The South African National Compute Grid

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1 IST-Africa 2009 Conference Proceedings Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds) IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2009 ISBN: The South African National Compute Grid Valeria ARDIZZONE 1, Bruce BECKER 2, Albert GAZENDAM 2, Albert Van ECK 3, Gareth De VAUX 4, Sean MURRAY 5, Sergio BALLESTRERO 6, Norman IVES 6, Roberto BARBERA 1, Emidio GIORGIO 1, GianniMario RICCIARDI 7 1 Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare Sez. Catania, Italy valeria.ardizzone@ct.infn.it 2 Meraka Institute, CSIR, South Africa 3 University of the Free State, South Africa 4 UCT-CERN Research Centre, South Africa 5 ithemba Laboratory Accelerator-Based Sciences, South Africa 6 University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa 7 Consorzio COMETA, Italy Abstract: South African research is coming to rely increasingly on highperformance computing in collaborative environments to ensure a competitiveness and to provide the best opportunities to the respective research communities. With a significant investment in cyberinfrastructure in the form of a Centre for High- Performance Computing, and a National Research Network, as well as a widely supported surge of interest in grid computing as an enabler of scientific research, the South African National Grid Initiative was started. This national initiative aims to deploy a grid infrastructure based on the glite middleware stack from EGEE in order to provide a collaborative HPC environment to the researchers in all fields of science in South Africa. In this report, we discuss the motivations and objectives of the project and present some of the results which have been obtained. A discussion of the methodology and technology used in the process will be also given, as well as a description of the potential benefits for business which we consider as being some of the outcomes of this initiative. Keywords: cyberinfrastructure, collaboration, virtual organisations, national grid, glite, EGEE, LHC, LCG, WISDOM, GILDA 1. Introduction Cyberinfrastructure on the continent of Africa is lacking far behind that of the developed world, in terms of capacity, access and technology. The so-called digital-divide is both responsible and a result of this. A short analysis of internet penetration on the continent gives some idea of the problem. 1.1 The Digital Divide in Africa : An Analysis of Internet Hosts on the Continent The digital divide in Africa is startling. When looking at the internet host distribution in Africa, two facts are clear : 1. most of the continent has a very low host count, 2. sixty-five percent the total number is in one country - South Africa - which has 5 % of Africa s population. Percentage growth in Africa in 2006 was much higher than the world average, but not so in 2007 (see the large areas trends in international data [1]), although it should be kept in mind that one or two years are too short to understand relevant evolution. The fact is that, Copyright 2009 The authors Page 1 of 14

2 with 14 % of the world s population, Africa still has only 0.3 % of the global activity in the internet, with a total of less than two million hosts, as compared to 120 million in Europe[2], 67 million in Asia [3] and 27 million in Latin America [4]. Table 1 shows the situation in the 22 African countries with over a thousand internet hosts (that constitute 99.6 % of the total host count in Africa.). Table 1 : Distribution of Internet Hosts in South Africa and Africa Number of hosts (December 2007) Percentage of Africa Per 1000 inhabitants South Africa Africa Figure 1: Distribution of Internet Hosts in 9 African Samples, Which Constitute 96.5 % of the Continent, Including the Contribution of the Rest of Africa. In figures 1 and 2, we see the situation of the nine African countries with over 10,000 internet hosts (that make up 96.5 % of the total in the continent). It can be seen that eighty percent of the host count in Africa remains concentrated in two countries, which have less than 9 % of the population. The reduction of this division in access and usage of digital information and services is one of the goals of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Apart from the general uptake of digital services, one of the main enabling technologies, especially for scientific and industrial research is that of grid computing, using middleware to organise virtual organisations and laboratories in order to enhance collaboration, knowledge production and scientific discovery. 1.3 Significant Large-Scale Research Activities in South Africa South Africa has large research projects in several areas which rely heavily on highperformance computing. A brief and representative outline of the major activities relevant to the national research infrastructure is given, to give a context to the following developments. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has identified several projects which it considers as fundamental to the country's scientific competitiveness, which in turn drives innovation. Thanks to its southern geographic position South Africa fills a niche in both optical and radio astronomy. The favourable regional aspects such as dry, isolated areas, are well-suited to hosting large observational facilities. The South Copyright 2009 The authors Page 2 of 14

