest of the World.
Users: 90 extreme computing projects were conducted, run by more than 160 European universities and research institutions, including partners from outside of Europe. About 600 users in several countries for example have access to the computer in Munich. An example of a science community with DEISA HPC support is the European fusion community. The fusion community brings together some of the largest European research laboratories working in the areas of nuclear fusion research.
User recruitment: There are Europe-wide calls, supported by a press release to attract users and user communities. Most of the users were recruited and trained by the project team. The idea is to make the project known to other communities so they will be able to take the developed technologies and apply them in their daily work.
Drivers and barriers to adoption: The participating communities have a strong need for supercomputing. Many projects are not imaginable without support from an e-Infrastructure like DEISA, especially in the fields of natural science and in projects with a global reach and data input. With increasing numbers of project proposals submitted, it has become necessary to review and select submissions. DEISA is supporting users through various media such as user documentation, training programme, operating a centralized user help desk and monitoring the availability status of the DEISA software stack at the partner sites.
Challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration: On the project's side, the Operations Team, the Development and Technology Team and the Applications Support Team play an important part. An example of a science community with DEISA HPC support is the European fusion community. Further targets for DEISA support are EU FP7-supported computational projects.
In addition to fusion energy research, the initiative is supporting, e.g., climate/earth system research, astrophysics/cosmology, life sciences and materials sciences. The initiative is also open for communities from other disciplines. Software engineers have deep knowledge on supercomputing hardware and software but not in detail of the natural sciences and other
Page 42 user domains. They can help to make programs faster and solve technical problems. Users have direct contact with some supercomputing experts and communicate with them by phone or e-mail, especially in cases of troubleshooting. Documentations and FAQs are used to help solving recurring problems. It was suggested that there are hardly communication problems between the providers and user communities. The communities are mostly from the natural sciences and the users have a good understanding of possibilities and barriers of
supercomputing.
Collaboration with other organizations: DEISA is cooperating with a long list of partners in different academic fields and domains, e.g. CLARIN, COSMOS, DANTE, EFDA/ITER, ENES and the European Psi-k Network in Material Science.
Technology
Main technologies, resources and services: The DEISA research infrastructure is constituted by leading national supercomputers in Europe interconnected with a high bandwidth point-to-point network provided by GEANT2 and the National Research Networks (NRENs). High bandwidth network connectivity is required to guarantee the high performance of the distributed services, and to avoid performance bottlenecks. DEISA incorporates several different platforms and operating systems (IBM AIX on Power5-6, IBM Linux on PowerPC, SGI Linux on Itanium, Cray XT, and NEC vector systems), and the consortium has deployed middleware that enables the transparent access to distributed resources, high performance data sharing at European scale, and transparent job migration across similar platforms.
Role of technology development: The DEISA system will be enriched by community interfaces to make it more user-friendly and to allow a more comfortable usage from external
computers. A new research paper declared more precisely: "In DEISA2, the single-project-oriented activities (DECI) will be qualitatively extended for persistent support of virtual science communities. DEISA2 will provide a computational platform for them, offering integration via distributed services and web applications, as well as managing data repositories." (Lederer 2008)
Data sharing: In the fields of meteorological or cosmological research large amounts of data are produced, e.g. by satellites or other measurement instruments with gigabyte rates per application. In materials science simulations are also important and often connected with a lot of data. A big challenge is the transfer of huge data sets from computer to computer. For example, in meteorological research terabytes of data are produced on one computer. A growing problem is the long-term storage of raw data. A solution being discussed is to delete the raw data after a first analysis and re-generate it later if necessary. In the future, JAVA-based web interfaces will be developed for facilitating data access and transfer.
