Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community · community, including pan-European research collaborations, organisations and e-Infrastructures. The Report covers the period to end of

30-03-2015

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1) Strategic Report on the GÉANT User Community

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1)

Contractual Date: 31-03-2015

Actual Date: 30-03-2015

Grant Agreement No.: 605243

Activity: 1/NA4

Task Item: Task 3

Nature of Deliverable: R

Dissemination Level PU (Public)

Lead Partner: GEANT Ltd

Document Code: GN3PLUS14-644-132

Authors: V. Capone (GEANT Ltd), D. Cresti (GARR), J. Dyer (GEANT Association), M. Minaricova (GEANT

Ltd), R. Sabatino (GEANT Ltd), J. Tendel (DFN), D. Vicinanza (GEANT Ltd), B. Weber (GEANT Ltd)

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework

Programme (FP7 2007–2013) under Grant Agreement No. 605243 (GN3plus).

Abstract

This Report provides an overview the GÉANT project’s strategy and engagement with the GÉANT service area user

community, including pan-European research collaborations, organisations and e-Infrastructures. The Report covers the

period to end of project Q4Y2 (April 2015).

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1) Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community Document Code: GN3PLUS14-644-132

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1) Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community Document Code: GN3PLUS14-644-132 i

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 1

2 Introduction 4

3 The Strategy 5

3.1 The NREN User Survey 5

3.2 The Strategy for Meeting User Needs 7

3.3 The One Stop Shop 8

3.4 International User Advisory Committee 9

4 Physics 12

4.1 The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 12

4.1.1 The LHC Computing Model 12

4.1.2 LHCOPN 12

4.1.3 LHCONE 13

4.1.4 NA4 T3 actions and strategy 14

4.2 BELLE II 15

5 Radio astronomy 18

5.1 SKA 18

5.2 eVLBI 18

5.3 CTA 18

6 Earth Sciences 19

6.1 EIDA 19

6.2 EPOS 20

6.3 GEO 22

6.3.1 Background 22

6.3.2 Support 23

6.3.3 Awareness and information on R&E networking 24

6.3.4 Improvement of global connectivity 24

6.3.5 AAI 24

6.3.6 Utilisation of Communication Networks 24

6.3.7 GEOSS Design and Interoperability 25

6.4 Copernicus 25

6.4.1 Background 25

6.4.2 Data distribution for Copernicus 26

6.4.3 Discussions with GÉANT – DFN 26

Executive Summary

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6.5 Earth Sciences Workshop 29

7 Collaboration with e-Infrastructures 31

7.1 Services to support e-Infrastructures 31

7.2 Collaboration to support users and development of services 33

7.3 Support for Helix Nebula 34

7.3.1 HN production service: the HN market place HNX 34

7.3.2 Costs and resources associated with supporting Helix Nebula 35

8 Life Sciences 37

9 Arts and Humanities 38

9.1 CLARIN 38

9.2 Data Sonification 40

9.2.1 Introduction to data sonification 40

9.2.2 Sonification cases support by GÉANT 40

10 Broadening the User Base 42

10.1 Collaboration with large organisations 42

10.1.1 CERN 42

10.1.2 ESA 43

10.1.3 EUMETSAT 43

10.2 Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) 44

10.3 EU agencies 45

10.3.1 Background 45

10.3.2 Support 45

10.3.3 Survey: Connecting EU agencies to GÉANT 45

10.3.4 Cloud services 47

11 Future Internet 48

11.1 CONFINE 48

11.2 SmartFIRE 49

11.2.1 Project partners 49

11.2.2 Proposed solution and implementation 50

12 FET Flagship projects 51

13 Dissemination 52

14 Conclusions 53

Appendix A One Stop Shop Principles 54

A.1 Motivation 54

Executive Summary

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1) Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community Document Code: GN3PLUS14-644-132 iii

A.2 Segmentation 55

A.3 Process Overview 55

A.4 User Needs/Requirement Gathering 56

A.5 Design 58

A.6 Proposal 59

A.7 Implementation 60

A.8 Operation 61

A.9 Roles and Responsibilities 62

Appendix B ESA Supported Initiatives 64

B.1 JAXA-ESOC connectivity 64

B.2 Connecting EKO to ESAC and ESTEC 66

B.3 ESA Search and Rescue System 67

References 68

Glossary 69

Executive Summary

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Table of Figures

Figure 3.1: User communities currently prioritised by NRENs 6

Figure 3.2: International projects actively supported by the NRENs 7

Figure 4.1: LHCOPN network diagram 13

Figure 4.2: LHCONE infrastructure for LHC Tier1 Data Centre and Tier2 Analysis Centre 14

Figure 4.3: Network topology built within the GÉANT backbone and the GARR and DFN

network 17

Figure 6.1: EIDA stations with unrestricted data access 20

Figure 6.2: Resources and Information sources for EPOS 21

Figure 6.3: Member countries of GEO (source: [EOorg], 5 February 2015) 23

Figure 6.4: Proposal 1 – additional peering between DFN and DTAG without involving

Copernicus 28

Figure 6.5: Proposal 2 – the Multihome peering solution preferred by DFN 28

Figure 7.1: The existing network connectivity for PRACE. 31

Figure 7.2: The proposed PRACE connectivity based on a VPN 32

Figure 7.3: Total supporting HN traffic seen for three of the Suppliers (ATOS, Interoute

and CloudSigma) 36

Figure 9.1: Overview of the CLARIN data centres (status as at February 2015) 38

Figure 10.1: Survey results about current, short-term and mid-term future use of

GÉANT 46

Figure A.1: Large user group interaction: process overview 55

Figure A.2: Requirement gathering 57

Figure A.3: Design phase 58

Figure A.4: Proposal phase 59

Figure A.5: Implementation phase 60

Figure A.6: Operation 61

Figure B.1: Diagram for JAXA-ESOC connectivity 65

Figure B.2: Diagram for connecting EKO to ESAC and ESTEC 66

Figure B.3: Diagram for ESA Search and Rescue system connectivity 67

Table of Tables

Table 2.1: Members of the IUAC 10

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1) Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community Document Code: GN3PLUS14-644-132 1

Executive Summary

The deliverable describes the strategy that NA4 T3 has adopted within the GN3plus project towards

engaging with the broader user community, followed by a report of the various interactions carried

out. NA4 T3‘s mission is to support science and research carried out by institutions connected to

NRENs.

Defining the strategy

NA4 T3 started its work by conducting a survey targeted at NRENs with the aim to define a strategy for interacting with users, projects and/or collaborations. The survey asked NRENs about their interactions with national users and what their own priorities would be both nationally and for GN3plus. A total of 25 NRENs responded to the survey. As a result of the analysis the following conclusions were drawn:

Continue to pay close attention to HEP, Astronomy and liaison with other e-infrastructures.

Proactively support Life Sciences and Earth Sciences.

Support requests received from any other scientific discipline.

Two further aspects, briefly introduced below and described in more detail within the body of this

deliverable, contribute to defining the strategy: the one stop shop principle and the International User

Advisory Committee. This is followed by a list of areas of interest where NA4 T3 has focused its support.

The one stop shop

Already introduced in the GN2 and GN3 projects, the one stop shop concept and way of working aims

to facilitate international collaborations by providing a central point of coordination between users,

projects, NRENs and the GÉANT project. Although the concept mainly addresses the flow of

communication, in GN3plus advances have been made in terms of design, operational support and

financial information gathering.

The International User Advisory Committee (IUAC)

The IUAC was established to advise on strategy and policy for interacting with pan-European user

groups and organisations and responds to the GN3plus Assembly. The input of the IUAC was carefully

considered in developing the NA4 T3 strategy.

High Energy Physics (HEP)

Support for LHC has continued, most significantly by fine-tuning the traffic flows for T1 centres to

other T1 centres and enabling testing of 100Gbps transatlantic connectivity. The Belle-II experiment

is now also supported, and it is integrated into the LHC international network infrastructure.

Executive Summary


Astronomy

Preliminary work has started regarding SKA and CTA, and whilst it is too early to see concrete actions

for these, the NA4 team is involved in the international dialogues making preparations for the required

services.

Earth Sciences

Progress in the Earth Sciences sector includes work with the GEO secretariat, several projects with ESA

and on-going dialogue to support the Copernicus programme. NA4 T3 has established an effective

working relationship with the seismology community, by interacting with the Research Infrastructure

EIDA and EPOS. The most relevant GÉANT services required by these are in the area of Federated

identity Management. NA4 T3 has facilitated discussions with the experts from SA5.

e-Infrastructures and organisations

NA4 T3 has continued its dialogue with EGI, PRACE and EUDAT on two fronts:

Periodic review of services required from GÉANT to operate the e-Infrastructures,

complemented by participation in their annual community events or conferences.

Collaboration to provide a coordinated interaction with users. This has been trialled

successfully in an Earth Sciences workshop held in Amsterdam 22–23 January 2015. It was

driven by GEANT NA4 T3, with successful involvement of EGI, PRACE and EUDAT.

NA4 T3 managed the interaction with CERN for the provision of a 100-Gbps circuit between CERN and

the Wigner Data Centre in Budapest, Hungary.

NA4 T3 worked with EUMETSAT, the European intergovernmental organisation that supplies weather

and climate-related satellite data, images and products. GÉANT and EUMETSAT worked on a proposal

for the “EUMETCast Terrestrial Project” with the aim to disseminate operational data from EUMETSAT

Head Quarters in Darmstadt, Germany, to 34 sites in 31 countries in Europe, with the collaboration of

27 NRENs and using the GÉANT network. This represented a working example of the one stop shop

concept where GÉANT acted on behalf of all the NRENs with the user, EUMETSAT in this case,

conveying the technical, operational and financial information needed to support the needs of the

user.

Many initiatives have been or are underway to support ESA, including support for Copernicus,

connectivity to support corporate and mission (e.g. ESOC-JAXA) operations as well as providing

consultancy for the establishment of an Identity Federation for ESA.

The Helix Nebula Initiative is relevant to GN3plus SA7 work. NA4 T3 has worked to provide the

necessary support to Helix Nebula in terms of network service to connect the Service providers and to

bridge with SA7 on the discussion of services offered. The Helix Nebula Initiative has spawned a

production service (HNX). This is supported, in the same way as the more general initiative, at no cost

from GÉANT until 31 March 2015. The GÉANT Product Management team, NA4 T3 and SA7 have

worked together to define a long term business model for cloud services in general, including HNX,

which is now under consideration by the GÉANT Cost Sharing Working Group (CSWG).

Executive Summary


Life Sciences

The Life Sciences community has been among one of the top targets for NA4 T3 involvement. After a

few sporadic contacts (visits to institutions, occasional face to face chats with individuals during

events), a coordinated strategy has taken place starting with a workshop held by BioMedBridges and

ELIXIR at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton, UK, in May 2014, followed by a second Workshop at EMBL in Heidelberg,

Germany in February 2015. The German workshop was specifically aimed at the Bio-imaging

community. As a result, GÉANT has been asked to coordinate a network testing campaign between a

few sites in the community.

Other initiatives

NA4 T3 is providing:

Dialogue with EU agencies to facilitate access to cloud services and mutual disaster recovery

via GÉANT.

Coordination of the International User Advisory Committee (IUAC).

Support for Future Internet projects: CONFINE, SmartFIRE.

Monitoring of EU Flagship projects.

Introduction


2 Introduction

This deliverable reports on the results of the user liaison task (NA4 T3) during the GN3plus project.

Whilst the GÉANT project members have a history of working together to serve the needs of High

Energy Physics (HEP) and radio-astronomy, the range of research and scientific collaborations on a

pan-European scale is huge. Apart from these two areas (HEP and radio-astronomy) there was very

little knowledge of and coordinated support by GÉANT and the NRENs regarding other areas of

collaborative science at the start of GN3plus.

As a first step, in order to define its strategy, NA4 T3 conducted a survey of the NRENs to gather

knowledge about the general interaction NRENs have with scientific communities, to identify areas of

priority and areas of opportunities for collaboration. The User Survey results are outlined in section

3.1.

Following a description of the development of the strategy, the deliverable outlines achievements in

the following areas of work:

Support for traditional communities, such as HEP and radio-astronomy.

Engagement with Earth Sciences and Life Sciences.

Supporting Future Internet, Arts and Humanities.

Collaboration with large organisations (e.g. CERN, ESA, EUMETSAT), e-Infrastructures (e.g. EGI,

PRACE, EUDAT ) and other initiatives (e.g. Helix Nebula).

EU Flagship projects.

Assisting the broadening of the NREN user base.

It is noted that in general, costs may be incurred when delivering services and support to the user

communities. Costs may be incurred within NRENs, in which case the NREN recovers those costs from

the connecting organisations according to their national policies. Any costs incurred by the GÉANT

network are typically recovered via the corresponding NRENs according to policies set out by the

GÉANT Association.

The Strategy


3 The Strategy

3.1 The NREN User Survey

In accordance with the objectives of the task, namely:

Ensure that GÉANT provides the best possible service for the European (and wider) R&E sector.

Coordinate across the GN3plus community to facilitate and simplify the customer experience

and interactions required in international, collaborative projects.

Develop and implement a strategy for addressing user needs across GÉANT in a coherent and

effective way.

Provide content to the case study material development in NA2.

The NA4 T3 team conducted a survey among European NRENs with the goal of establishing and

aligning priorities vis-à-vis the international user communities, and harmonising activities in European

and international projects. This in turn enables the development of the one stop shop concept,

whereby select members of the GÉANT project can liaise with European and international user

communities in synchrony with the NRENs, to ease the adoption of global-scale services for these

communities.

