The potential for better cooperation between NRENs and Grids was demonstrated through various use-cases that were presented at the 8th NRENs and Grids Workshop this week, 22 September. More than 30 people from 13 countries across Europe joined the event, which was co-located with the EGEE’09 conference in Barcelona.

Xavier Jeannin from EGEE SA2 explains that, “collaboration with NRENs is required in order to provide better services for end users.” Ideas were exchanged on four main topics of common interest: Grid Monitoring Solutions, Advanced Network Services, Project-wide Network Operations and Grid Middleware.

The workshop began with a few presentations that allowed participants to develop a better understanding of Grid requirements. Lars Fischer (NORDUnet) showed how the NORDUnet project aims to integrate the use of GLIF directly within dCache, Grid middleware. Susanne Naegele-Jackson (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) then presented PerfSONAR-Lite TSS, a troubleshooting tool which exemplifies good collaboration between NRENs and Grids. She showed how it could be used to monitor the network over Grid sites. Participants learned that this tool is expected to be deployed on the EGEE sites.

During the session on Network Operations, use-cases made it clear that better information is still needed about network problems, via trouble ticketing systems and monitoring tools, especially in multi-domain environments. Typically, a Grid user submits a job to use one of the Grid facilities. However, if the job cannot be executed, it is often not clear to the user where the problem lies.

Diego Lopez (RedIRIS) gave the first presentation in the session on Grid middleware, which covered eduGAIN and GEMBus - both of which are being developed and deployed within the GÉANT project. EduGAIN is the infrastructure to enable web single sign-on, whereas GEMBus will produce a framework to define, discover, access, and combine network services.

Jan Meijer (UNINETT) followed with a very interesting use-case for collaboration between NRENs and Grids. In cooperation with a few NRENs, TERENA is working toward the implementation of a service to enable users to login to and validate their own identity federation and to obtain e-science personal certificates. This will be one of the options available in the TERENA Certificate Service.

Further information

TERENA has been running the NRENs and Grids workshops since May 2005 to bring together members of the NREN community with members of Grid projects in order to understand the common issues for these communities and to seek agreements and recommendations.