SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

<strong>SIENA</strong> <strong>European</strong> <strong>Roadmap</strong> on Grid and
Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond
Executive Summary
The future <strong>European</strong> electronic infrastructure for research (e-infrastructure) needs to
integrate federated and virtualised technologies based on geographically distributed
information and communications technology (ICT) resources in a secure and interoperable
way. Such ICT resources will be provided by both the public sector and commercial vendors
and be dynamically and flexibly accessed on demand to provide a set of common services
for the communities they serve.
A driving force for e-infrastructures in Europe is data intensive science exemplified in
Europe by existing research projects at national and <strong>European</strong> levels 1 , and future projects
such as those described in the <strong>Roadmap</strong> of the <strong>European</strong> Strategy Forum on Research
Infrastructures, commonly referred to as the ESFRI projects 2 . Our focus is to identify
the core common requirements relating to the provision of e-infrastructure that the
communities have rather than the specific functionality used by particular communities. A
high-level description of these requirements, and especially those that are common to all
or most projects, is contained in the report of the <strong>European</strong> E-Infrastructure Forum 3 . Other
relevant documents describing e-infrastructure requirements have been produced by the
e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) 4 and the High Level Expert Group on Scientific
Data 5 .
An overarching and fundamentally important characteristic of an e-infrastructure is the
interoperability of its component technologies. Failure to achieve interoperability can have
powerful negative consequences for cost and efficiency of operation, and for the research
productivity of user communities of an e-infrastructure. Interoperability is best achieved
through adherence to a set of open standards and agreed principles. Work to establish such
a set of standards is ongoing for the e-infrastructure components, the services, and the
metadata, and will continue for the foreseeable future. Agreed principles are important to
achieve interoperability as a temporary measure while an agreed set of open standards is
being developed.
Due to the highly diverse, domain specific requirements of different user communities,
there is a risk of fragmentation in the development of e-infrastructure. The fact that
funding for public infrastructure comes primarily from the independent Member States
The <strong>SIENA</strong> <strong>European</strong> <strong>Roadmap</strong> on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond
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1] See, for example, the book edited by Hey and Gray
research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/contents.aspx
2] ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/index_en.cfm?pg=esfri-roadmap
3] https://documents.egi.eu/public/ShowDocument?docid=12
4] www.e-irg.eu/
5] cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/high-level-group_en.html