3 African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) manages the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), which is the main instrument of a large international collaboration consisting of scientists from South Africa, the Americas and India. Another major project to take advantage of South Africa's strategic advantage is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the technology demonstrator, MeerKAT. South Africa is also member of two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ATLAS and ALICE. Participation in these experiments is achieved via a SA-CERN Figure 2: Number of internet hosts per 1000 inhabitants in 21 African countries. The values for a selection of countries is shown, along with the African average. Programme recently funded by the DST. Apart from these major scientific undertakings, seen as crucial in maintaining South Africa's scientific competitiveness, there are smaller collaborations and research activities in several science domains, specifically bio-sciences, physical chemistry, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC, which undertakes research in social sciences), electronic, civil and mechanical engineering to name but a few. All of these rely to some extent on e- Infrastructures and are initial target communities addressed by the South African National Grid. 1.4 Empowering Research in Africa : The South African National Grid Prototype In 2008 a joint decision was made by a group of South African universities and research laboratories to deploy a functional national compute grid, in order to favour collaboration, provide a stable distributed computing platform, and provide an way to interact with international collaborations already using grid technology, such as the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) [5]. At this point in time, the e-infrastructure plan for South Africa, developed by South Africa's Department of Science and Technology (DST)[6] and implemented by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)[7] planned for a Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC), a National Research Network (SANREN)[8] and a plan for increased mobility and funding[9] to favour collaboration amongst South African and pan-african research. What was missing was a coherent grid computing platform to enable users to securely and easily collaborate on scientific projects, and take efficient advantage of the aforementioned infrastructure. A federated scheme of collaboration at the institutional Copyright 2009 The authors Page 3 of 14

4 resource level was proposed, with the grid infrastructure based on the glite middleware stack [10] from EGEE. 1.5 The Existing Situation in South Africa, Preceding the Start of the Project Although a number of independent efforts had been under way for several months in the field of grid computing, there was little coordination between them and no greater vision for the benefit of research communities in general in South Africa. The members of the UCT- CERN Research Centre at the University of Cape Town had been unofficially participating in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG)[11] by providing computing resources to the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)[12],[13] experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for some years. More recently, in late 2007 a decision was made at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Physics to similarly provide computing resources to the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) Experiment[14] which members at that institution had joined, and there was also a stated desire by the CSIR Cluster Computing Centre (C4) to collaborate via the Wide In Silico Docking On Malaria (WISDOM) grid[15] on biomedical research. However, all of these efforts were lacking the common infrastructure which is usually relied upon when virtual organisations in a country are formed. This common infrastructure includes the framework for collaboration, the security framework and the basic underlying network hardware required for distributed high-performance computing using grid technologies. Towards the end of Q1 of 2008, however, a significant number of independent and contemporary initiatives in universities and laboratories in South Africa had been preparing to deploy high-performance compute clusters for scientific research, most notably at the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein, the North West University (NWU), the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the University of Johannesburg (UJ), as well as the previously mentioned CSIR Cluster Computing Centre (C4). An aspect of the situation in South Africa which contributed to the decision to deploy grid services at a national level was the eventual installation of a national high-bandwidth and low-latency national research network, SANREN. This last factor was one of the most decisive in making a collective decision to embark on the deployment of grid services for scientific research at a national level. In this article, we describe the development of this national infrastructure project, as well as the partner and related projects involved. We outline first the projec objectives in section 2, discuss the methodology, followed during implementation and planning in section 3. A brief outline of the technologies used is given in section 4, as well as some relevant developments and results in sections 5 and 6 respectively. A discussion of our vision of the potential business benefits is given in section 7, while in section 8 we summarise and give our conclusions. 