EGI Virtualisation Activities

EGI Workshop: Defining a roadmap for a federated virtualised Infrastructure

This workshop will bring together three critical groups (resource providers, end-users and technology providers) within the European production infrastructure to ask the following series of questions:

• Should EGI move towards providing an 'Infrastructure as a Service' model (a.k.a. cloud computing) tuned to support data intensive research communities?
• Should this service be provided by federations of resource providers from the research community, commercially by ad hoc agreements between users and resource providers, or by collective negotiation and purchase of resources on behalf of different communities?
• What sort of use (consuming communities and use cases) would the research community make of such a capability?
• What are the major issues (e.g. technical, policy, governance, etc.) that need to be resolved for this use to happen?

Over a 2-3 day workshop through a series of presentations and breakouts we will try to answer these questions in order to end the meeting with a set of critical observations that can be developed into a roadmap that will meet the growing need for virtualised resources from the European research communities.

Selecting a time and place

We are looking to hold this meeting in May or early June 2011 in Amsterdam. Please register your interest in participating and availability in this Doodle

Background Material

The meeting schedule will deliberately not spend a lot of time on technology related presentations or provide an introduction for cloud computing. There are plenty of meetings that can provide that information. A selection of recent events are provided below:

• CloudScape III, Brussels, March
• EGI User Forum - Cloud & Virtualisation sessions, Vilnius, Lithuania, April
• SIENA Grids and Clouds standards roadmap
• DCI Collaborative Roadmap

It would be useful to have short specific presentation understanding the use cases from the e-science community to help motivate the discussions.

Organisers

If you are interested in contributing to the organisation of this workshop or wish to be informed once a date has been decided please email [1]. Details of the agenda and eventual date of the workshop will be circulated widely within the community once it has been decided.