The specific goal of the survey was thus to obtain feedback from NRENs on which user communities

are most “strategic” to them, and to get an updated overview of NREN activities in current and

planned international user projects. These survey results are crucial in developing a strategy to engage

with pan-European users and projects; they also help to uncover potential case study material.

The survey was conducted during the second half 2013. It was distributed to 32 European NRENs, to

which 25 responded in full or in part.

On a national level, over half the NRENs that answered the survey conduct their own user surveys.

Among those who don’t, many maintain a close relationship with their users by other means, such as

high level committees and advisory groups.

The NRENs were asked which user communities they currently prioritise in terms of research area,

and what international projects they are currently involved in. The research areas were grouped into

the following nine categories:1

Social Sciences and Humanities.

Life sciences (Food and agriculture, Biology, Medical Imaging, Bioinformatics).

Environmental, Marine and Earth Sciences (Atmospheric Sciences, Biodiversity, Marine

Sciences, Climatology).

Engineering (Aerodynamics, Seismology, Structural Engineering).

Energy.

1 User categories from http://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/

http://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/

The Strategy


Material sciences, Chemistry and Nanotechnologies.

Physical sciences and Astronomy (High-Energy Physics, Astrophysics).

Information and Communication Technologies, Mathematics.

Other.

Figure 3.1 shows the responses:

Figure 3.1: User communities currently prioritised by NRENs

The results show that the highest priority – though not by a large margin – is assigned to the

“traditional” high-bandwidth communities: LHC (Physical Sciences) and “partner” e-Infrastructures

such as PRACE, EGI and EUDAT (ICT). This is also reflected in the number of international projects

actively supported by the NRENs, as shown in Figure 3.2.

The Strategy


Figure 3.2: International projects actively supported by the NRENs

The next highest-priority areas are Life Sciences (LS) and Earth Sciences (ES): this particular result is

significant. NA4 T3 does not have historical data specifically addressing this question, but given our

common knowledge of past activities in service of user communities, it is reasonable to hypothesise

that these scientific domains are rising faster as new priorities for the NRENs and for GÉANT and thus

require focused attention.

3.2 The Strategy for Meeting User Needs

From a strategic standpoint this means that, while the Physical sciences and ICT communities continue

to have high priority in terms of maintaining and developing good relationships and providing high

quality services, there are fewer unknowns that need to be catered for and thus less of a learning

curve in meeting these parties’ requirements. On the other hand, the LS and ES communities require

a more proactive approach, as GÉANT and the NRENs need to learn about their requirements and the

communities need more guidance in the process of addressing these requirements.

For this reason, NA4 T3 has been particularly active in providing specific occasions for the discussion

of community needs among the major LS and ES community stakeholders.

It should be noted that roughly half the NRENs that responded (IL, FI, EE, BE, DE, HR, LT, PT, CH) make

the point that all user communities have the same priority, as a matter of principle. Furthermore,

several NRENs indicated specific additional groups under the “other” category, such as Public

administration, Schools, and research spin-offs. It is of course important, in implementing any

The Strategy


particular strategy, to maintain flexibility and openness to new relationships which may not be

highlighted as specific priorities by a numbers-based analysis.

In conclusion, the (qualitative) type of effort groupings by type of relationship, as follows:

Current customers/consumers with very large data transfer needs – e.g. the LHC and related

projects; these users know what they want, GÉANT and the NRENs essentially respond to

requests.

"Technology partners", e.g. PRACE and EGI; these are more-or-less our customers, but they

share with GÉANT and the NRENs – at least in part – an end-user community; this relationship

entails improving collaborations as service providers.

Emerging international customers, e.g. the ESFRI projects and international organisations like

EMBL and ESA. These communities may be further grouped by field and require the most effort

in qualitative terms, to better understand their needs and provide guidance in the

implementation of services.

Strategically, the team has thus been particularly proactive with groups from the Life Sciences and

Earth Sciences, while of course remaining open to any other group.

3.3 The One Stop Shop

Already introduced in the GN2 and further developed in the GN3 projects, the one stop shop concept

and way of working has been established specifically to provide coordination to collect and share

information with international users whilst at the same time preserving the relationship between a

user site and the NREN that it connects to. This process is documented in Appendix A.

The need for a one stop shop is user-driven. Experience has shown over many years that international

collaborations with sites spread across many countries and NRENs find it extremely difficult (if not

impossible) to obtain on their own an overall view of how their needs can be met by the joint work of

NRENs and GÉANT: this includes understanding which services, in which configuration, operational

support and financial information. While in general each user asks its own NREN for services, in an

end-to-end international situation additional coordination is needed. This is because, in general,

different services are available in each NREN and with different terms and conditions.

From the GÉANT 2020 Strategy document:

GÉANT, as the principal European consultancy and service provider for their knowledge

communities, will be the ‘one stop shop’ for experts, products, and services. From the user’s

perspective, the experience must allow the perception of a single ‘provider’ even if the delivery

entails the collaboration of multiple GÉANT partners. GÉANT must provide a comprehensive

‘one-stop shop’ experience, supported by a federated organisation capable of implementing

and delivering federated services and initiatives in Europe and beyond. This function will build

on established internal procedures developed and operated by the entire GÉANT partnership.

These will be transparent to the user, allowing for NRENs to act locally on behalf of the central

or federated function. GÉANT will position itself as the provider of choice and will demonstrate

its value by serving its users with cost effective and efficient services ranging from commonly

available commodity services for general user requirements to bespoke service solutions

addressing the needs of high-end users.

The Strategy


Appendix A One Stop Shop Principles shows the key working principles of the one stop shop

summarised from GN3-11-144 : the coordination functions performed and the concept of the lead-

NREN.

In GN3plus, advances on this working model, based on specific feedback from user organisations such

as ESA and EUMETSAT, are:

The development of coordinated network operations support functions such as monitoring

and trouble-ticketing.

Management of network elements at user sites.

Curation of SLAs in a multi-domain environment.

Ongoing efforts to assess in which circumstances coordinated invoicing, ideally centralised, for

services can be achieved. It is clear that this is beneficial for the user organisations but it does

raise concerns within NRENs on the changing relationship between the NRENs and the user

site.

Examples where the advances have been developed include:

EUMETSAT for the development and operation of a monitoring portal, involving the

collaboration between 31 NRENs and GÉANT.

Proposal to ESA for interconnecting ESA sites in Kourou, French Guiana, in Madrid, Spain and

the Netherlands, where centralised network operational support and monitoring are proposed.

This is a result of the collaboration between GÉANT, RedIRIS, RENATER and SURFnet. The

proposal also contains coordinated financial information although invoicing remains between

the site and the respective NREN.

The feedback from users, organisations and Infrastructures such as ESA, EUMETSAT, PRACE, EIDA, EU

agencies has been very positive, and they all find the one stop shop communication channel of vital

importance to them to be able to achieve their objectives with the GÉANT community. Additional

formal feedback is being collated from within the IUAC (International user Advisory Committee) as

explained in the following section.

3.4 International User Advisory Committee

The International user Advisory Committee (IUAC) was newly established in GN3plus aiming to

interact with the GN3plus Partners’ Assembly, providing input on the development of policy and

practice within GÉANT from an international user perspective. The Chair of the IUAC is Senior Advisor

in the IT department of ESA and the group comprises 11 representatives of large research

organisations and collaborations.

The current members of the IUAC are listed in Table 3.1:

The Strategy


Table 3.1: Members of the IUAC

The committee meets on a bi-annual basis to provide advice on how to keep abreast with bandwidth-

demanding and data-intensive scientific developments and to best serve large international research

user. NA4 T4 operates as secretary to the Committee, prepares and facilitates meetings, and acts as

communication channel between the GÉANT Governance, NA4 Activities and the Committee. Within

GN3plus, NA4 T3 planned and facilitated three face-to face meetings:

November 2013 – DANTE (now GEANT Ltd), Cambridge, UK.

April 2014 – ESA, ESRIN site, Frascati, Italy.

December 2014 – CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

The meetings focused on input to and feedback on the GÉANT strategy, in depth discussion on AAI

services, cloud service provisioning as well as the networking set-ups and challenges of the different

user groups. This has led to the following four main outcomes:

Input to GEANT strategy 2020

The IUAC provided input and feedback to the GÉANT 2020 strategy on several occasions. Formal input

was given supporting the development of the GÉANT strategy. A set of questions posed by the Strategy

and Innovation Committee (SIC) was answered by each IUAC member. The replies were summarised

by NA4 T3 and collated into a White Paper.

The first draft of the strategy was reviewed at the meeting in Frascati, Italy. The feedback was collected

and fed back to the SIC for their consideration.

Name Affiliation

Maryline Lengert (Chair) ESA

Tony Cass CERN

Arpad Szomoru JIVE

Thomas Eickermann PRACE

Ralph Niederberger Human Brain Project

Duarte Borba ITER

Reinhard Budich ENES

Lothar Wolf EUMETSAT

Dieter van Uytvanck CLARIN

Rafael Jimenez ELIXIR

Rupert Lueck EMBL

The Strategy


Service feedback eduGAIN

CLARIN delivered a White Paper outlining their AAI set-up and requirements including feedback on

their experience with eduGAIN and recommendations for further service developments.

IUAC – Role in future projects

Following a discussion at the meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, the IUAC suggested that their role and

Terms of References (ToR) within GN3plus be reviewed and suggestions on its possible future role be

provided. The individual inputs were collated and have been forwarded to the GÉANT Association

Board for their consideration. Feedback is expected from the periodic GÉANT Association Board and

Assembly meetings.

GÉANT One Stop Shop concept

At the December 2014 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, it was suggested that formal

recommendations of how to deliver a one stop shop for large international users (i.e. extending

beyond the boundaries of a single NREN) be delivered. Recommendations via mail were collected.

Physics


4 Physics

The support to the use of computing for the Physics community is of paramount importance to GÉANT,

and a large number of activities have involved the experiments in High Energy Physics, especially the

LHC and BELLE II.

4.1 The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

4.1.1 The LHC Computing Model

The four experiments that make use of the Large Hadron Collider rely, for their computing needs, on

the Grid computing paradigm. This paradigm enables the sharing of heterogeneous computing and

storage resources from different locations and organisations, letting them appear as a single

computing cluster.

The LHC computing grid is best known as the World LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and is composed of

more than 200 sites, worldwide. Inside the WLCG, the sites are categorised by their role in the

computational model that in turn is based on the size, characteristics and performance of the site. Tier

0 is in the CERN site itself that hosts the LHC and the equipment needed to fetch the raw data out of

the experiment’s detectors. Tier 1s are 13 large Data Centres that help the Tier 0 to store raw data at

the time of data collection, and also contain the reprocessed data to be used for the analysis. Tier 2/3s

(approximately 150), use the processed data to perform the actual physics analysis.

On this underlying infrastructure, every experiment makes use of specific centralised software

systems that allow the distribution of the data and optimise available resources.

4.1.2 LHCOPN

The LHC Optical Private Network (LHCOPN) is a closed network infrastructure that was originally

intended to serve T0–T1 traffic and was later broadened to include T1–T1 traffic. Currently 13 Tier 1s

are connected directly to CERN over LHCOPN and there are also several connections between large

T1s.

Figure 4.1 shows the LHCOPN network topology.

Physics


Figure 4.1: LHCOPN network diagram

4.1.3 LHCONE

The new LHC data model stepped away from static and hierarchical associations of Tier 2s to a specific

Tier 1, to a more complex any-T1 to T2, any-T2 to T2, and any-T2 to T3 data transport. This change

resulted in the inception of the LHC Open Network Environment (LHCONE) that can provide

connectivity to T1/T2/T3 sites.

The current LHCONE network, which was implemented in early 2012, is based on interconnected VRF

instances, instantiated on the backbone networks of the participating regional and national RENs

(European NRENS, GÉANT, ESNet, and Internet2). These VRFs are connected to several Open Exchange

points (ManLan, WIX, StarLight, CERNLight, and NetherLight) where these networks establish peerings

with each other.

Since its inception in 2012, LHCONE has grown organically, from connecting around 10 WLCG sites in

a few RENs, to connecting more than 50 WLCG sites in over 15 RENs around the world. Currently, eight

T1s and over 40 T2s are connected to LHCONE and exchange traffic over LHCONE.

Figure 4.2 shows the LHCONE Layer3 network topology.

Physics


Figure 4.2: LHCONE infrastructure for LHC Tier1 Data Centre and Tier2 Analysis Centre

LHCONE is implemented on the backbone networks of over 15 RENs, most of them running a 100Gbps

backbone and connected to other networks using 100Gbps or multiple 10Gbps links. This makes

LHCONE VRF a decentralised, high speed and strongly connected core network. The end-sites

connected to LHCONE can get to all other sites connected to LHCONE with a single BGP peering and

do not need to setup a complicated routing-policy. The end-sites also get a single point of contact for

any issue relating to LHCONE. The LHCONE topology is based on Layer 3, which makes it very scalable

and there is no limit to the number of sites that can be connected to the LHCONE backbone.

4.1.4 NA4 T3 actions and strategy

Support to LHCOPN and LHCONE, both on the technical side and on the architectural and project sides,

has been provided by the GÉANT project members involved, with attendance at the LHCOPN/ONE

Joint Meeting held every four months, and also by hosting a meeting in Cambridge, UK, during 9–10

February 2015. In August 2013, two new transatlantic links, dedicated to LHCONE traffic, were funded

by DFN, GARR and RENATER and operated by GÉANT.

