RedCLARA News - 2004/2010
- María José López Pourailly
EELA-2 was kicked off in the ancient city of Trujillo
EELA-2 (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) started on April 1st 2008 and was officially launched during its Kick-off Meeting (KoM) that was held between April 20th to 23rd at the Meliá Trujillo Boutique Hotel in Trujillo, the old Spanish city where CETA-CIEMAT is located. Funded by the 7th Framework Programme - Capacities of the European Commission, the EELA-2 Project (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) aims to build a high capacity, production-quality, scalable Grid Facility providing round-the-clock worldwide access to distributed computing, storage and network resources needed by the wide spectrum of applications from European - Latin American scientific collaborations, with special focus on providing a complete set of versatile services fulfilling application requirements and ensuring the long-term sustainability of the e-Infrastructure beyond the term of the project.
Such an ambitious project would not be possible without the prior existence of a consolidated e-Infrastructure, set up with the early intention to build a sustainable Grid platform. This was the objective of the EELA project that is providing its users with a stable, well supported Grid Infrastructure based on 16 Resource Centres (RCs) summing up to over 730 CPU cores and 60 Terabytes of storage space, thus proving that the deployment of an EU-LA e-Infrastructure was not only viable but is also responding to a real need of a significant part of the Scientific Community.
The EELA-2 vision is two-fold:
- Consolidate and expand the current EELA e-Infrastructure built on the research networks GÉANT2/European NRENs (National research and Education Networks) and RedCLARA/LA NRENs, to become an e-Infrastructure Facility, providing a full set of enhanced services to all types of applications from multiple scientific areas of European and Latin American scientific communities;
- Ascertain the conditions of the durability of the e-Infrastructure, beyond the project duration.
In two years, the very skilled and highly motivated people from Europe and Latin-America that are working in EELA-2 will be devoted to the following objectives: expand the current EELA e-Infrastructure, collaborate with related projects, support current and new grid applications, collaborate with RedCLARA and LA NRENs, support e-Science and/or National Grid initiatives (NGIs), and build the required support for the e-Infrastructure.
The great collaborative experience and the outcomes of the previous EELA project (ranked as "good to excellent", the highest valuation possible, by the European Commission), set the basis for the success of EELA-2 and at the same time compel all the EELA-2 members and partner institutions to give their best effort in order to achieve the proposed goals, which in the long term will serve to reduce the digital divide between the European and the Latin-American countries.
The EELA-2 KoM
 Members of EELA-2 at the KoM. |
The scope of the meeting was worked out to include all the relevant matters that needed to be discussed at the start of the project, i.e.:
· Constitution of the Consortium Board and installation of the Project Management;
· Tutorial on Administrative & Financial procedures;
· Presentation of Scientific Institutions, Resources and Applications by EELA-2 Members;
· Presentation of the EELA-2 Network, Service and Joint Research Activities by the Activity Managers.
The meeting was also expected to be an opportunity of utmost importance to:
· Know each other and the EELA-2 scientific environment, from the very beginning of the project;
· Exchange views of and interests in using the EELA-2 e-Infrastructure;
· Express common concern to ensure a long-term sustainability of the EELA-2 e-Infrastructure, i.e. of the longevity of Europe-Latin America e-Science.
EELA-2 members
A total of 53 institutions participate in EELA-2 with 16 partners as coordinators of JRUs:
CIEMAT (Spain), CUBAENERGIA (Cuba), CLARA (Latin America), UCC-CMRC (Ireland), HLP (France), CNRS (France), INFN (Italy), LINTI - UNLP (Argentina), REUNA (Chile), SENAMHI (Peru), ULA (Venezuela), UNIANDES (Colombia), UNAM (Mexico), UPORTO (Portugal), UFRJ (Brazil) and UTPL (Ecuador).
Representing the following 37 institutions in the countries mentioned:
Argentina: ILFP, LSC / UBA. Brazil: CEFET-RJ, UNILASALLE, FIOCRUZ, INCOR/USP, IME, LNCC, ON, RNP, SPRACE, UnB, UFCG, UFF, UFJF, UPMackenzie. Chile: CEAZA, FCV, UDEC, UFRO, UTFSM, UVALPO. Colombia: UIS. France: IPGP. Peru: CIP, PUCP, USMP. Portugal: UAVR, UMINHO. Spain: CESGA, RED.ES, MAAT, UC, UCM, UEX, GRyCAP - UPV. Venezuela: USB.
Useful links:
- Portal EELA-2: http://www.eu-eela.eu
- Wiki EELA-2: http://wiki.eu-eela.eu
- For more information about the previous EELA Project, please visit: http://www.eu-eela.eu/first-phase