Interoperability with similar or connecting infrastructures: N/A
Contribution
Main contributions of project: An important contribution of DEISA is the collaboration among European supercomputing centres. Previously, there were only national initiatives and no interaction at a European level. The HPC sites in Europe had different strengths and special competences in different parts of the HPC field. The centres had to develop common platforms and distributed services. The possibility to process wherever it is beneficial for a project, respectively where resources are most appropriate and available, is revolutionary in every respect. One point is that countries which cannot provide specific systems for
themselves are still able to do simulations and analyses on a high level. Another advantage for European science is the improved access to supercomputing resources for scientists from countries which cannot provide specific systems themselves. With DEISA, it's easier to apply for projects at an international level. The increasing transparency of the system and its
Page 43 processes make the users aware of the hardware and resources that are available. A global central file system that is available for all DEISA users also increases transparency.
Challenges: In the future, the focus will be more on a complete European HPC ecosystem, with a heterogeneous set of machines and Grids at different levels of the infrastructure. One of our informants noted that these services need to be accessible to any scientist through a workspace that hides as much as possible the complexity of the DEISA systems, but facilitates the creation of workflows using differing system architectures or Grids as needed.
Informants’ recommendations to policy makers
An informant indicated that there is an increasing demand for computing time. In the last call the demand exceeded the submission with a ratio of 3:1. Therefore more and more proposals must be declined. Another problem is that the development of hardware is faster than the development of software. It is necessary to support also the software development to overcome the gap. Otherwise in the future only a few users will be able to use the provided services and systems. Another informant pointed out that in addition to the technical challenges, human collaboration is one of the most important factors. It is necessary to consolidate the team and build a community to support a kind of collaboration which is based on trust and cooperation.
SWOT analysis
Table 4-11: DEISA strengths and weaknesses
Strengths Weakness
Long-term funding
The long-term funding of the project is secured through the support by the EU.
It is not clear if there will be a successor project.
Sustainability At the moment, the e-Infrastructure is established and productive. The user communities benefit from the e-Infrastructure. The chances are good that other communities can be
attracted. Especially the calls seem to be effective instruments.
The project will end in 2011. It is well documented; but not all web pages are available.
User recruitment There are Europe-wide calls, supported by a press release to attract users and user communities. Most of the users were recruited and trained by the project team. The idea is to make the project known to other communities so they will be able to take the developed
technologies and apply them in their daily work.
At the moment, there is a strong focus on one user community, the fusion community. Further targets for DEISA support are EU FP7-supported
computational projects. Ten European computational science grand-challenge projects from the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative were presented at a recent conference, covering the fields of Weather and Climate Research, Engineering, Materials Science, Astrophysics, Computational Neurosciences, Plasma Physics and Computational Bio Sciences.
Involvement of current users
Some users have large intrinsic
motivations and are very interested in a further use of the e-Infrastructure.
Because not all projects can be accepted, not all potential users can benefit from the e-Infrastructure and there is a preference for high-level projects with a strong need for supercomputing.
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bedding
DEISA seems to be embedded well, as it contributes to the core mission of its participating organizations, namely to deliver super computing services.
Institutionalised links
DEISA is well informed of the work of other e-infrastructure projects and communities and is collaborating with other initiatives like CLARIN, COSMOS, DANTE, EFDA/ITER, ENES and the European Psi-k Network in Material Science.
External use of software, tools
DEISA is one of the biggest projects in the field of grid and supercomputing and provides several e-Infrastructures with computing power and resources.
Table 4-12: DEISA opportunities and threats
Opportunities Threats
Funding of member organizations
DEISA is linked with other strong organizations, i.e. supercomputing centres. Therefore a funding of member organizations could be possible.
Technology monitoring
The project receives first-hand
information on new developments mainly through some of its members, who are—
like the participating supercomputing and research centres—at the forefront of their fields and involved in
standardization and governance activities in academia as well as business.
Competition with other
infrastructures or technologies
Neither in technological nor commercial sense there is any strong competition for DEISA as no similar initiatives exist. The focus in EGEE is more on grid computing with the need of data exchange.
Cloud computing may be a threat; but it has unsolved problems in the field of security and can hardly reach the same computing power.
Security risks Security problems could affect the
DEISA community negatively. In the field of fusion and nuclear power are strong political and commercial interests.
Change of user communities and fields
There are several trends which are supportive to the community’s work, e.g.
the increasing need of electricity (which can be a product of nuclear power stations) and mobility (which can be supported by results of fusion research).
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