A European e-infrastructure success story
Grid infrastructures are being built in several areas of the world. However,despite the huge investments made by the EC and other funding agencies at national and international level, the total number of users is still discouragingly low. It is orders of magnitude less than the number of users of the pan-European data network for the research and education community, GÉANT. The EC-funded 'Exchange programme to advance e-infrastructure know-how' (EPIKH) started in 2009 to increase the number of users authorised to access network-based services. Over the course of its four-year duration, EPIKH has greatly contributed to the spread of the e-infrastructure thanks to a 'science gateway' framework whose instances have been deployed in several places worldwide). This set of tools and applications allows to easily build user interfaces that meet the needs of specific scientific communities. EPIKH also promoted the adoption of standards, whenever and wherever possible, to let different middleware operate together. Through training and sharing knowledge and expertise, EPIKH helped scientists make use of distributed computing capabilities in their research. Selected young scientists were invited to visit European partners of EPIKH to be trained on technologies for the administration of grid sites and applications support. In addition, EPIKH organised training events. This helped new users to access and apply a pilot e-infrastructure on which applications can be developed and used as examples for future case events. Hundreds of secondments were offered and more than 40 events were organised in Africa, Asia as well as Latin America. By 2012 end, over 700 researchers from 219 organisations of 47 countries had been registered in the science gateway implemented using the EPIKH framework . These figures show the strong interest in gaining know-how on grid infrastructures. The training infrastructures built during the grid schools helped facilitate the building of grid infrastructures elsewhere. Europe has heavily invested in the creation of a continental e-infrastructure based on grid technologies. However, the EPIKH project made giant steps towards turning the vision of a European Research Area into reality by globally spreading e-infrastructure.
Keywords
Research, education, e-Infrastructure, grid, GÉANT, science gateway, user interface, standards, middleware, training, distributed computing, European Research Area