2. Objectives From the pre-existing situation in research and general infrastructure described above, a set of concrete goals have been outlined for the national compute grid programme. Clearly, the long-term global goal of providing a functional national research and collaboration tool, open to all fields and researchers, and interoperable with similar international projects has to be kept in the background. However, the short term objectives include several goals: 1. Setup of a South African Certificate Authority 2. Formation of a South African Joint Research Unit (JRU) 3. Deployment of a minimal number of functional sites to provide a prototype of a national infrastructure 4. Training of group of experts in the relevant fields in South Africa 5. Start the formation of the relevant Virtual Organisations and Copyright 2009 The authors Page 4 of 14

5 6. Start with the process of support for various scientific research applications. In this paper we will show how, in working to fulfil these objectives, we have proceeded along a well-defined path, using a deployment strategy suggested by experience with similar grid initiatives in other parts of the world. These goals will be achieved by establishing a human network in escience, Commerce and Industry, and training new communities of potential users. This initiative will profit by using the already available middleware developed by other grid computing projects like EGEE and by making use of established common practices in the deployment of such large infrastructures. The Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities (GILDA) [16] is relied upon to provide a training infrastructure and a powerful means for dissemination and training activity. 3. Methodology Underpinning the three pillars of the triangle of knowledge- education, research and innovation - are the research infrastructures. These can be considered as necessary tools and instruments that bind these activities together to produce high quality results. Among the research infrastructures, e-infrastructures have demonstrated their impact on development as facilitators of the work of scientists, educators, students and technicians. Grids are an important element of e-infrastructures which have successfully extended the initial concept of the World-Wide Web (content sharing) to the sharing of all kinds of resources: computing, data storage, databases, instruments, etc. The South African National Grid Initiative aims to further the deployment, extension and evolution over time of grid e- Infrastructures in South Africa, exploiting sharing of a larger set of computing resources, scientific instrumentation and data facilities, across multiple scientific disciplines. Many new skills will be required, both for South Africans scientists that will need to learn how to work in new environments, as well as for application developers that will have to learn how to write and optimise their software for use in the distributed environment so as to better utilise grid resources. The methodology adopted in the context of this national initiative, aims to develop a technical roadmap for a sustainable working model for the propagation of grid technology in South Africa, and surrounding region. 3.1 The GILDA t-infrastructure. An important partner in this roadmap is the Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities (GILDA). The ambitious objective of Grid Computing technology is to provide an e-science infrastructure ensuring opportunities for all, overcoming social and geographical differences and minimizing the risk of a 'digital divide'. In this regard, the prerequisite for an inclusive Information Society are widespread access to platforms and services, skills to benefit from them, and willingness to do so. Launched in 2004 by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) [17], GILDA is a fully working grid test-bed devoted to dissemination activities. This infrastructure is adopted as the official training tool by several grid projects, such as EGEE, EELA[18], EUMedGRID[19], EUChinaGRID[20] and several others, transforming GILDA into the world largest training-infrastructure for the dissemination of Grid Computing. GILDA is also open to anyone who wants to have first hand experience with Grid systems. Through its infrastructure, both users and system administrators are able get quick and easy access to an "real world" grid environment. To remove barriers of disadvantaged people in terms of ICT equipment, appropriate on-line content and authorized access to Grid infrastructure, the GILDA project aims to: 1. raise awareness of Grid Computing benefits; 2. provide customized formats for dissemination events, according to the attendee's skill level; Copyright 2009 The authors Page 5 of 14