The strategy that NA4 T3 has successfully pursued during these two years has been to foster the

migration of the T1–T1 traffic from LHCOPN to LHCONE. The rationale behind this was the fact the

LHCOPN, although sufficiently reliable, is not a scalable solution, and during the LHC Network

Workshop, held at CERN in February 2014, the LHC experiments foresaw the possible need for major

upgrades for LHC Run2. In addition, in the current setup of LHCOPN, the T1–T1 transfer does not

Physics


always take the best possible path. For example, traffic between NL–T1 and UK–RAL must go through

CERN, and traffic between CNAF and IN2P3 goes via DE–KIT. The way to avoid this type of traffic flow

would have been to add more direct links between T1s, creating a full or partial mesh. However, this

is neither scalable nor cost-effective. Moving the T1–T1 traffic over LHCONE will let the data flows

take the best and most direct path available, instead of collapsing on a central location, with the added

benefit of being based on the highly reliable and resilient GÉANT backbone, instead of using an

assembly of privately-owned links.

This strategy was presented to the LHC networking community during the CERN Workshop in February

2014, and has been followed up with a large testing activity during April and May 2014. This activity

has involved three major T1 sites (KIT in Germany, CNAF in Italy and IN2P3 in France), and their

connecting NRENs (DFN, GARR and RENATER), migrating all their T1–T1 traffic from LHCOPN to

LHCONE for two months. The successful result of the migration test was presented to the

LHCONE/OPN Meeting at the University of Michigan, USA, in September 2014. Beginning in January

2015, DFN, GARR and RENATER have decommissioned the Cross Border Fibres that were used for the

T1–T1 traffic between their sites. Moreover, a new 10G circuit has been provided by GÉANT to directly

connect KIT to CERN. During November and December 2014, a new activity was held with KIT and

CNAF, testing their LHCONE connection as a backup for the T0–T1 traffic. The positive results of this

activity have strengthened the confidence and recognition of LHCONE as a reliable and capable

infrastructure to serve the LHC community. A great amount of traffic is expected on the GÉANT

backbone during Run 2 of the LHC, which will also allow the connecting NRENs to maximise the use

their IP subscription.

In October 2014, GÉANT was the first operator to enable IPv6 on its LHCONE VRF, activating the Ipv6

BGP peering with RENATER. Following, on February 2015 the peering was established with CERN, and

during March 2015 with ESNet.

In parallel, T3 is collaborating with the CTO Office and the International Relations team on extending

LHCONE to other world regions. Starting from the Asia-Pacific area, during the 38th APAN meeting,

held in August 2014 in Taiwan, a GÉANT/CERN joint strategy was presented to involve the LHC

computing sites and the network operators in the region. Technical activities are progressing to join

LHCONE to Asia, involving the CMS Tier2 site in Pakistan, the local NREN and the TEIN regional network.

At the LHCONE/OPN meeting in February 2014 in Cambridge, UK, the request from the Brazilian HEP

community (four Tier2 sites) to join LHCONE was reported. An activity was started, led by NA4 T3, to

involve the Brazilian NREN RNP and to establish a peering using the RedCLARA connection between

GÉANT and Latin America.

4.2 BELLE II

BELLE-II is a collaboration of more than 530 physicists from 94 institutions across 23 countries that

deals with the project of an asymmetric electron-positron (e+e-) collider named SuperKEKB, engaged

in the so-called “flavour physics” that uses precise measurements of the interactions involving various

quark families (“flavours”). It is the continuation of the former BELLE collaboration (and in the track

of other experiments like BaBar) on the same topic that used a smaller-scale and older collider facility

(KEK-B). The ultimate goal is to understand the formation of the universe, based on the assumption

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that while at the Big Bang time there were equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, today only

matter remains. The peak luminosity of SuperKEKB is expected to reach 8x1036 cm-2s-1, and the

expected data production of the detector is rated at ~50PB/year. The experiment will have a

distributed computing system making use of grid computing facilities.

The experiment facility is located in an area near Tsukuba (45 minutes by express train from Tokyo),

that also hosts the computing equipment needed to store the raw data produced by the detectors. A

mirror site is located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington State, USA,

that will host the same data and will reprocess them, so to transform them into the so-called mDST

(physics-analysis-oriented compact dataset made from raw data). These data will be transferred to a

number of sites in Germany (40% - DESY, GridKa), Italy (40% - CNAF, INFN–Naples, INFN–Turin, INFN–

Pisa) and Slovenia (20% - SiGNET), where will be performed the MonteCarlo and the Ntuple production.

The subsequent analysis of the Ntuple will be performed on an (at the moment) unknown number of

worldwide-spread sites.

The involvement with the project was initiated with the occasion of the BELLE II Network Workshop,

held in Vienna, Austria, in October 2013. At a following meeting, held at KEK Institute in Japan, on

December 2013, the possibility of using perfSONAR as a monitoring solution was presented, and in

the following months the setup and deployment of a perfSONAR-MDM monitoring testbed was

performed, with Measurement Points in Japan, USA and Europe, with a MDM central service in the

USA. Subsequently, a new installation campaign was triggered at the following BELLE II computing

Workshop, held in May 2015 in Italy, asking to all the remaining sites to install perfSONAR MPs.

At that meeting another large-scale activity that NA4 T3 has coordinated for the BELLE II project, a

Trans-Atlantic Data Challenge, was also announced and presented. The test was performed on two

different days during April 2014, with four organisations involved (ESNet, GÉANT, DFN and GARR) and

four sites (PNNL in the USA, INFN-Napoli and CNAF in Italy and KIT in Germany), simulating one-day’s

worth of raw-data flow (25 TB) between the USA and Europe, using the ANA-100G link.

Figure 4.3 shows the network topology built within the GÉANT backbone and the GARR and DFN

networks.

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Figure 4.3: Network topology built within the GÉANT backbone and the GARR and DFN network

One of the most important achievements was, eventually, to include the BELLE II sites in LHCONE. This

outcome was the result of a six-month campaign with the network operators, with the final decision

to be approved at the LHCONE meeting at the University of Michigan, USA, in September 2015, at

which BELLE II representatives will be invited to attend.

Radio astronomy


5 Radio astronomy

5.1 SKA

The support to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ongoing activity, held in collaboration with the

CTO Office, also since GÉANT is one of the members of the Signal And Data Transport Consortium

(SADT), with a consulting function for all the network aspects of SKA.

During the second half of 2014, a GÉANT/SKA joint activity was put forward to organise a demo session

on the occasion of SuperComputing14 (SC14), held during 16–21 November 2014 in New Orleans, USA.

The session consisted of a HD video connection from the GÉANT booth in New Orleans to the SKA

control centre in Perth, Australia and to the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO),

Cambridge, UK. During the session it was possible to operate the antennas remotely, showing them

moving via a webcam pointing at the dishes, and at the same time showing in real-time the output

signal from the receivers, changing in accordance with the antennas movement. Dr Keith Grange,

leader of the SADT, was present at the GÉANT booth during the demo sessions.

5.2 eVLBI

In 2014, following many years of activities in the EXPRES/NEXPRES project (which ended in 2012),

NA4 T3 promoted a renewal of the liaison with the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (eVLBI)

community. In a first meeting in March 2014 it was decided to reinstate the EVN-NREN Meeting series,

that used to happen annually during the EXPRES/NEXPRES projects, and used to be the occasion for

the NREN community and the Radio astronomy community to meet and exchange information.

NA4 T3 has organised and sponsored the 9th EVN-NREN Meeting, following the 3rd International VLBI

Technology Workshop, held in November 2014 in Groningen, the Netherlands. The meeting was

attended by more than 50 representatives from the Radio astronomy community, and there were

contributions from NA4 T3 and several NRENs.

5.3 CTA

For the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a project to build a system of very high energy gamma ray

telescopes, NA4 T3 has provided budgetary information for connecting sites in Latin America, North

America, Namibia and Tenerife, Spain to IN2P3 in Lyon, France, via GÉANT and NRENs in the regions

involved. Each site would require dedicated 1–10Gbps capacity, with an implementation planned to

start in 2016/2017.

Earth Sciences


6 Earth Sciences

As described in the output of the strategy, Earth Sciences is a high priority scientific sector that NRENs

and GÉANT wish to proactively engage with. Earth Sciences is a very broad sector and includes

activities such as:

Earth Observation and Satellite imaging.

Climate studies and climate modelling.

Weather forecasting.

Seismology.

Geology.

Oceanography.

Atmospheric studies.

In turn, the various communities avail of Research Infrastructures to support their research. NA4 T3

has actively engaged with the following:

EIDA (European Integrated Data Archive), used by seismologists.

EPOS (European Plate Observation System), used by seismologists and others.

6.1 EIDA

The European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA) is a research infrastructure that provides a distributed

data centre that:

Securely archives seismic waveform data and related metadata.

Provides transparent access to the archives for the geosciences research communities.

The data provided by EIDA amounts to a total of ~350TB, originating from ~4500 stations worldwide.

It is hosted across the following nine nodes in Europe:

GFZ European, Global, temporary deployments.

ODC European-Mediterranean area (VEBSN).

ETH Switzerland.

INGV Italy, European-Mediterranean (MedNet).

RESIF France and Global temporary deployments.

BGR Germany.

NIEP Romania.

IPGP France (volcanological observatories) and Global.

GEOSCOPE, a French global network of seismic stations.

LMU Germany (BayernNetz).

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Most of the data is freely available, but there is a set of data to which access is restricted for a period

of time. To access the restricted data, the scientists currently need to have a specific account on the

node that hosts the data. In this case it is clear that Federated Identity management and eduGAIN is

of strong interest to EIDA. The NA4 T3 team is facilitating a dialogue between EIDA and the GN3plus

SA5 team to examine in more detail the Federated identity management requirements of EIDA and to

develop a roadmap for its deployment.

Figure 6.1: EIDA stations with unrestricted data access

Regarding Cloud Services, EIDA plans to use the services provided by EUDAT, especially for the long-

term identification and preservation of data. The developments of GN3plus SA7 are also of interest to

EIDA, especially the catalogue and the definition of the clear set of requirements relevant to the R&E

community.

6.2 EPOS

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a Research Infrastructure project in support of solid

Earth Sciences, containing information and pointers to resources that can be used by researchers in

this field. EPOS contains information about:

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244 Research Infrastructures.

138 Institutions.

22 countries.

2272 GPS receivers.

4939 seismic stations.

464 TB Seismic data.

1.095 PB Storage capacity (seismology).

1.240 PB Storage capacity (GNSS DC).

828 instruments in 118 Laboratories.

Figure 6.2 illustrates the distribution of resources and information to which EPOS aims to facilitate

access.

Figure 6.2: Resources and Information sources for EPOS

The EPOS site contains information on how to access the resources. It serves data consumers as well

as data providers and addresses issues including:

Where does the user find the required resources?

How can the user distinguish between offerings?

It aims to establish a framework to support the use of resources such as:

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Ownership and IP (data, software, publications).

Permissions to use (data, software, facilities/equipment including computing).

Conditions of use: (by class of user) (licence) acknowledgement, citation, payment, constraints

on further actions.

EPOS does not require special network connectivity services to support its work. Indeed special

connectivity requirements may emerge from the various researchers looking to access resources and

transfer data between the resources that EPOS contains information about. For GN3plus, the most

relevant aspect for EPOS is Federated Identity Management. The NA4 T3 team has enabled a set of

discussions with the experts from GN3plus SA5 to explore in more detail what the development

requirements might be, and from initial discussions, the long term goal is to have a common definition

of attributes and a mechanism to authorise access to information based on those attributes.

6.3 GEO

6.3.1 Background

Global Earth Observation (GEO) was initiated in 2002 by the World Summit on Sustainable

Development and the G8 nations and in 2005 was formally established with its secretariat in Geneva

located at the World Meteorological Association. GEO is a voluntary partnership of currently 94

member states, the European Commission and 89 organisations. The organisations include data

providers, governmental agencies, meteorological organisations such as EUMETSAT and NOA; space

agencies such as ESA, NASA and JAXA; and research infrastructures such as EPOS.

The European Commission contributes actively to GEO through the support of ESFRI projects and

Copernicus. GEO is governed by a plenary of all participating members, who meet once a year and is

coordinated by its Secretary.

Member countries of GEO are shown in Figure 6.3.

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Figure 6.3: Member countries of GEO (source: [EOorg], 5 February 2015)

GEO’s motivation is to bring the assets of globally distributed data collections together and make them

accessible to researchers, policy makers and the general public worldwide. GEO’s remit includes the

establishment and coordination of earth observation networks, the improvement of open access and

sharing of data, metadata and products, and to enable interoperability among data and data

applications. The GEO community spans the entire information value chain from Data Provider, Value

Adding Providers to the End-user.

GEO coordinates the establishment of a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The

system of systems links together Earth Observation systems around the world and promotes the

development of technical standards to facilitate that data from thousands of different instruments

can be used in coherent datasets.

This is carried out in consecutive work plans. The current work plan runs from 2012 to 2015 focusing

on three areas:

Development of networks, observing systems and their inter-coordination.

Reinforcing data sharing, resource mobilisation, capacity-building and user engagement.

Development of information, tools and end-to-end systems to be made available through

GEOSS.

6.3.2 Support

GEO plays a pivotal role in facilitating data sharing between earth scientists worldwide. GÉANT is a

participating member of GEO, regularly attending the annual summits and user meetings. GÉANT also

supports transfer of scientific and operational data from space, air, earth and sea. Examples are the

following projects or organisations in EO and related to GEO: Copernicus, CleanSeaNet, EUMETSAT,

EIDA, ESA Supersites, THEOS, PAGASA, CAREN and TIGGE.

