Work Area for HEP SSC Workpackages

Networking Activities

To foster a culture of co-operation between the participants in the project and the scientific communities benefiting from the research infrastructures and to help developing a more efficient and attractive European Research Area. Networking activities could include (non exhaustive list):

• joint management of access provision and pooling of distributed resources;
• strengthening of virtual research communities;
• definition of common standards, protocols and interoperability; benchmarking;
• development and maintenance of common databases for the purpose of networking and management of the users and infrastructures;
• spreading of good practices, consultancy and training courses to new users;
• foresight studies for new instrumentation, methods, concepts and/or technologies;
• promotion of clustering and coordinated actions amongst related projects;
• coordination with national or international related initiatives and support to the deployment of global and sustainable approaches in the field;
• dissemination of knowledge; internal and external communication;
• promotion of long term sustainability, including the involvement of funders and the preparation of a business plan beyond the end of the project.

Comments:

David Britton: does to foster a culture of co-operation between the participants in the project and the scientific communities (etc.) suggest a yearly? SSC collaboration meeting? or at least some activity that promotes information flow across the HEP boundary (both ways) into and out of other areas covered by the SSC?

Service Activities

To provide specific research infrastructure related services to the scientific community. This may include (non exhaustive list):

• procurement and upgrading communication infrastructure, network operation and end-to-end services;
• Grid infrastructure support, operation and management; integration, test and certification; services deployed on top of generic communication and computing infrastructures to build and serve virtual communities in the various scientific domains;
• deployment, quality assurance and support of middleware component repositories;
• data and resources management (including secure shared access, global scheduling, user and application support services) to foster the effective use of distributed supercomputing facilities; federated and interoperable services to facilitate the deployment and wide use of digital repositories of scientific information.
• vertical integration of the different services in support of specific virtual research communities, including virtual laboratories for simulation and specific workspaces.

Comments:

David Britton: Service activities: to provide specific research infrastructure related services for the scientific community: From a UK perspective, this sounds like the Tier-2 coordinators - absolutely crucial element in the UK.

Joint Research Activities

These activities should be innovative and explore new fundamental technologies or techniques underpinning the efficient and joint use of the participating research infrastructures. To improve, in quality and/or quantity, the services provided by the infrastructures, these joint research activities could address (non exhaustive list):

• higher performance methodologies and protocols, higher performance instrumentation, including the testing of components, subsystems, materials, techniques and dedicated software;
• integration of installations and infrastructures into virtual facilities;
• innovative solutions for data collection, management, curation and annotation;
• innovative solutions for communication network (increasing performance, improving management, exploiting new transmissions and digital technologies, deploying higher degrees of security and trust) and introduction of new end-to-end services (including dynamic allocation of resources and innovative accounting management);
• novel grid architecture frameworks and policies, innovative grid technologies, or new middleware solutions driving the emergence of high level interoperable services;
• advanced Service Level Agreements and innovative licensing schemes, fostering the adoption of e-Infrastructures by industry;
• innovative software solutions for making new user communities benefit from computing services.

Comments:

David Britton: Joint research activities: should be innovative and explore new fundamental technologies or techniques… To improve in quality or quantity the services provided … Data management; virtualisation; and more data management......

Milos Lokajicek: T3 user support: - use cases for T3 user support need (from real users) - try to find if some generic form/structure of T3 user support can be find for all WLCG VOs - Try to implement it

General Comments

1) ARC liasion and expertise. Our group heads the NorduGrid and ARC activities, and as ARC is a core part of EMI these services will be needed and used by our communities. We hope to provide some of this expertise to the SSC in particular. NA activity?

2) Distributed analysis on the grid, with heavy experience in end-to-end work flows. Suits 'analysis tasks for WLCG part', probably as SA/JRA activities.

3) Ganga expertise. We have several ganga developers and core team members, with focus on interfacing ganga to experiment or private software. Also as SA/JRA activities.

Bjorn H. Samset

Workpackages

One possibility would be to have "vertical" WPs, such as HEP, photon science, FAIR etc together with a few "horizontal" WPs covering training & dissemination, common tools etc.

We could still split out e.g. "Grid infrastructure support" and "analysis support" into separate tasks within a given WP.

It is probably good to have a list of the key activities - from the lists above plus any others - that we wish to cover and then see how these could map to various WP proposals.

Work on the HEP SSC Draft

Here we are collecting ideas/contributions for "Scientific and technological excellence"

• Soundness of concept and quality of objectives

• Progress beyond state-of-the-art

• Quality of the methodology to achieve the objectives, in particular the provision of integrated services

• Quality of the Networking Activities and their work plan added to draft v9 - Jamie

• Quality of the Trans-national Access and-or Services and their work plan

• Quality of the Joint Research Activities and their work plan (to improve the services provided by the infrastructures) felt to be ok as sis - some input from Massimo?

Here we are collecting ideas/contributions for "Potential impact through the development, dissemination and use of the project results"

• Contribution at the European level towards structuring the European Research Area (largely) added to draft v9 - Jamie

Appropriateness of measures for the dissemination and/or exploitation of project results

Contribution to socio-economic impacts

-- JamieShiers - 2009-08-20

• SSCImpact.rtf: Comments from Harry on improving the Impact Evaluation criteria added to draft v9 - Jamie