6 3. facilitate appropriate free on-line content and services for training purposes; 4. encourage the use of its complete training infrastructure (t-infrastructure) amongst new communities. GILDA fits seamlessly into the Grid projects training and dissemination activities on a number of levels. It acts as a first point of contact for new users, allowing them quick and easy access to a working Grid. The GILDA test-bed consists of 9 sites using heterogeneous hardware to act as a "real world" grid environment. It is made up of all the components of a larger Grid project, including services, resources and monitoring systems tools. To allow use of the test-bed, it also features a Virtual Organization (VO) and a real Certification Authority (CA) that grants two-week certificates for the test use of the GILDA infrastructure. In addition, it runs the latest production (and stable) version of the LCG middleware, being also compatible with glite, the EGEE's middleware solution. The GILDA training infrastructure also provides a Grid web portal called GENIUS[21], where different usages are supplied, such as basic content for novice users and full featured ones for more in depth tutorials and demonstrations. At a more advanced level, GILDA offers a service for those interested in testing the Grid and glite with their own software, offering a more intensive and in-depth introductions to the Grid. Figure 3 shows schematically the interplay of the various phases and activities and we discuss below the actions taken in each of the areas of our methodology. 1. Requirements Capture and Analysis (RCA), is intended to study the state of the art in terms of the communications network, available resources and knowledge of grid technology, as well as develop a model for the formation of sustainable National Grid Initiatives and propose a technical roadmap in order to sustain a deployment strategy from site installation to operations. 2. Gather and Analyse Data (GAD), is intended to gather and analyse information about potential user communities, through administering ad-hoc questionnaires which, exploiting the results of RCA, will formulate a strategy and a dedicated technical roadmap for the communities. 3. Dissemination, aims to disseminate the National Grid Initiative to a wider audience, thus improving grid awareness in the South African area and involve new user communities, thanks to an ad-hoc training programme. Three different kinds of dissemination events have been identified: conferences, workshops and Industry/Government Days. The conferences are addressed to related project and relevant communities, and they will be devoted to present the South Africa National Grid Initiative status and results and all its several collaborators will be invited to participate and contribute. The workshops will deal with specific project areas and will be useful to establish contact with scientists, engineers, and other stakeholders interested in the relevant topics. The Industry/Government Days 4. The training courses will be addressed to several types of audiences - users, developers, system administrators - with different levels and areas of grid knowledge, ranging from novice to advanced. Two kinds of special courses will be organized to cover the issue: the Operation-on-Duty Tutorial and the Grid Schools. The former will provide advanced skills to system administrators, which already have been trained about some previous experience in the installation of Grid services. The attendee will learn how to manage a grid site and how to deal with the most common technical problems by using the available monitoring and diagnostic tools to carry out the troubleshooting. 5. Operations will facilitate the expansion and quality improvement of the current SA grid infrastructure for the benefit of the scientific communities in the area. The goal is that operations teams should be able to measure the availability of the infrastructure and take all the necessary actions in order to notify and support site Copyright 2009 The authors Page 6 of 14

7 administrators in maintaining high availability of services. The SA National Grid infrastructure will be constantly monitored and supported in order to bring them up to speed with production quality operations. 6. Support is intended to be provided to the middleware and related core services deployed in the infrastructure, to new resource centres among the institutes of the user communities participating in the initiative, and to application integration activities in the grid data processing. A ticketing system will be used to facilitate the effective resolution and delegation of any problems, while it will be extended to facilitate both operational as well as user application needs. The local South African operators, in conjunction with the GILDA t-infrastructure and its team, will play a very important role in the support activities. 4. Technology Description In a large national project if this type, due the the complex nature of the problems to be solved, a wide range of proven technologies is required. We will briefly discuss the technology issues in this project, in a preliminary way, separated into three general areas: middleware and software, hardware and the national network. 