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In August 2014, NA4 T3 intensified the discussion with the GEO secretary aiming to identify how GEO

can make better use of the GÉANT infrastructure. An initial videoconference with representatives of

the GEO secretary, AfriGEOSS and ESA was held to explore possible collaborations and support areas.

In the meeting the following areas of support were identified: general awareness and information

about R&E networking, supporting user groups how to make better use of the GÉANT infrastructure,

improvement of global connectivity especially to developing countries and supporting federated data

access:

6.3.3 Awareness and information on R&E networking

Discussing the GÉANT project and its interconnections with the rest of the world made clear that a

knowledge gap exists regarding the scope and reach of GÉANT and R&E networking in general. Despite

the majority of earth observation users being research related, it became clear that little is known

about R&E networking, GÉANT and how it supports GEO members, which raised the demand for

information for the GEO members.

6.3.4 Improvement of global connectivity

The AfriGEOSS initiative, newly established in 2014, focuses its work on capacity development in Africa.

They highlighted improved connectivity between Africa and the rest of the world for African GEO

members as the most urgent toic, and the possibility of extending multicast service (as currently

implemented for EUMETSAT in EUROPE) to Africa.

6.3.5 AAI

GEO aims to link existing earth observation initiatives. This will be facilitated via the Global Earth

Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Portal, which acts as a directory for the different services. In

this context, the benefits of eduGAIN as an Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) were

raised, and possibilities for further integration such as Federated Access to the GEOSS Portal explored.

GÉANT was able to reinforce its role as expert and contact point for networking questions. GEANT Ltd,

representing GÉANT, has been awarded Lead Contributing Role in the GEO Work Plan 2012–2015 for

the Task components “Utilisation of Communication Networks” and “GEOSS Design and

Interoperability”:

6.3.6 Utilisation of Communication Networks

GÉANT contributes to this Task Component by promoting the expansion of a worldwide

communication network of interconnected networks by engaging with European Earth Observations

infrastructures and collaborations to assess technical and user requirements. Where applicable,

GÉANT also contributes to the development of tailored network and user application solutions to

facilitate timely and reliable data distribution on a global level. It engages with global initiatives, e.g.

AfriGEOSS, to assess network requirements for potential improvements to data dissemination.

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It was further agreed to deliver a report on the status of International Research Network Connectivity

and its use in the Earth Observation Sector. The report aimed to provide background information on

the global R&E networking infrastructure and services highlighting GÉANT’s achievements in the area

of Earth Sciences and the benefits of the network and services for this community.

The report “Global Data Sharing for Earth Observation through R&E Networks” was published in

November 2014. Two-hundred copies were distributed at the GEO-IX Ministerial Summit, and a

further 70 copies were distributed to user groups. The report is available from: [MediaLib-Nov14].

6.3.7 GEOSS Design and Interoperability

GÉANT will support the Architecture Task and the development of the Architecture Evolution Strategy

by attending meetings and workshops to provide consultancy and technical expertise with regard to

communication networks and related user services. One important contribution was the Earth Science

User Workshop (see section 6.5 Earth Sciences Workshop)

In addition, the further integration of Trust and Identity Services, including eduGAIN, will be supported

to increase worldwide user access to data across different platforms.

6.4 Copernicus

6.4.1 Background

Copernicus, formerly known as Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) is the

European programme for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation

(Copernicus.eu). This initiative is headed by the European Commission (EC), in partnership with the

European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Environment Agency (EEA).

The mission of Copernicus is to provide access to data from the growing constellation of Europe’s

flagship Sentinel earth observation satellites, as well as additional Contributing Missions (CM)

providing other satellite or ground observation data. It processes these data and provides users with

reliable and up-to-date information through a set of services delivering a selection of data products.

The application of this data ranges from earth science, managing the environment and understanding

and mitigating the effects of climate change to providing support in emergency and crisis situations.

The Copernicus/GMES Space Component (GSC) was built to ensure comprehensive and sustainable

supply of data from space-based Earth observation.

Most data provided by the different missions are distributed by the European Space Agency ESA, and

the majority of it will be “Free and public”, serving different communities:

EU/ESA projects using Sentinel data for scientific studies (e.g. environmental monitoring); –

Commercial users using Sentinel data for their business cases (e.g. land movement detection)

General public who are interested in Earth Observation data

Additional international users and partners accessing Sentinel data for scientific studies

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Copernicus core users who need the information to develop environmental legislation and

policies or to take critical decisions in the event of an emergency, such as a natural disaster or

a humanitarian crisis

These communities need committed reliability and dissemination performance to access the Sentinel

data in near-realtime within their specific availability timeliness.

6.4.2 Data distribution for Copernicus

Following a public procurement conforming to EC regulations, ESA awarded a contract to T-Systems

to interconnect the satellite data receiving sites (Svalbard, Norway; Matera, Italy; Mas Palomas,

Canary Islands, Spain) with the data processing sites (Farnborough, UK; Toulouse, Sophia Antipolis,

and Brest, France; Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany). These sites are interconnected by a VPN provided by

T-Systems at 1–10Gbps.

Managed access to data products is made available to the public at large, including R&E sites, via one

central access-control and security gateway to the public internet. This is located in Frankfurt am Main,

Germany. To this end, T-Systems draws on the Internet services of its parent company, Deutsche

Telekom (DT). The Copernicus gateway is currently connecting to DT’s commercial internet network

at 2x10Gbps, with a planned upgrade to 40Gbps.

6.4.3 Discussions with GÉANT – DFN

In the current setup, Copernicus data downloaded by researchers will follow the shortest route from

the Deutsche Telekom network through the public Internet, following standard Internet routing

mechanisms. Since the data originates in the Deutsche Telekom network, this will often result in data

flowing through commercial networks to researchers, even if they receive their Internet connectivity

through a National Research and Education Network (NREN). Interconnections between NRENs and

commercial upstream providers are expensive to the NREN, and care is taken to minimise unnecessary

(and costly) traffic on those interconnections.

There are a number of national mirror sites such as the National Observatory of Athens (NOA), Greece,

who provide copies of the data for national consumption – with the aim to reduce time and cost of

downloading data for national researchers.

GÉANT is of course in a position to facilitate access to the data for the worldwide R&E community by

implementing one central connection to the Copernicus infrastructure, via an interconnection at the

gateway in Frankfurt, and transporting the data to science users over the existing science network

infrastructure. The plan for doing so involved a connection between the Copernicus data centre

Internet gateway in Frankfurt to the DFN network.

DFN has a key role in enabling the connectivity because the gateway is located in Frankfurt am Main,

Germany. GÉANT does not have a commercial model to connect commercial suppliers, other than

settlement-free peerings, so any direct connection to GÉANT currently would prevent the data from

being accessible by non-European R&E sites. This is true even if they are connected to another R&E

network in another region, (such as I2) as GÉANT does not provide transit for those R&E users to

European commercial ISPs. By connecting Copernicus to DFN, it becomes a “user” of DFN and hence

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can access GÉANT’s intercontinental connectivity and ensure that worldwide R&E users can access the

data, provided they are connected to an R&E network in their region.

6.4.3.1 Roadmap for connecting Copernicus data centres to DFN

Discussions about the connectivity started in November 2013 and the following plan and roadmap

was set out:

Identification of a small number of European and worldwide sites who would volunteer to test

connectivity to the data centres via the commercial Internet and via GÉANT. This was to prove

the concept and test the technical implementation, as well as to assess relative performance

via both paths

Carry out testing with these sites in the second quarter, 2014.

Enable connectivity via GÉANT-DFN.

Carry out testing via DFN/GÉANT in the third quarter, 2014.

Ready for Service in Q4 2014.

The sites involved in the testing were STFC, UK; CNR-IREA, Italy; ESTEC, the Netherlands; the University

of Miami, USA and the University of Tokyo, japan. Tests involved pings, traceroutes and iperf tests.

The first set of tests, using the commercial Internet, reinforced the influence of end-point computer

configuration in long-range data throughput performance.

The second set of tests, using connectivity via DFN and GÉANT, required a routing via the existing

peering between DFN and Deutsche Telekom to be established. During implementation, it was proven

that this conceptually straightforward approach in practice required a number of non-standard

modifications to be made to network settings by a number of parties along the route. Deutsche

Telekom declined to make these changes and so the traffic re-routing via DFN/GÉANT could not be

implemented successfully. Hence the comparison was inconclusive.

In late 2014 talks resumed to agree on a technical solution, with two options described in the following

6.4.3.2 Two proposals to connect Copernicus to DFN-GÉANT

Proposal 1 (This is the solution proposed and preferred by ESA)

This proposal suggests the implementation of an additional dedicated peering between

DTAG (AS 3320) and DFN (AS 680) outside the Copernicus internet gateway. This is intended to allow

most of the academic traffic to flow into the DFN/GÉANT networks at one central location in Frankfurt

am Main, Germany.

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Figure 6.4: Proposal 1 – additional peering between DFN and DTAG without involving Copernicus

Assuming this re-routing can be implemented successfully, it would have the advantage for ESA that

there will be no technical, operational, or contractual changes with regard to the Copernicus Internet

gateway infrastructure. Ideally, there would be no effort required by Copernicus in the

implementation of the new peering between DTAG and DFN and it would be completely transparent

to Copernicus IT systems.

This setup requires constant manual fine tuning of routing tables within DTAG to ensure NREN and

GÉANT are used to reach R&E users worldwide

Proposal 2 (This is the solution proposed and preferred by DFN/GÉANT)

DFN and GÉANT propose a Multihoming solution that establishes Copernicus as an Autonomous

System (AS) according to Internet convention, and allows a standards-based and scalable routing

implementation to be created.

Figure 6.5: Proposal 2 – the Multihome peering solution preferred by DFN

A Multihoming approach is desirable as all decisions and changes of routing policies are implemented

and operated where they originate. This approach is also in line with the current standards of Internet

peering and is technically the best option for scalability, resiliency, and flexibility.

CopernicusDeutsche Telekom

GEANTDFN

Gateway

10Gpeering

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6.4.3.3 Current Status

While it is clear to all parties that enabling access to the Copernicus data for the worldwide R&E

community via GÉANT-DFN is vital, at the time of writing GÉANT, DFN, ESA and T-systems have not

yet agreed on the most appropriate technical and operational means of doing so. Discussions are

ongoing.

6.5 Earth Sciences Workshop

In order to gain a broader understanding of the Earth Sciences community, the task consulted with

other e-Infrastructures EGI, PRACE and EUDAT to organise a dedicated workshop to this community.

It was felt important to consult with the other e-Infrastructures because especially EUDAT and EGI

have good contacts with that user community and avail of services of interest to them. EIDA and KNMI

also helped in the preparation of the workshop. It was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands during

22–23 January 2015.

Seven research groups or infrastructures were present at the workshop and they each gave an

overview of their day-to-day collaboration model. Some of this information was collected in advance

(see annex for questionnaire sent to earth sciences workshop) to allow the workshop to focus on the

key points for the users. In terms of connectivity, none of the users presented significant connectivity

demands that required anything other than the standard IP service. The three areas that emerged

where the users might require special assistance or to be kept informed of developments are:

Federated Identity management, Data management and cloud services.

The research groups present at the workshop were:

EIDA.

EPOS.

Computational seismology from KNMI.

Climate modelling (ENES- KNMI).

British Geological Survey.

Satellite imaging (related to Copernicus).

Solid Earth Sciences.

Whilst there are significant differences in the details of their workflows and the dynamics of their data

exchange, there are a few broad commonalities:

They deal with data distributed among many European (and beyond) locations.

Most of the data is open, some of it is restricted, for a period of time. Federated Identity

management is clearly an area where a lot of work and support is required.

Data is transferred from data centre to user or to a processing site, but the amount of data

and its processing requirements are such that the transfers are well supported by the existing

NREN and GÉANT IP services.

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Cloud services are of interest. Some users are engaged with the development of EUDAT-

and/or EGI-federated cloud services but are unclear about their long term strategy regarding

commercial cloud services.

Details of the workshop are at [ESworkshop] and, apart from the summary of the results listed above,

the workshop had three key outcomes:

The e-Infrastructures gained a good overview of how researchers conduct their work, what

services they may require.

The researchers gained a better and consistent view of how the four e-Infrastructures can

meet their needs.

Concrete coordinated actions have been established in the area of federated Identity

management. There was knowledge exchange on data management (relevant to EUDAT and

EGI) and cloud services.

Collaboration with e-Infrastructures


7 Collaboration with e-Infrastructures

NA4 T3 collaborates with the other three e-Infrastructure providers (EGI, PRACE, EUDAT) on two main

fronts:

Services to support the e-Infrastructures.

Coordination to support users and development of services.

In addition, the work has included support for the Helix Nebula initiative.

7.1 Services to support e-Infrastructures

PRACE

Of the three e-Infrastructures at the moment, only the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe

(PRACE) uses dedicated connectivity to interconnect the PRACE centres.

The connectivity for PRACE has been in place since 2005 and is based on a set of dedicated point-to-

point circuits. In August 2014, and at the request of PRACE, NA4 T3 compiled budgetary information

for a review of the network connectivity based on an IP VPN using the shared 100Gbps capacity

available on GÉANT. To date, PRACE has not yet indicated if and how it wishes to proceed with the

information given.

Figure 7.1: The existing network connectivity for PRACE.

SUNETFUNET

OCRE TGCC

Dedicated

10 Gb/s wavelength

10 Gb/s Ethernet IP

1 Gb/s IPsec Tunnels

(Shared)

SURFnet

UKERNA

RedIris

GARR

RENATER

DFN

GÉANT2

JuQueen Juropa

Pionier

Bulgaria

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Greece

Hungary

Ireland

Norway

Serbia

Turkey

Central PRACE

router

DFN/GÉANT

Frankfurt

IPsec

Gateway



Figure 7.2 shows the proposed PRACE connectivity based on a VPN:

Figure 7.2: The proposed PRACE connectivity based on a VPN

EUDAT

The European Data Infrastructure (EUDAT) has so far not required special connectivity from GÉANT

for two main reasons:

Until now, EUDAT has focused on developing the set of data management services it aims to

offer.

The EUDAT data centres are co-located with the main PRACE sites, and the same organisations

are involved.

The situation for EUDAT is due to be reviewed in the second-half of 2015, following the application for

EC Horizon2020 funding.

EGI

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) itself does not require special connectivity. The resources

provided by EGI are federated amongst the NGIs across Europe and are usually well connected to the

NRENs. Researchers who make use of EGI resources may need access to special connectivity to

support their research.



7.2 Collaboration to support users and development of

services

For many researchers network connectivity is perceived as a given – it is just there as a commodity –

and is able to support that vast majority of researcher’s needs. In many cases researchers do not know

what connectivity services they could avail of, and there is potentially a significant degree of

opportunities that are not being exploited simply because of a lack of mutual knowledge between

researchers and GÉANT/NRENs.

Researchers are much more likely to be aware of services they may need from EGI, PRACE or EUDAT,

but in general it is difficult for researchers to establish which services they should acquire from which

e-infrastructure and how. This point is relevant to the more general e-Infrastructure commons

discussions. GÉANT services may be consequential to these requirements. Therefore NA4 T3 has

worked to establish some coordination in the dialogue with researchers in order to understand better

how they work and what services they may require. A result of this coordination is the Workshop on

Earth Sciences held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands during 22–23 January 2015, where a two-way

dialogue between researchers in Earth Sciences and e-Infrastructures took place.

Section 6.5 gives a more detailed overview of the Earth Sciences workshop.

EGI and GÉANT have, since November 2012, a MoU for collaboration in terms of Information exchange,

user support and PR. In accordance with this MoU, two major events have taken place:

The Earth Sciences workshop described above

A joint workshop on the requirements and development for Cloud Services, in September

2014. The results of the workshop are that both EGI and GÉANT project SA7 are of the opinion

that the research community would greatly benefit from further collaboration between the

two organisations – and there is potential in further collaboration on:

o Standards and interoperability: identify suitable standards and share expertise.

o Security: share expertise and collaborate on policies and working methods.

o Identity management and authentication: link AAI efforts, in a model where eduGAIN is

being used in the EGI community.

o Cloud requirements descriptions: bridge suppliers’ and users’ needs so that the products

provided to the community are fit for purpose

o Cloud catalogue and marketplace, although separate stages of the cloud delivery chain

both communities should benefit from work in this area.

o Communication and adoption: clearly define and communicate EGI and GÉANT cloud

components and their relations to enable adoption across the community.



7.3 Support for Helix Nebula

The Helix Nebula (HN) initiative is a collaboration between ESA, CERN, EMBL and a number of

companies involved in the provision of cloud services. The aim of the initiative is to collaborate on the

definition and the piloting of a cloud service to support science in Europe. The emphasis here is Europe,

where the suppliers are from Europe. EGI is also involved in the initiative, both from a services

definition point of view and supplier of services.

The initiative has benefitted in part from EC funding as part of an FP7 proposal, of which some of the

HN initiative members were partners.

Following a decision first of the GN3,and later of the GN3plus Executive committee, GEANT has been

supporting the initiative since March 2012 by providing connectivity to the IaaS (VMs, storage) Cloud

service providers to enable CERN, EMBL and ESA sites carry out pilot activities using GEANT and NREN

networks.

The Helix Nebula Initiative has a consensus-based governance model, and it is necessary to sign an

NDA to become involved in the initiative.

The HN IaaS suppliers are connected as follows:

ATOS to RedIRIS.

CloudSigma to SWITCH.

Interoute and T-systems to GÉANT.

The service provided by NRENs is standard best effort IP service. The direct connections to GÉANT are

free of charge to the suppliers and for a limited period only, until end of March 2015. Until then,

GÉANT will monitor usage and assess impact on GÉANT and decide if and how support for HN should

continue. In addition, GEANT is supporting HN supplier-supplier traffic testing as well, which is usually

not allowed. This is because a research collaboration may wish to store data on one IaaS provider, and

do computing on another, or perhaps a mix of both. Therefore the users require excellent

performance between the suppliers to support their research needs. This request was made explicitly

by ESA.

7.3.1 Helix Nebula production service: the HN market place HNX

The results of the pilot testing within the Helix Nebula initiative have led to the establishment of a

production service, called the Helix Nebula market place (HNX). This is provided by the IaaS suppliers,

EGI and a number of technology providers. The “demand side” (ESA, CERN, EMBL) has no formal

relationship with this, other than being a potential customer.

HNX announced its start in May 2014. GEANT committed to support the activity of HNX by continuing

to provide network connectivity for the IaaS suppliers. This was initially for a period of six months

during which:

GN3plus SA7 would discuss with HNX IaaS suppliers integration into the SA7 framework on a

one-to-one basis.



GÉANT network would support supplier–supplier traffic, monitored by GÉANT in order to

assess its impact on the network.

GN3plus would investigate a long-term business model for the interaction with HN and cloud

service providers in general; this work would be led by SA7 and the Product Management

Office in consultation with the CSWG.

However, HNX has not progressed as much as anticipated and very little activity has occurred with

practically no supplier–supplier traffic.

The first and third points above are progressing, albeit slowly from a SA7 perspective. In any case, the

HN suppliers are being treated in the same way as any other Cloud Service Provider that SA7 works

with.

Given the lack of progress of HNX and lack of data to support any long-term decision, GEANT has

anyway agreed to extend support to HNX until 31 March 2015.

7.3.2 Costs and resources associated with supporting Helix Nebula

In general the costs for supporting Helix Nebula, both the initiative and the market place are low, and

can be analysed into networking, traffic and staffing costs.

For GÉANT, the networking costs are associated with the interconnection with Interoute in London,

UK and T-systems in Vienna, Austria.

For Interoute, a pre-existing 1GE port in London, UK, is used.

For T-systems, the interconnection is via the existing peering connection between GÉANT

and VIX, hence at no additional cost.

ATOS and Cloudsigma are connected by RedIRIS and SWITCH, according to their own

business models

Regarding actual traffic costs, as the traffic always involves an NREN, this is met by subscription from

the NRENs. There is a potential cost for supplier–supplier traffic that has to be accounted for. At this

time there is no measurable traffic, but this may change in the future.

The graphs shown in Figure 7.3 show total traffic seen for three of the Suppliers: ATOS, Interoute and

CloudSigma, which also include any traffic between suppliers. Clearly the traffic level is very low at

this time and hence has had very little impact on GÉANT, but it can still be used to make projections

and prepare scenarios for continued support for HN. This work is ongoing in collaboration with the

GÉANT Product Management function.



Figure 7.3: Total supporting HN traffic seen for three of the Suppliers (ATOS, Interoute and CloudSigma)

Life Sciences


8 Life Sciences

The Life Sciences community has been one of the top targets for NA4 T3’s involvement.

It is fair to say that the engagement with Life Sciences has not yet reached the level of engagement

reached with Earth Sciences, however a lot of ground work is in progress to enable greater

involvement in the coming months.

After a few sporadic contacts (visits to institutions, occasional face to face chats with individuals during

events), a coordinated strategy has taken place starting with a workshop held by BioMedBridges and

ELIXIR at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton, UK, in May 2014.

The “Preparing for the Data Deluge” workshop was attended by representatives from the Life Science

community (Genomics, Proteomics, Imaging, Metabolomics, Clinical data), as well as by the main e-

Infrastructures (GÉANT, EUDAT, EGI, PRACE and CERN OpenLab). A “living document” was used to

convey information, Q&A, notes and thoughts, before, during and after the workshop. The meeting

was useful for GÉANT to have a first insight of the different sub-communities within the Life Sciences,

and to let them have a better understanding of the GÉANT working model; but the lack of cross-skilled

individuals (with both life science and IT/networking skill) didn’t allow a well-structured requirement

analysis to be made, in term of services that the e-Infrastructures could offer to match the needs. The

difficulties in the approach with the Life Science community were mainly typified by the scattered and

heterogeneous nature of the entities that constitute the communities, which range from large, single

institutions (like EMBL-EBI) to research departments within universities and from specialised research

laboratories into hospitals.

After this first contact, NA4 T3 kept in touch with ELIXIR via monthly calls; these have provided mutual

updates and have strengthened GÉANT’s involvement.

In February 2015, a second Workshop was held at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, specifically aimed to

the Bio-imaging community. GÉANT was invited at the Workshop, where NA4 T3 presented a

contribution targeted to let the Bio-imaging community understand the complexity of the network

infrastructure and of end-to-end communication. The people present have given very positive

feedback, and requested that GÉANT coordinate an action aimed to perform a network testing

campaign between a few sites in the community, in different countries, involving the IT people in the

sites, the local NREN and GÉANT. The expected outcome of this activity would be to draft a series of

“best practices” or “how-to” documents for results and lessons learned for sharing with the whole

community.

GÉANT has also been invited to attend the ELIXIR Technical Services Workshop, during 12–13 March

2015, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, organised by the ELIXIR Task Forces and the EXCELERATE

leaders. This has the aim of a better understanding of the use cases and the services needed to support

them.

Arts and Humanities


9 Arts and Humanities

9.1 CLARIN

Background CLARIN is a distributed data infrastructure of digital archives with sites all over Europe, which provides

access to digital language data collections and digital tools over one platform. Sites are universities,

research institutions, libraries and public archives. Aims at providing easy and sustainable access for

scholars in the humanities and social sciences to digital language data (in written, spoken, video or

multimodal form) and to advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine

them.

The following twelve countries are members of CLARIN: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark,

Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Sweden. More EU countries are

expected to join in the near future. CLARIN is funded by its member countries with additional data

centres across Europe and a data mirroring site in the USA.

Figure 9.1: Overview of the CLARIN data centres (status as at February 2015)

Support

NA4 T3 is in regular contact with CLARIN and provides support on various topics. As active member of

the R&E community they are in close contact with different parts of the projects. Support activities

focus on single topics, which arise over time rather than implementing one defined set of services at

a time.

Performance issues

CLARIN synchronises its data from the European sites to a data repository located at the Carnegie

Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, USA. The data centres mainly host lively datasets consisting of

index and process data. Mirroring is done on a regular basis. In addition, some of the data is shipped

per airmail.

Arts and Humanities


In April 2014 CLARIN experienced unforeseen timeouts due to transatlantic package loss between the

Göttingen Computing Centre, Germany (routed through DFN) and the site in Pittsburgh, USA. NA4 T3

put CLARIN in contact with the teams of perfSONAR and eduPERT to carry out measurements and

identify if any optimisations can be done to improve performance whilst safeguarding local

infrastructure work. As the data transfer is not time critical the issues were resolved by switching from

UDP to TCP with now 100% availability.

AAI

CLARIN offers password-protected language resources hosted at multiple centres. Authorisation rights

have to stay within the responsibility of each centre (use SAML protocol). They have previous

experience in providing its services via SAML-based federated identity to European users and they

tried to implement eduGAIN but it is currently not best solution for them as many of the CLARIN users

are not part of a federation or eduGAIN. To enable federated access to the data centres for all users,

CLARIN pursued a pragmatic solution by setting up their own identity federation. CLARIN considers

this as only temporary solution.

GÉANT is currently evaluating the benefits and requirements to establish a guest IdP, in the context

of the Federation as a Service work in SA5 (FaaS), for pan-European research. This could potentially

provide an IdP service to organisations who are not already members of a federation.

CLARIN was a use case in SA5 for GN3plus and GÉANT is working closely to develop a suitable solution

for federated access to their data centres.

Middleware

CLARIN is currently developing a prototype for their AAI to build a bridge between SAML and Oauth

[CLARIN]. Discussions started if the service could possibly be hosted by and offered within GÉANT to

other users as off the shelves solution. In November 2014, a demo session of the developed service

was carried out between CLARIN, NA1 T4, NA4 T3 and SA5 to demonstrate the service and get a better

understanding of possible use cases within the GÉANT community. The service pilot is currently being

reviewed by NA1 T4 and SA5 especially with regard to possible overlaps with the Moonshot service.

Cloud services

CLARIN expressed their interest in using cloud services via GÉANT. Of particular interest are virtual

machines, Storage and OwnCloud. They currently run an OwnCloud pilot together with EUDAT and

are interested in general knowledge exchange. First requirements were gathered and the contact with

SA7 was facilitated.

Arts and Humanities


9.2 Data Sonification

9.2.1 Introduction to data sonification

Data sonification is, in general terms, the use of non-speech audio signals to convey information or

conceptualise data. Auditory perception of complex, structured information could have several

advantages in terms of temporal, amplitude, and frequency resolution when compared to visual

representations and often opens up possibilities for an alternative or complement to visualisation

techniques. These advantages include the capability of the human ear to detect patterns, recognise

timbres and follow different strands at the same time. This would offer, in a natural way, the

opportunity of rendering different, interdependent variables into sound in such a way that a listener

could gain relevant insight into the represented information or data. Since the ear is exquisitely

sensitive to variations in time, pitch and loudness, sonification provides a valid alternative or

complement to visualization techniques.