4.1 Middleware and Software Technologies The technology of grid computing is of course based on well-known and widely used components. The decision was made to select a mature middleware stack which could provide the functionality required. The objectives of our initiative - to provide South Africa with a functional and efficient compute grid as well as favouring collaboration in research the glite middleware stack from EGEE was chosen as the basis for the national grid services. The reasons for making this particular choice considers the level of support which could be relied upon from organisations such as GILDA, and their long and successful record in developing and supporting similar national grid initiatives. A basic design of the grid services layout in South Africa is described, taking into account our aims of selfsufficiency & inter-grid interoperability. [22] provides a more detailed description of glite. A fundamental prerequisite of self-sufficiency is to have a set of so-called central services available in South Africa, so that users or services do not have to contact information or resource providers outside of the national infrastructure. These central services provide the information backbone for the rest of the services, as well as the global resource management in terms of job execution. These central services would provide overall management of resources and information necessary for independence of compute and storage resources. Note that the term central here does not refer to the geographic location of the site where they are hosted, but to the relative importance of the function which that service has. Although they are all hosted at the UCT-CERN Research Centre, Cape Town, there is no reason that each could in principle not be hosted at a different site. These services play a central role in managing the site services, which are distributed at the grid sites around the rest of the country. The sites provide the services which eventually execute the actual jobs on the grid and which are used in the grid for permanent storage of data. The design of the schema in which the grid services are deployed should take into account possible bottlenecks and single points of failure. For example, there should be redundancy in the information provided by the central services, in case of failure of the site hardware or network interruptions. This issue is currently not addressed, but a possible Copyright 2009 The authors Page 7 of 14

8 solution to it would be to have redundant replicas of the top-level BDIIs in various sites around the country, as well as one or more WMS, using these BDIIs. Figure 4: Map of the sites of the South African Grid, in relation to the rest of the country. Current operational sites are shown in green. 4.2 Hardware Technologies The hardware technologies currently installed at the sites are for the most part pre-existing clusters of high-performance computers. The so-called cheap, off-the shelf (COTS) components model of building compute clusters has been widely adopted in South Africa, except in a few sites (which have not yet been integrated into the grid), where truly highperformance supercomputers are needed. We have opted for supporting open-standards and vendor-neutral hardware technologies at all levels, from the servers to networking capacities The federated nature of the grid model ensures that sites are quite free to choose the hardware technologies which are appropriate for their site based on the specific VO's and activities which will be supported at that site. 4.3 The National Research Network, SANReN Of course, any national grid initiative relies heavily on the underlying network infrastructure provided. Fulfilling this aim is the South African Research Network (SANReN) [8], commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology and implemented by the CSIR. SANReN is a large-scale, high capacity National Research and Education Network (NREN), which is closely aligned with CHPC. It is designed specifically for connecting public and other research and higher education organisations together and to international networks such as GéANT[25]. The base capacity of the Copyright 2009 The authors Page 8 of 14

9 network is 10Gbps and it is provided exclusively via a country-wide fiber optic network. A schematic diagram of the state of the network in July 2008 is shown in figure 5. Figure 5: A Schematic Diagram of the South African National Research Network (SANReN) [20] 5. Developments Once a middleware stack had been selected work the first sites could be deployed. The first crucial step was to provide the training necessary for the site administrators at the first sites. The knowledge dissemination process guided by the training activities is a key factor to ensure that all users can fully understand the characteristics of the offered Grid services and that they acquire enough expertise to properly use the available Grid infrastructure. The main objective of the dissemination activities is to identify and reach relevant communities in South Africa that can take benefit from the Grid infrastructure. 5.1 Understanding an Evolving Environment By studying the state of the art in South Africa research institutions, universities and industry, will be possible to collect ad-hoc information from users, application developers and new communities, thereby assisting the dissemination and training activities to formulate strategy for the following tasks: to develop requirements analysis results for given scientific/industry community; to identify specific target audience within South Africa regions; to capitalise on success stories of new users or new communities publishing on press releases, newsletters, presenting on research conference; to communicate the advantages of adopting the grid paradigm to specific sectors belonging both to academia and industry with specific case studies; Copyright 2009 The authors Page 9 of 14