One of the sonification method widely used in modern science is called audification. It works by

amplifying existing sounds or translating oscillations into the range of human hearing. One example,

from cosmology, are the compression and rarefaction of photons and baryons that were tightly

coupled in the early universe, and which left their mark as tiny hot and cold spots in the cosmic

microwave background. Other examples include medical applications (where sound is used to

describe and summarise multi-dimensional complex data) and investigation in seismology and

volcanology (where the infrasonic oscillations of the earth before and during an earthquake or an

eruption can be translated into audible sounds, studied by researchers, stored and classified.)

Sonification is increasingly being investigated as a diagnostic tool in several scientific domains. A

recent study demonstrated how sonification can improve cancer discrimination by converting infrared

spectrum of human tissue cells into sounds. One of the benefits of data sonification supported by R&E

networks is the possibility offered to small research groups (or even to the single researcher) to design

and use one of the most versatile data investigation techniques. Thanks to the international links

towards other world regions, researchers can easily exchange data, sound, sonification algorithms and

work on truly global collaboration endeavours.

9.2.2 Sonification cases support by GÉANT

There have been several instances of showcasing data sonification in support of science, listed

below:

Worked with CERN, liaising with the Director of Research, to organise an event within the

European Researchers Night in Geneva, September 2014 to raise the awareness of R&E

networking and the scientific and artistic aspects of data sonification.

Collaboration in the organisation of the CERN 60th anniversary and the realisation of a video

to raise awareness about the relations between science and arts among the public. The result

was a concert for a VIP audience including ambassadors, ministers and heads of state from 20

countries and a special video called “LHChamber Music”. Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted The

EU Youth Orchestra in performingmusic written by a NA4 T3 member using data sonification

across GÉANT. GÉANT was mentioned and the global coverage of the news co-produced by

Arts and Humanities


GÉANT and CERN reached a global audience (measured by CERN Communication Office) of 175

million people.

Collaboration with Birmingham City University, University of Central Lancashire and Preston

Hospital. The collaboration focuses on applying data sonification across R&E networks in

Europe to improve the early diagnosis of cancer using sonification of human tissue infrared

spectroscopy. A paper titled “Assisted differentiated stem cell classification in infrared

spectroscopy using auditory feedback” has been presented by a member of the NA4 T3 team

at the International Conference on Auditory Display in New York (June 2014)

Support given to the European project Specifi by means of scientific documentation and multi-

media example about volcano data sonification for a presentation “Performing Arts

Experiences in academic Networks”.

Work with the Italian NGI on data sonification on grid and R&E networks for medical

applications. The results were presented at the EGI User Forum 2013 (Manchester, UK),

summarised in a contribution titled “Grid Computing and Data Sonification tools as SaaS for

supporting neuroscientists in analysing EEGs of patients affected by drug-resistant epilepsy”

Liaison with the department of linguistics and social semiotics at the University of Gothenburg,

Sweden, working on the use of sound in science and research, particularly in presenting data.

The result was a presentation to a conference at the University (part of a Master’s thesis).

Work with NASA on data sonification of solar spot numbers for Supercomputing 2014. The

result was a live demo at NASA booth, raising the awareness of the importance of R&E

networking in astrophysics. NASA promoted the result on its website [NASA].

Collaboration with the Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, USA), focusing on using LoLa

and real-time technology on R&E network across the Atlantic to enable students from EU and

USA universities to the role of research and education networking for the arts (November

2014).

Broadening the User Base


10 Broadening the User Base

This section outlines the efforts undertaken to broaden the user base supported by NRENs and GEANT

or to strengthen involvement with large organisations. It summarises:

Efforts to strengthen collaboration with CERN as an organisation, as opposed to supporting

LHC experiments.

Development of working relationships with organisations such as ESA and EUMETSAT. There

is work also being carried out with EMBL and EBI, although not yet at the level of ESA and

EUMETSAT.

Building relationships with EU agencies, who may wish to avail of NREN services.

Liaison with the Connecting Europe Facility initiative of the EC.

10.1 Collaboration with large organisations

10.1.1 CERN

The collaboration with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has extended beyond

the network support for the LHC experiments activities, exploiting other areas of collaborations like

the Cloud Computing. In April 2014 a visit was arranged to CERN by NA4 T3, collecting information and

discussing CERN’s engagement in the GÉANT activities.

On December 2014, NA4 T3 has organised a one-day workshop at CERN, aimed to find common

grounds and to be a source for concrete follow-up actions, with the participation of SA7, NA4 and

Product Management representatives from the GÉANT side, and with the groups that within CERN are

engaged with Cloud Computing. The topics included a general presentation of the Cloud activities from

both GÉANT and CERN sides, and also an in-depth analysis of OpenStack and OwnCloud

implementations.

In terms of network services, during the two years of the project the IP connection to GÉANT has been

increased twice: starting from a 20G access, on July 2014 it was upgraded to 30G, and finally in

November 2014 to 100G. This IP access is used for both the general R&E access to GÉANT, and for the

LHCONE traffic.

In addition, in 2013 CERN has been the first customer in Europe to acquire a 100G lambda on the new

GÉANT backbone, connecting the data centre in Geneva, Switzerland, to the new CERN data centre

operated by MTA-Wigner in Budapest, Hungary. While the 100G lambda was in place between the

GÉANT PoPs in Geneva and in Budapest, GÉANT has also acted as a Single Point of Contact for the

troubleshooting of the whole end-to-end path, including the local circuit between the Budapest PoP

and the final landing point in the Wigner Data Centre in Budapest, Hungary.



10.1.2 ESA

NA4 T3 has been working with the European Space Agency (ESA) on several projects, as follows:

Copernicus, outlined in section 6.4.

Provision of point-to-point connectivity, in collaboration with DFN and SINET, between ESOC

and JAXA in support of two space missions: BepiColumbo and Hayabusa-2. ESOC and JAXA

requested that one circuit be provisioned via the USA, the other would use the ORIENTPLUS

circuit. So far, only connectivity via the USA has been implemented; connectivity via

ORIENTPLUS is under investigation from JAXA and SINET.

ESA-SARN: ESA has run a tender for the development of a Search and Rescue project, for

vessels in distress at sea, based on information relayed via satellite. The contract was awarded

to Capgemini (Cap Gemini S.A.) which used the services of three NRENs (UNINETT, CYNET and

RedIRIS) to connect the necessary ground station sites (Svalbard in Norway, Makarios in Cyprus

and Mas Palomas in Canary Islands- Spain) and provide connectivity to the search and rescue

coordination centre based at CNES in Toulouse, France (connected via RENATER). Connectivity

is in the order of 10Mbps for each site.

Proposal for connecting sites for ESA’s corporate network via NRENs: ESA requested from

GÉANT a proposal for connectivity and management of connectivity between EKO (Kourou,

French Guiana), ESAC (Madrid, Spain) and ESTEC (the Netherlands). The proposal is to provide

connectivity of up to 20Mbps, via a VPN. All sites are already connected to the NRENs involved:

RENATER, RedIRIS, SURFnet. GÉANT has also prepared an operational model whereby the

GÉANT NOC acts a single point-of-contact for all queries regarding network performance issues

and manages ESA equipment on site. ESA are currently evaluating the proposal.

Discussions are on-going regarding GÉANT providing the operational support for an ESA

Identity Federation.

Figures showing the setups for the above projects are provided in Appendix B.

10.1.3 EUMETSAT

EUMETSAT, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, [EUMETSAT]

is an intergovernmental not-for-profit organisation that supplies weather and climate-related satellite

data, images and products. It operates a system of meteorological satellites that continuously

observes the atmosphere and ocean and land surfaces. The data is supplied to the National

Meteorological Services of member and cooperating states in Europe, and to other users worldwide.

EUMETSAT and GÉANT have been exploring ways of cooperating since 2009. In 2012 a prototype was

run to disseminate meteorological data to five countries in Europe (Germany, France, Sweden, The

Netherlands and UK). The prototype dissemination was followed by a multicast test to South Korea

via GÉANT in 2013.

Following the successful prototype, GÉANT and EUMETSAT worked on a proposal for the “EUMETCast

Terrestrial Project” with the aim to disseminate operational data from EUMETSAT HQ in Darmstadt,

Germany, to 34 sites in 31 countries in Europe, with the collaboration of 27 NRENs and using the

GÉANT network. This represented a working example of the one stop shop concept where GÉANT was



able to act on behalf of all the NRENs towards the user, EUMETSAT in this case, covering the technical,

operational and financial information needed to support the needs of the user.

The work resulted in the award of a contract between EUMETSAT and DANTE Ltd for the provision of

a network multicast service connecting all 34 sites in 31 European countries, together with centrally-

coordinated monitoring and operations. The DANTE Board of Directors agreed to these proposals in

Q3 of project Y1 and a contract between EUMETSAT and DANTE (now GEANT Ltd) was signed.

The implementation started in April 2014. DANTE acted as a coordinator to the NRENs involved,

ensuring that planning, equipment installation, interfacing and other issues are resolved in order to

achieve a robust multicasting and monitoring service.

The implementation was successful and 17 NRENs have been integrated into the system on January

2015. The remaining countries will continue to be integrated into the service in 2016.

The operational phase now has eight pilot production countries that went live in January 2015 receive

EUMETCast Terrestrial in the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria and

Poland. A monitoring portal has been developed to support delivery of the service. This portal is used

by EUMETSAT as well as by GÉANT and the NREN partners to monitor the service and troubleshoot in

the case of incidents.

The operational phase requires GEANT Ltd (formerly DANTE Ltd) to provide centralised monitoring of

this network infrastructure. The EUMETCast Terrestrial Project has a long-term and long-range outlook,

with an expected lifetime of more than 10 years and an eventual worldwide coverage.

The work is a clear demonstration of the capabilities of the GÉANT network and the collaboration of

a large set of NRENs within the GÉANT community. The EUMETCast project will provide a highly visible

reference case to the Earth Sciences and the worldwide GEO community.

10.2 Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)

The GÉANT community was closely engaged in acting as a consultative stakeholder during the study

of the readiness of Member States for a pan-European network infrastructure for public services –

SMART 2012/0048. Copies of the final report by Capgemini, Deloitte and Tech4i2, published in

November 2014, were distributed to the community through the General Assembly email-distribution

list and also discussed by members of the Task Force on the Management of Service Portfolios (TF-

MSP). There is general support for the six recommendations to the European Commission made in the

report from members of the community who have expressed an opinion.

In view of EU President Juncker’s affirmation regarding the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), members

of the NA4 T3 team continue to monitor for potential opportunities to broaden the GÉANT community

user base. The GÉANT project is ready to engage further with the European Commission to explore

whether the GÉANT network can expand its user base beyond the traditional research and education

community to provide support for European public services such as e-health, e-social or similar

applications.



10.3 EU agencies

10.3.1 Background European Union agencies are bodies of the EU installed to carry out specific technical, scientific or

administrative tasks. Spread across Europe, they are working in distinct areas such as health, safety

and the environment, freedom, justice or security. Their role is to gather, analyse and disseminate

area-specific information and knowledge to researchers, policy-makers and the general public – most

of them have a strong link to the R&E community. Although they are autonomous organisations, they

have a common organisational model and work together on areas such as IT management. Currently

36 agencies exist, of which 30 are permanently set up with another six executive agencies set up for a

fixed time period.

All IT departments of the 30 EU Agencies are organised in an IT management group to discuss IT

challenges and work on joint solutions. The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), representing

this group, approached NA4 T3 in April 2014 seeking support and looking for new cooperation

opportunities between the agencies and the NREN community.

10.3.2 Support

The first videoconferences with EMSA were held to understand their challenges and identify their

requirements.

EMSA were seeking to establish reciprocal arrangements for housing another agency’s secondary data

centre (as a Business Continuity Facility) using the GÉANT network. Arrangements already exist in part

and EMSA would like to expand this, potentially connecting all agencies to GÉANT.

Further to this, the agencies are looking into the joint use and procurement of cloud services and are

interested in either using the GÉANT network to access cloud services or to jointly buy cloud services.

Several VCs were held to develop an understanding of their requirements and define a suitable

strategy to gather the individual requirements of the agencies and address their concerns. However

some agencies had previous difficulties joining their local NREN due to policy and procurement issues

and NA4 T3 was asked to help support facilitate the individual contacts. It was also discussed if a

general MoU would help ease the joining process.

As EMSA is located in Lisbon, Portugal, and connected to GÉANT, Fundação para a Ciência e a

Tecnologia (FCT, previously named FCCN) has been contacted, informed about the project and has

agreed to support as lead NREN.

10.3.3 Survey: Connecting EU agencies to GÉANT

A survey was carried out gathering high level information which agencies are already using GÉANT and

which wish to use GÉANT within the short term (i.e. to connect within the next year) or the mid-term

(i.e. to connect within the next three years). The survey results are summarised in Figure 10.1.



Figure 10.1: Survey results about current, short-term and mid-term future use of GÉANT

The results were discussed with EMSA and it was agreed to start working with a small set of agencies

wishing to connect within the next year.

The pilot agencies are:

EU Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), Lisbon, Portugal.

European Asylum Support Office (EASO), Malta.

Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union (CDT), Luxembourg.

European Fisheries Control Agency (EFCA), Vigo, Spain.