10 to grow a rich dissemination contacts portfolio from industry, science & academia The online survey shown in figure 6 collects the information concerning grid computing, storage, interconnect capacity, and applications of interest for the South Africa NGI. The resulting document presents the information collected via a database and the results of the survey are continuously analysed in order to extract a clear understanding of the grid resources and needs in the region as well as the present level of expertise. Figure 5: The South Africa Grid User Survey 5.2 Managing Dissemination of Information An accurate explanation of the grid technology has been provided to the potential users in all the training events (started from April 2008 to now), highlighting the benefit that their communities can obtain exploiting the Grid infrastructure. Several tools and materials were planned and produced in order to successfully disseminate the National Grid Initiative to the public and facilitate the exchange of information among Contributors. Dissemination is pursued using the following approaches. An efficient communication among the different contributors of the initiative is essential in order to achieve the objectives, so the main aim here is to provide for the institutions members with effective collaborative tools. An active effort has been made during dedicated training events organized in both Europe and South Africa to promote the knowledge and use of the infrastructure: June 2008, Catania, Italy : 1 st Training for Certification and Registration Authority Manager, Grid Site Administrator and User [29] July 2008, Cape Town, South Africa : 2 nd Training for User, Site Administrators; 1 st Training for Application Developers & Grid Science & Industry Open Day[30]. December 2008, Durban, South Africa: Training for User & Application developers[31] Events of general interest, such as local and international workshops on computing, where the South Africa Grid Initiative will be publicized and promoted: CHPC 2007 Conference Cape Town, South Africa (December 2007) Meeting with the Association of South African University Directors of Information Technology (ASAUDIT) (March 2008) First round of consultative meetings, Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa (April 2008) EGEE-III Conference, Istanbul, Turkey[32] CHPC2008 Conference, Durban, South Africa (December 2008).[33] Copyright 2009 The authors Page 10 of 14

11 Open Grid Forum and Fourth EGEE Users Forum, Catania, Italy [35] The South African National Grid Initiative highlights the importance of up-to-date accessible training by an experienced team. The South Africa user training staff and the GILDA team aim to provide a full programme of accurate and engaging tutorials with realworld examples. This is vital to spreading the word about the importance of grid technology to research and industry throughout not only South Africa, but also other African countries. One of the biggest challenges for these two teams is to keep the training programme upto-date, as the project infrastructure develops and also to present the material in such a way that it meets the needs of a diverse community. This includes new staff to the project, academics well-versed in grid technology, subject specialists wishing to understand how this technology can help them pursue their research, people in industry keen to exploit the new grid computing environment for commercial reasons and many more. The GILDA t- Infrastructure and its free access to training material on its wiki and website give an important improvement in collecting kit exercises for the user training event and virtual services for site administrator training event. 5.3 Technical and Integration Developments During the initial deployment of the grid services at the first sites, we had the opportunity to consider some interesting developments in terms of integration of various systems. Two of these are highlighted here, the integration of the CSIR Cluster Computing Centre (C4) and general integration of the national infrastructure to the greater EGEE grid. The site at the C4 had already installed a compute cluster managed by the Sun Grid Engine from Sun Microsystems. This is a very flexible and capable resource management system, which is unfortunately not currently supported by the glite CE service. By drawing on the experience of similar efforts within EGEE[34], the necessary changes were made to the glite compute element in order to integrate this large computing facility to the national grid in a short amount of time. This provides the experience necessary to repeat the procedure in South Africa (where SGE is a very popular resource manager, used at several sites) at other sites, and provides the opportunity for further and closer development with the vendor involved (Sun Microsystems in this case). Integration into the EGEE production grid is one the most interesting possibilities for collaboration with virtual organisations in Europe. While a level of such integration has been achieved at a VO-level for the South African participation in the LHC experiments (ALICE and recently the ATLAS collaboration), there has not been an official integration into the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) or EGEE. There has, however, been informal contact with EGEE on the topic and a first step has been taken by including the SAGrid services in the Global Operations Centre (GOC) monitoring information (Figure 7) 6. Results 6.1 Joint Research Unit The first step in consolidating the infrastructure and work done in South Africa was to organise the directors of participating sites into a Joint Research Unit, based on the EGEE definition. The SAGrid Initiative JRU was drafted at a meeting at ithemba LABS on 31 July This document sets the stage for a National Grid Initiative in South Africa based on a more formal agreement including the national governmental and research structures. Copyright 2009 The authors Page 11 of 14