In the last quarter of 2014, NA4 T3 held initial VCs with the agencies to introduce the GÉANT/ NREN

network infrastructure and services, discuss their connectivity needs and their requirements regarding

Data security, Guaranteed Level of Service and End-to end monitoring. As a result no general

procurement and policy issues could be identified and the idea of a general MoU was abandoned.



To facilitate a smooth joining process the project and the respective agency was introduced to the

local NREN. This additional step was agreed, to address possible concerns on NRENs side connecting

European bodies. The corresponding NRENs are: FCT (previously FCCN), UoM, RESTENA and RedIRIS.

By early 2015 all four agencies are in contact with their local NREN, working to connect.

10.3.4 Cloud services

In parallel to facilitating connectivity, in November 2014 discussions between EMSA, NA4 T3 and SA7

started on the agency’s possible use of cloud services via a common broker model.

EMSA would like to use an intermediary such as a one stop shop broker model to act on their behalf

as the contractual channel for purchasing and providing SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and Disaster Recovery as a

Service. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) would need to be provided as mandatory requirements,

especially for IaaS and DraaS and all data would need to be stored in the EU. Some agencies would

also need a private cloud with dedicated hardware and equipment.

The agencies envisage a joint procurement process to leverage their purchasing power and rationalise

the procurement process. To address these requirements, a new inter-agency tender for cloud

services is under development by approximately 15 agencies and targeting a seven-year framework

contract. Discussions were held how the planned GÉANT Cloud service offering could meet these

requirements and would favour a one stop shop solution via GÉANT against others.

At the time of writing, both the planned GÉANT community Cloud offering and the Interagency Tender

are under development and discussions indicate that the proposed GÉANT Cloud offering could work

as practicable solution for them. As a next step it is planned to identify a suitable NREN interested in

offering cloud provisioning which is already connecting an EU agency, to carry out a proof-of-concept.

Future Internet


11 Future Internet

From the GÉANT 2020 strategy:

Future Internet (FI) will remain a very important research topic in Europe. The GÉANT

Community, network services and Infrastructure, together with the NRENs, are well positioned

to deliver in a range of areas related to this. GÉANT and the NRENs will facilitate the FI-related

activities providing adequate resources, test-beds and potential testing environments.

Moreover, members of the GÉANT Community may take part directly in these FI activities.

GÉANT will also implement new solutions resulting from FI activities if they become feasible

and useful for the community.

To this end, NA4 T3 task members participated in the Information Day for the Future Internet call held

in Brussels, Belgium, on 31 January 2014 to highlight to potential Future Internet project proposals

the support that GÉANT and the NRENs will provide.

A number of Future Internet projects are currently being supported, as described below.

11.1 CONFINE

The CONFINE (COmmunity Network testbed for the Future INternEt) project deals with the concept of

the IP community that is emerging from the Future Internet developing field. The project will create

Community-Lab, a test-bed for experimental research that integrates and extends three existing

community networks: Guifi.net (Catalonia, Spain), FunkFeuer (Vienna, Austria) and AWMN (Athens,

Greece); each is in the range of 500–20,000 nodes. This test-bed provides researchers with access to

these emerging community networks, supporting any stakeholder interested in developing and testing

experimental systems and technologies for these open and interoperable network infrastructures.

The project has been funded with €4,942,000 in range of FP7, for a duration of 48 months (October

2011–October 2015). The project coordinator is Leandro Navarro from Universitat Politècnica de

Catalunya, Spain.

Project partners

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain.

Fundació Privada per a laXarxa Oberta, Lliure i Neutral (guifi.net), Spain.

Pangea, Comunicació per a la Cooperació, Spain.

FunkFeuer, Austria.

Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network, Greece.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Germany.

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

iMinds, Belgium.

Future Internet


Proposed solution and implementation

The project was first deployed using the FEDERICA facility; it was later decided to use a different

infrastructure. The basic requests were of reliable connections between the sites, allowing the use of

BGP as routing protocol, but with no particular bandwidth needs. Indeed, the traffic among the sites

is basically limited to signalling, AAI transactions and occasionally software updates. After some

discussions with project representatives and the GÉANT Operation Team, the L3VPN service was

chosen as the best-fit solution and the L3VPN service was first deployed on 4 July 2014, between DFN

and RedIRIS. Five sites (three in Spain and two in Germany) out of eight, now connect to the new

infrastructure. The project had a fixed requirement for the use of a private address space in the VPN,

but had no specific bandwidth requirements.

Subsequently, in January 2014, the University of Antwerp, Belgium, was connected to the L3VPN

service as a new project participant, following a request from BELNET.

11.2 SmartFIRE

The SmartFIRE project deals with the experimentation of SDN technologies in Wireless testbeds, and

is a collaboration between South Korea and Europe. It has been funded within the FP7 framework

with €500K (for a total cost of €1.3M), and its lifetime will be from November 2013 to December 2015.

The activities in the project cover a number of areas, mainly dealing with building testbeds in the

participating sites and with the technology to interconnect and federate the testbeds. Other activities

will deal with development of specific use-case, monitoring and dissemination of the results and the

know-how acquired by the project.

The objectives of the project are to create a common and unified method of experimenting with large-

scale facilities for SDN technologies.

11.2.1 Project partners

The consortium comprises 11 partners from EU (Greece, France, Spain and Belgium), South Korea and

an international collaborator from Australia.

University of Thessaly, Greece – project coordinator.

University Pierre et Marie Curie, France.

University of Murcia, Spain.

Sigma Orionis, France.

National ICT Australia, Australia.

Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, S. Korea.

Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, S. Korea.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, S. Korea.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, S. Korea.

Seoul National University, S. Korea.

iMinds, Belgium.

Future Internet


11.2.2 Proposed solution and implementation

The first service required by the project was the connection between the University of Murcia (UMU),

Spain, and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea. This service consisted of a

GÉANT Layer2 point-to-point circuit from the RedIRIS access router in Madrid to the Korea Institute of

Science and Technology Information (KISTI), delivered via Internet2 and KREONET for the extra-EU

part. Since KREONET is not connected to the TEIN4 network, it was not possible to use an eastward

path from Europe. The circuit setup was completed on August 2014.

Two new sites were then added to the list of participants: the University of Thessaly (UTH), Greece,

and Seoul National University. After an internal study about a possible multipoint L2VPN service

solution, it was decided to provide additional Layer2 point-to-point circuits from the new connecting

sites to the South Korean site. The new service will be deployed between GRNET access router in

Athens and the KOREN network in South Korea between UTH and SNU, as soon as the latter will

complete its connection to KOREN. This new circuit will be transported via the TEIN4 network, being

the KOREN NREN one of the partners in TEIN.

FET Flagship projects


12 FET Flagship projects

NA4 T3 has sought to establish a working relationship with two Future and Emerging Technologies

(FET) initiatives: the Graphene [Graphene] and Human Brain [HumanBrain] projects.

Both projects are extremely large and complex and for the last two years have focused on defining

the strategy of their science and have not prioritised international networking requirements. At the

moment, any network connectivity needs are met by standard IP services via the NRENs. Following

the recent annual review of the projects, it is likely that demands for special support or connectivity

will emerge during 2015 or 2016.

NA4 T3 is in regular communication with the WP leader for networking for the Human Brain project

(Ralph Niederberger from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany).

For Graphene, NA4 T3 has held dialogues with many representatives, but so far no networking needs

for the near future have been identified. GÉANT will continue to periodically contact representatives

of Graphene in order to understand their forthcoming needs.

Dissemination


13 Dissemination

Following the request of NRENs to be more regularly informed about the user support activities,

NA4 T3 provides a dedicated section on updates from user groups in the monthly issued NREN News

bulletin.

In addition to this, the NA4 T3 section on the GÉANT intranet [NA4T3_intranet] contains a table

summarising the key pieces of information regarding the initiatives being supported, as follows:

Project name.

Brief description.

User sites

User coordinator

NRENs involved.

NA4 coordinator.

Project documents.

Timing of project.

Services required.

Links.

N4 T3 members have participated in numerous events to inform stakeholders of the services offered

and the achievements made to date. In particular:

Presentation of data sonification work at numerous events and conferences.

Participation in EGI, EUDAT conferences, in round table discussions and panels.

TNC conferences.

EU Copernicus workshop, Brussels, March 2014.

EU Future Internet Information Day, Brussels, 6 February 2015.

Big data workshops, ESRIN, November 2014.

NREN conferences.

Conclusions


14 Conclusions

During the course of its two-year work programme, NA4 T3 has strengthened the engagement of the

GÉANT project and the NRENs with several user communities, organisations and projects. It did so in

accordance to a strategy set out which is based on three key ingredients:

The priorities of the NRENs, identified via a survey.

The development of the one stop shop principle.

The ongoing input of the IUAC.

There has been continued support for the more traditional sectors HEP and Radio astronomy, while

significant developments have occurred in the Earth Sciences sector, where a lot of emphasis is placed

on Federated Identity Management.

The collaboration with other e-Infrastructures has been strengthened via workshops with EGI, PRACE

and EUDAT.

The one stop shop principle has been developed to include coordinated monitoring functions and

management of user-site equipment where necessary, whilst future work will continue to examine

the circumstances in which centralised invoicing for services is of mutual benefit to users and NRENs.

Work is under way to strengthen the engagement with the Life Sciences communities as well as the

EU flagships (Graphene and Human Brain), which until now have focussed on their internal project

priorities. It is expected that the EU FET Flagship projects will be ready to engage with NRENs and

GÉANT during the course of 2015.

Future Internet and Arts and Humanities are also being actively supported by NA4 T3.

Finally, NA4 T3 is exploring opportunities to strengthen the user base of NRENs, so far specifically via

engagement with EU agencies and following of the Connecting Europe Facility discussions. Results

with EU agencies are expected within the 2015/2016 timeframe.

Conclusions


Appendix A One Stop Shop Principles

This section contains an extract of the GN3-11-144 document on the process for supporting large user

groups. GN3-11-144 is a document approved by the GN3 Executive Committee at the time in 2011,

and as such is included “as is” for reference. It sets the basis for interacting with international user

groups/organisations is still the current reference document on this topic. Being a document from

2011, it refers to DANTE and not to GEANT Ltd.

A.1 Motivation

The continued success of the NREN community is dependent on maintaining a competitive advantage

over commercial network providers in key sectors, by providing R&E community with tailored

solutions non available from these commercial actors. One of the most important of these specific

sectors is that of large international research projects. Conversely, the community’s approach to these

projects has so far been haphazard and largely uncoordinated.

Among the key strengths of the GN3plus consortium is:

Large European and Global network footprint.

High levels of technical expertise.

High levels of knowledge of local and pan-European network markets.

Access to cutting-edge technologies.

Understanding of the network requirements of the R&E community.

European and global partnerships and reach.

Subsidised pan-European connectivity.

Existing (and often unique) connections to the majority of European R&E institutions.

However, these benefits cannot be leveraged if basic organisational processes do not exist on a pan-

European basis. The essential areas to address are:

Account management to ensure that records are kept, requests answered and follow-ups

made where necessary. To provide a point-of contact for enquiries and to manage the

technical and commercial offerings of the consortium.

Conclusions


Technical customer support to understand the detailed requirements of the user application

and organisational structure. To propose a suitable service offering and to develop a technical

design for the NREN/GÉANT solution.

Commercial management to provide a coherent pan-European response to commercial

enquiries with the aim of offering a credible alternative to the commercial market.

This document aims to address these issues by describing a framework process to manage large user

interactions.

A.2 Segmentation

Clearly it cannot be expected that every user of GÉANT capacity should receive, or indeed need,

dedicated support. However, to deliver support effectively it must be decided which user groups

should receive dedicated support from the GÉANT project.

User groups can be broadly categorised into the following three types:

Very Large Users. These are projects or organisations of the highest political and scientific

significance; they may involve hundreds or thousands of users and may influence the very

architecture and services of the GÉANT and NREN backbones. It is necessary to address these

users (e.g., LHC, PRACE and EXPReS) in a bespoke manner and with policy input from the NREN

PC. It is likely that there will only ever be a handful of such projects and, as such, they fall well

in the scope of this document.

Large User Groups. Large User Groups are pan-European organisations or projects that are

‘large’ in terms of their data and networking requirements and the number of participants. It

is likely that they will have very specific needs for support on a pan-European scale. This

support may require the design of a set of specific instances of existing services, help with

gauging the suitability of research networks for their application, or they may simply require

advice on networking on an international scale. There are at least several tens of these projects,

thus their support requires a framework in which to operate effectively in order that it

becomes routine.

Smaller User Groups. These form the great bulk of European researchers and educationalists

that benefit from the GÉANT network, yet find adequate support at a local or national level

and do not require input on a European scale to use research networks effectively.

A.3 Process Overview

The lifecycle of interaction with a Large User Group may be divided into five distinct stages:

Figure A.1: Large user group interaction: process overview

Requirement Gathering Design ImplementationProposal Operation/Support

Conclusions


Each of these stages is discussed in detail in the following sections, with its own flow-chart as

necessary. While it is helpful to define a timescale for each stage, the level of complexity of each user

case will vary, so it may be best to set expectations once a clear picture of the user case is established.

A.4 User Needs/Requirement Gathering

Requirement gathering is an essential stage of interaction with Large User Groups. In logging the

existence of the user or potential user, the consortium must commit to maintaining an account-

management function with regular interactions until either an acceptable network solution has been

provided or it has been clearly established that services from the GÉANT/NREN consortium are not

required. In either case, a clear log of interactions and requirements should be kept in conjunction

with the standard templates.