12 6.2 Certificate Authority (CA) Any grid infrastructure relies critically on the security infrastructure which allows different sites to trust each other and the users on these sites. This security infrastructure, is based on public-key certificates which are usually issued by national Certificate Authorities. At the start of this project, no CA existed in South Africa which was a member of the International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF), which is essential in allowing international cooperation of grid infrastructures. The Meraka Institute has since been identified as the host for the South African CA, due to its strategic mission in ICT, and has started the procedures for accreditation to the EU Grid Policy Management Authority, which precede accreditation to the IGTF. Since this procedure is highly sensitive, the start of a highly trusted international relationship, it can last several months. In the interim, however, in order not to impede grid deployment in South Africa, certificates are being issued to South African users and hosts by the Italian Certificate Authority. In practice this is done by allowing the Italian CA to delegate certificate issuing authority to two so-called Registration Authorities (RA's) which can issue certificates in South Africa. This interim agreement allows the deployment of grid sites and their integration into national and international infrastructure to proceed. 6.3 Dissemination, Training and Site Deployment The group represented by the JRU had volunteered in early 2008 to install the first sites, and dedicated training sessions were organised to support this activity by GILDA. Part of these training sessions was the dissemination of results to the audiences of potential and current grid users, providing information about the available opportunities and transferring competence to the people acting as users, managers, developers, teachers, etc. As discussed in section 5, during the three major events in Catania, Cape Town and Durban, as well as several other meetings in both Europe and South Africa, the project was presented to the research communities of the two Continents. A joint workshop with experts from the WISDOM grid collaboration and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) was also held in Durban in the context of the CHPC 2008 Conference. Eight events were held, where 90 attendees were trained, consisting of theoretical and practical sessions with specific contents for each role of sites, administrators and users of the grid. A local South Africa training team has been instructed during the first part of the project and it currently carries out part of the dissemination and site support activities inside South Africa, in collaboration with GILDA team. The availability of more trainers will allow the expansion of similar activities in other countries in the region, and preparation for this expanded support is ongoing at the participating sites. 7. Business Benefits An important aspect of similar projects in other regions, implemented with similar goals, resources and timelines, has been the long-term project sustainability. Experience has shown that a healthy interaction with businesses in the fields of the various Virtual Organisations, as well as leading software and hardware vendors can be very beneficial to creating an environment suitable to this aim. We outline here some of our ongoing efforts to favourable conditions for vendor and commercial participation at all levels of the project. 7.1 Vendor Competitiveness and Support for New Market Opportunities Deployment of new site services itself provides a a significant new market for vendors within South Africa, however the unknown factor discourages and delays purchases of Copyright 2009 The authors Page 12 of 14

13 several HPC configurations. This results in opportunities being lost both on the vendors' and on the client side. For example, the vendor may be new to the country and not have a well-established network or influence, and thus not fully understand the client's concerns or how to address them. On the client side, the wide variety and lack of relevant benchmarks may cause them to become confused with the array of products and solutions available, thereby delay a decision on any particular product. The federal nature of the grid encourages local control as far as possible, aiming to reduce the level of all barriers to entry and participation. While some aspects, such as the operating system have to be standardised, following from the choice of middleware which underlies the entire project (glite), certain cluster configurations are easier to deploy and maintain than others. What is really required though is a certification that a given configuration of software and hardware will be both compatible with the rest of the grid and easily manageable, while leaving the door open to experimentation and certification of ever more different configurations. As a general rule, during the deployment of each site, we would like to encourage healthy competition and support of open standards amongst vendors, both in terms of software and hardware, rather than relying on any single vendor to provide official solutions. This would, in our opinion, give all vendors a good reason to remain interested in the HPC and grid computing market in South Africa and moreover avoid the serious problem of vendor-lock in. We view the large vendors in South Africa as partners in the project and rely on them for funding and support in several areas, without declaring a preference for any particular vendor. 