Figure A.2 shows a typical user interaction with a representative of the Large User Group approaching

an NREN, who then becomes the ‘Lead NREN’ responsible for joint-interaction with the user and

overseeing the process together with the DANTE account manager.

An important step at an early stage of interaction is often to establish a cost estimate for connectivity

to R&E networks. This is often requested by the user to decide whether to consider R&E networks as

a viable alternative to the commercial sector or to alternative technologies such as satellite

communications.

If possible, it is useful to establish certain facts at an early stage. Examples include:

Whether the user feels an open tender or similar procurement procedure is necessary (it is

often inappropriate for publicly subsidised and not-for-profit organisations such as NRENs to

compete in this way).

Whether all the user sites meet the necessary NRENs’ acceptable use policies.

The timescale for implementation.

Conclusions


Figure A.2: Requirement gathering

Conclusions


A.5 Design

Based upon the established requirements, a network design should be proposed that will meet the

needs of the user group given the known constraints. This work is the joint responsibility of the Lead

NREN and GEANT Ltd, although once again, it is necessary for the Account Manager to take ownership

of completing the design phase in an agreed timescale. In some cases such analysis will conclude that

no ‘design’ is necessary and the existing infrastructure will suffice, unchanged. In other cases, the

design can only be confirmed after close consultation with all the network domains concerned and

this liaison will be an important (and potentially time-consuming) phase of the design process.

Furthermore, depending on the user requirement a ‘rough’ design may suffice for a budgetary

estimate, while a very detailed design may be needed for final implementation. However after the

design is defined, it should be distributed in full with all the NRENs.

Once complete, the proposed design must be shared with the user before a formal commercial

proposal is made.

Figure A.3: Design phase

Conclusions


A.6 Proposal

The proposal is perhaps the phase of this process where most gains can be made from a coordinated

approach. Any commercial supplier will naturally present a coherent picture of any proposed solution

and pricing. To provide an equally professional picture of the capabilities of the NREN community,

technical and commercial data must be collected from each NREN in a common template, then edited

into a single document to harmonise, as much as possible, the joint offer from the consortium. Once

complete, this proposal must be submitted on time to the potential user.

Figure A.4: Proposal phase

Conclusions


A.7 Implementation

In the case that the user group accepts the GÉANT proposal, a coordinated effort is needed to

smoothly implement the network solution. A first step must be to establish appropriate contracts

between all the parties concerned. These contracts will take a different form, depending on the

requirements of the user and the particular solution concerned. The default position is that there will

be individual contracts between the user sites and each NREN, maintaining strong relationships

between NRENs and local sites. However, in some cases, where a user is centrally funded or

coordinated, it may be necessary to consider GEANT Ltd taking on a ‘clearing house’ function to

administer the funding to the NRENs. The details of this function and how it might work contractually

have yet to be determined.

Figure A.5: Implementation phase

Conclusions


A.8 Operation

The success of the operational phase depends significantly on the existence of strong cooperation

between the various Network Operations Centre (NOC) functions. It must be established as part of

the proposal, how fault reporting should be handled; in different scenarios this may be handled

differently. In some cases it may be appropriate for each user site to report faults to a local NREN NOC

who will then coordinate with the other domain NOCs to resolve the fault. In other cases a single NOC

service desk may be required to accept all fault reports, which will then need to be distributed as

appropriate. Aside from fault reporting, the networks should provide a monthly service report

outlining the performance of the paths in each network domain.

To maintain and build on the relationship with the user group, review meetings should take place at

least annually between the Lead NREN, GEANT Ltd and the user representatives.

Figure A.6: Operation

Conclusions


A.9 Roles and Responsibilities

Large User Groups are an important and highly visible sector of the research and education network

community. These users often drive innovation and provide important case-studies to encourage take-

up of NREN services. However, with the exception of those projects with the highest profile (LHC,

DEISA, ITER, etc.), it should be possible to formulate a process to deal with these more ‘routine’ pan-

European users in a consistent and professional manner, with the aim of providing a service which

equals or betters the commercial alternative.

This section sets out roles and responsibilities for each of the stakeholders. It should be emphasised

that this process deals with the day-to-day workload of customer support and does not aim to regulate

decision-making or formulate policy.

Lead NREN

In most cases, it will be the Lead NREN who identifies the user group and begins the dialogue with

them. In these circumstances, the Lead NREN is responsible for the collection of initial information

and distribution to GEANT Ltd and the other NRENs. The lead NREN also co-organises and attends all

meetings with the User. A representative of the Lead-NREN takes joint responsibility for the technical

design with GEANT Limited’s Technical Customer Support.

In other respects the lead NREN is responsible for the same contribution as other NRENs involved in

the activity.

GEANT Ltd (Account Manager)

GEANT Ltd performs an account manager function, taking responsibility for the smooth and timely

running of the processes, the distribution of user requirements to NRENs, and the collation, editing

and submission of the proposal. The GEANT Ltd account manager will attend meetings with the User

and Lead NREN.

GEANT Ltd (Technical Customer Support)

GEANT Ltd Technical Customer Support will take joint-responsibility for technical aspects of the

network design, any necessary proof-of-concept testing, and may assist in performance testing of the

implemented solution.

Other NRENs

NRENs should respond to requests for information in a timely manner and should be prepared to

provide information in the format specified in the Proposal templates. NRENs may also act as first-

point-of-contact with the user sites, and will then take responsibility for the appropriate distribution

of faults, requests for action and information.

Other responsibilities of the NREN will be set out on a case-by-case basis in the user contract.

Users

The User should be prepared to engage with GÉANT NRENs and GEANT Ltd, but should not bear the

burden of project-managing the process. Likewise, the User should be prepared to share full details of

Conclusions


the network requirements, but these will not necessarily be in the form of a demand for a particular

service, bandwidth or network design. The User should be clear, however, on the sites to be connected;

providing accurate address and contact details for each site is essential.

In order to engage fully with the GÉANT community, the User should nominate a point-of-contact and

should make the necessary staff available for the meetings listed in the process.


Appendix B ESA Supported Initiatives

B.1 JAXA-ESOC connectivity

This initiative is to provide point-to-point service capability to support a new collaboration between

the European Space Operation Centre (ESOC, part of ESA) based at Darmstadt, Germany and the Japan

Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan.

The specific requirement is for end-to-end bandwidth for ground communications to support a launch

programme scheduled to start in Q4 of 2014, with a requirement for testing during Q1 of 2015. The

bandwidth is only required to be only around 2Mbps, replacing previously used ISDN technologies,

but high reliability and performance are required. A project team that includes DFN, GEANT Ltd, CNGI-

6IX and NII (JAXA’s Japanese NREN) has been working with the end users and assessing potential

routes. The aim is to set up two paths – one west from Europe and one in the easterly direction – to

provide full redundancy, as this will carry telemetric data during future space flights.

At the end of 2014 the Western route via the USA had been tested and is now ready for operational

use. The easterly route that has been selected will use ORIENTPLUS to carry traffic on the leg between

Europe and Beijing, China. The plan is for testing of this route to start in early 2015 and be available

for operational use in mid-2015. The connectivity diagram is shown in Figure B.1.

Executive Summary


Figure B.1: Diagram for JAXA-ESOC connectivity

Executive Summary


B.2 Connecting EKO to ESAC and ESTEC

The European Space Agency (ESA) requires 20Mbps connectivity between its site in Kourou, French

Guiana (EKO) to its data centres in Madrid, Spain (ESAC) and the Netherlands (ESTEC) to support its

corporate IT functions.

The proposal was submitted by GÉANT Ltd on 16 January 2015 and is currently under evaluation by

ESA.

Figure B.2: Diagram for connecting EKO to ESAC and ESTEC

RENATERL3VPN

RedIRISSURFnet

GÉANT L3VPN

L2VPN

BGP Peering

EKO

ESTEC

ESAC

Executive Summary


B.3 ESA Search and Rescue System

Figure B.3 shows the overall setup of the ESA Search and Rescue system and shows connectivity of the

three ground stations to the respective NRENs. It has onwards connectivity to CNES in Toulouse,

France, via RENATER, which hosts the search and rescue coordination centre.

Figure B.3: Diagram for ESA Search and Rescue system connectivity


References

[CLARIN] http://www.clarin.eu/content/user-delegation

[EOorg] http://www.earthobservations.org/members.php

[ESworkshop] https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2390

[Graphene] http://graphene-flagship.eu/

[HumanBrain] https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en_GB/home

[MediaLib-Nov14] http://www.geant.net/Resources/Media_Library/Pages/Brochures.aspx

[NA4T3_intranet] https://intranet.geant.net/NA4/T3/SitePages/Overview.aspx

[NASA] http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC14/demonstrations.html

http://www.clarin.eu/content/user-delegation

http://www.earthobservations.org/members.php

http://www.geant.net/Resources/Media_Library/Pages/Brochures.aspx

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC14/demonstrations.html

Deliverable D4.5 (DN4.3.1) Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community Document Code: GN3PLUS14-644-132+ 69

Glossary

AAI Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure

ANA-100G Advanced North Atlantic 100G Pilot project

Belle II An upgraded particle physics experiment conducted by an international

collaboration of more than 400 physicists and engineers investigating CP-violation

effects at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK), Japan

BGP Border Gateway Protocol

CDT Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union, Luxembourg

CEF Connecting Europe Facility

CERN European Organisation for Nuclear Research

CLARIN Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure

CM Contributing Missions

CNES Centre national d'études spatiales, Paris, France

CONFINE Community Network testbed for the Future INternEt

Copernicus An EC programme, formerly Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)

for achieving an autonomous, multi-level operational Earth observation capacity

CST CNES Centre spatial de Toulouse, France

CSWG Cost Sharing Working Group

CTA Cherenkov Telescope Array

DARIAH Digital Research Infrastructures for the Arts and Humanities

DEISA Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications

EASO European Asylum Support Office, Malta

EC European Commission, the executive body of the EU

eduGAIN A service that enables the trustworthy exchange of information related to identity,

authentication and authorisation between the GÉANT Partners’ federations.

eduroam A global service that provides secure roaming connectivity.

EEA European Environment Agency

EFCA European Fisheries Control Agency, Vigo, Spain

EGA European Genome-phenome Archive

EGI European Grid Infrastructure

EIDA European Integrated Data Archive

EKO Centre spatial Guyanais (the Guiana Space Centre), Kourou, French Guiana

ELIXIR European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information

EMBL-EBI European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute

EMCDDA EU Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Lisbon, Portugal

EMSA European Maritime Safety Agency

EPOS European Plate Observation System

Glossary


ES Earth Sciences

ESA European Space Agency

ESFRI European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures

ESnet Energy Sciences Network

ESOC-JAXA European Space Operations Centre – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

EU European Union, the economic and political union of 28 member states

EUDAT European Data Infrastructure

EUMETSAT European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites

eVLBI A technique for connecting VLBI radio telescopes in real-time, while still employing

the local time references of the Very Long Baseline Interferometry technique

EXPReS A project designed to connect telescopes at Gigabit per second links via their

National Research Networks and GÉANT

FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal

FET Future and Emerging Technologies, an EC initiative

FI Future Internet

Gbps Gigabits per second, a data rate of 109 bits per second

GÉANT The pan-European data network for the research and education community

GEO Group on Earth Observation

GEOSS Global Earth Observation System of Systems

GN3plus (GÉANT Network 3 plus), a project part-funded from the EC's Seventh Framework

Programme under Grant Agreement No.605243

HEP High Energy Physics

HN Helix Nebula (project)

HNX Helix Nebula service

IaaS Infrastructure as a Service

ICT Information and Computer Technology

Internet2 A not-for-profit United States computer networking consortium led by members

from the research and education communities, industry, and government

IP Internet Protocol

ITER International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project

IUAC International User Advisory Committee

JAXA Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

JRA Joint Research Activity

KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, Tsukuba, Japan

KNMI Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch

Instituut)

L0 In the OSI model, Layer 0 is transmission media (outside the scope of the Physical

Layer)

L1 In the OSI model, Layer 1 is the physical layer

L2 In the OSI model, Layer 2 is the data link layer

L3 In the OSI model, Layer 3 is the network layer

LHC Large Hadron Collider (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)

LHCONE LHC Open Network Environment

LHCOPN Large Hadron Collider Optical Private Network

Ln Layer n

LS Life Sciences

MoU Memorandum of Understanding

Glossary


NA Networking Activity

NOA National Observatory of Athens

NOC Network Operations Centre

NREN National Research and Education Network

NSF National Science Foundation (USA)

PB Petabyte (1015 Bytes)

perfSONAR Performance Service Oriented Network Monitoring Architecture

PRACE Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, supported by the EC and based in

Belgium

R&E Research and Education

REN Research and Education Network

SA Service Activity

SKA Square Kilometre Array (astronomy)

SLA Service Level Agreement

SmartFIRE A project enabling SDN Experimentation in Wireless Testbeds exploiting Future

Internet Infrastructures in South Korea and Europe, supported by the 7th Framework

Agreement

SNU Seoul National University, South Korea

SuperKEKB An enhanced version of the asymmetric electron–positron collider, located at the

High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan

TB Terabyte, 1012 bytes

UMU University of Murcia, Spain

UTH University of Thessaly, Greece

VLBI Very-long-baseline interferometry

VRF Virtual Routing and Forwarding

WLCG World LHC Computing Grid

Documents

Strategic Report on the GÉANT Community · community, including pan-European research collaborations, organisations and e-Infrastructures. The Report covers the period to end of