7.2 Multi-Vendor Development and Certification Laboratory In order to level the playing field for all vendors, we propose to form an research facility, which we will call the experimental multi-vendor research and certification laboratory. This facility should be comprised of hardware from the large vendors in South Africa : Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett Packard. The primary aim of the laboratory, and what makes it a research tool, is to provide a testbed for new applications. However, taking into account the discussions above, a strong secondary aim is to provide a permanent, open and independent certification facility on which to prove the compatibility of middleware, management tools and software which are used in various site configurations. 7.3 Collaboration with the HP-UNESCO Sponsored Anti-Brain Drain Project A project supported jointly between Hewlett Packard Laboratories and UNESCO, to encourage a circulation of knowledge ( brain circulation ) is currently in place in order slow the adverse effects of brain drain in African countries. One of the ways in which this is to be achieved is to provide the African diaspora with a tool for collaboration with the researchers in their home countries. The technology used for this is the grid-computing model, with services running in the home country being integrated with the EGEE infrastructure in Europe. The SA grid is collaborating closely with the project and HP South Africa in order to develop creative connections between researchers and businesses which many benefit from it. 8. Conclusions The South Africa Grid Initiative aims the further deployment, extension over time and evolution of grid-enabled e-infrastructures, exploiting the sharing of a larger set of computing resources, scientific instrumentation and data facilities across multiple scientific disciplines. It aims also at providing persistent, cross-disciplinary services to virtual Copyright 2009 The authors Page 13 of 14

14 organisations serving research communities which need to cooperate and collaborate with corresponding groups of scientists in South Africa and internationally, using transparent access to resources and data with increased levels of trust and confidence. The process of deploying a stable national infrastructure has to be undertaken at many levels, including national organisation and infrastructure, community development and support and international cooperation. The expected benefits to the research communities mentioned above is expected to mirror the experience of similar that provided by other national and regional infrastructure projects. The national grid aims to exploit to the full extent the possibilities afforded by the other cyberinfrastructure projects in South Africa, the National Research Network SANREN and the Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC). The initial deployment of computing and storage resources to sites around the country is currently functional, in a prototypical phase. The refinement of the resources necessary to bring them to production readiness is under way. The eventual uptake and usage of the grid paradigm will be encouraged through regular dissemination and training events. The strong regional cooperation and collaboration on projects such as the HP/UNESCO Brain Drain project will serve to make the experiences gained during this project in South Africa relevant also to the rest of the African continent. References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] EGEE website,, [6] Department of Science and Technology public web page,, [7] South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research public web page,, [8] SANReN Public Website,, [9] Centre for High-Performance Computing public webpage,, [10] [11] Worldwide LHC Computing Grid public website,, [12] ALICE Experiment public web page, [13] The ALICE Collaboration, K Aamodt et al, The ALICE Experiment at the CERN LHC, 2008 [14] The official outreach page for the ATLAS Experiment at CERN.,, [15] The WISDOM grid home page,, [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] glite User Guide,, [23] N. Santos and B. Koblitz, Distributed Metadata with the AMGA Metadata Catalog, 2006 [24] Geoff Daniels, SANReN schematic diagram, 2008 [25] Geant Network Public Website,, [26] South African National Grid Wiki Website,, [27] GSTAT monitoring web pages for SAgrid,, [28] Agenda server for SAGrid,, [29] First South Africa Grid Training in Catania,, [30] South African National Compute Grid Training, Deployment and Strategy Meeting,, [31] CHPC Conference Grid Workshop, [32] EGEE Conference 2008, egee08.eu-egee.org/index.php?id=342 [33] CHPC Conference 2008, [34] SGE Implementation in glite, Copyright 2009 The authors Page 14 of 14