The DORII Infrastructure

Table of Contents

DORII Infrastructure - General Information

DORII applications require the integration of scientific instruments with computational and storage resources to facilitate data acquisition, storage and processing. Coordinated and secure access to instruments, data and computational resources is an important requirement for the effective remote usage of these instruments by the application and their users. To fulfil the above requirements the DORII project utilizes the capabilities of Grid infrastructures. The main principle is the use of existing e-Infrastructures in Europe adding the necessary components and services to facilitate remote instrumentation. The DORII eInfrastructure is mainly based on the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) [http://www.eu-egee.org] infrastructure and its middleware of choice gLite (http://glite.web.cern.ch/glite/). The middleware service dealing with the management of remote instrumentation is the Instrument Element (IE) that is being built by the DORII project. To deal with the interactivity requirements of the applications the DORII eInfrastructure deploys a selection of services built by the Interactive European Grid Project (int.eu.grid) [http://www.interactive-grid.eu]. The first version of the DORII e-Infrastructure is comprised of resource centres (sites) that are distributed among the partners of the project in several countries such as Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain. Several of them belong to the EGEE infrastructure while others are new sites operated by the DORII partners and supporting the DORII Virtual Organizations. Initial deployment of the applications is being done inside the Catch-All vo.dorii.eu VO. Today, while some applications continue to use this Catch-All VO, some others have migrated to their own VOs. In total, 10 resource centres are already available in the DORII infrastructure in its first version, providing more than 2300 non-dedicated CPUs and several Terabytes of storage.

Instrument Resources

Community Partner Application Long Name Application Short Name Instruments
Earthquake EUCENTRE Network-centric seismic simulations NCSS Actuators,seismic sensors: Actuators are devices applying forces to the specimen, while a sensor network is used to monitor the specimen's reaction.
EUCENTREEarthquake early warning system EEWS seismic sensors
EnvironmentalOGS Oceanographic and coastal observation and modeling Mediterranean Ocean Observing NetworkOCOM - MOON (FLOAT)Float: Lagrangian (passively following the current) instrument, CTD Sensors
OCOM - MOON (GLIDERS)Glider: Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), CTD Sensors, Turbidity sensors,Oxygen sensors
OPATM-BFM
UC Oceanographic and coastal observation and modeling using imagingHORUS Digital Cameras, Pressure sensors, temperature sensors
ECOHYDROS Simulation and Monitoring System for inland waters and reservoirsSMIWRCTD, optical sensors
Experimental ScienceELETTRAOn-line data analysis in experimental science SAXS SAXS: Small Angle X-ray Scattering, Detectors, Other sensors
ELETTRA XRD XRD: BeamLine, Detectors, Other sensors
ELETTRA SYRMEP SYRMEP: SYnchrotron Radiation for MEdical Physics, Detectors, Other sensors
Demonstration ELETTRA LEGO Robot Exploitation LEGO Robot Exploitation LEGO Mindstorm
ELETTRA Robocam Robocam Digital Camera

Virtual Organizations

VO Name Applications User Registration
vo.dorii.eu Catch all DORII VO https://voms.grid.auth.gr:8443/voms/vo.dorii.eu/
ihydra HORUS https://i2g-voms.lip.pt:8443/voms/ihidra
ienvmod ECOHYDROS https://i2g-voms.lip.pt:8443/voms/ienvmod
gridats On-line data analysis in experimental science https://voms01.grid.elettra.trieste.it:8443/voms/gridats/
lights.infn.it On-line data analysis in experimental science https://voms2.cnaf.infn.it:8443/voms/lights.infn.it/

Instrument Integration

Sites of Computational and Storage Resources

Country Partner Name Site Name CPUs(Cores)Storage (TB)Core Services
Poland PSNC PSNC 2128 4
Spain CSIC IFCA-CSIC 1680 230
IFCA-I2G* 1680* 230*
Italy ELETTRA ELETTRA 160 20 WMS, BDII, LFC VCR
SISSA-Trieste240.5
INFN-Trieste2760
Greece GRNET HG-01-GRNET 64 4.78 WMS, BDII
HG-02-IASA 118 3.14
HG-03-AUTH 120 3.13 WMS, BDII
HG-04-CTI-CEID 114 2.87
HG-05-FORTH 120 2.33
HG-06-EKT 628 7.76 WMS, BDII

* IFCA-CSIC and IFCA-I2G sites share the same resources.

Operational Tools

Information for users

Information for Site administrators

The DORII Network Infrastructure

The DORII networking infrastructure is based on three main component networks:

  • Local Area Networks of the participating institutions, including highly heterogeneous data collection parts (sensor networks, satellite links, ADSL, high-speed data transfer)
  • NRENs, providing access to each national research network and to the Internet
  • GÉANT, as the backbone interconnecting NRENs

The basic DORII network infrastructure is reported in the following figure and and has been extensively discussed in DSA1.1, DSA1.2. Since the network infrastructure is used as is, i.e., in an “Internet-like” fashion, only a best effort packet delivery service is provided.

The figure also highlights the location of the clients and servers deployed to monitor the available bandwidth and the Round-Trip Time (RTT), by using Pathload and Smokeping, respectively.

The task of the networking Service Activity was to ensure that the necessary connectivity be present, to identify service interruptions and bottlenecks, and to maintain QoS (and, consequently, users’ QoE) within acceptable limits, identified by the specific application requirements. To this end, deliverables DSA1.1, DSA1.2 and DSA1.3 identified application requirements, evaluated early applications’ deployment, and defined a roadmap for the setup of a monitoring infrastructure, capable of reporting potential bottlenecks and the ensuing performance degradation in the quality of the user applications. The monitoring infrastructure allows measuring well-defined metrics.

Testbed with QoS support

To evaluate the performance of a sub-set of DORII applications (one for each scientific community) when QoS is provided, a dedicated bandwidth connection at 1 Gb/s between PSNC and GRNET (see the following figure) has been set-up for experimental purposes. The dedicated bandwidth connection was provided from GÉANT through the GÉANT Plus Connectivity Service. For the purposes of the test, point-to-point dedicated 1Gbps connectivity was established between marie.hellasgrid.gr (SE) and reef.man.poznan.pl (CE). Traffic generated from marie.hellasgrid.gr towards reef.man.poznan.pl was routed through the dedicated point-to-point connection. Similarly, traffic generated from reef.man.poznan.pl towards marie.hellasgrid.gr was routed through the dedicated point-to-point connection. All the other traffic of both sites was routed through the existing network in GRNET and PSNC and did not affect the dedicated bandwidth circuit.

IPv6 Testbed

Within the DORII network native IPv6 connectivity is provided between GRNET and PSNC through the GRNET and PIONEER networks that are connected through the GÉANT2 network. Furthermore, an IPv6 Testbed is set-up within EUCENTRE and a HellasGrid site in GRNET. Native IPv6 connectivity has been enabled in the access network for EUCENTRE and ariagni.hellasgrid.gr that is a HellasGrid site in Crete. In EUCENTRE, IPv6 is supported in the EUCENTRE LAN, the hosting IE and the VCR, while in ariagni.hellasgrid.gr IPv6 is supported in all the hosts of the Grid site. IPv6 connection between EUCENTRE and ariagni.hellasgrid.gr is provided through the native IPv6 network of GRNET, GÉANT and GARR. The topology of the connection is shown in the following figure.

\\

EUCENTRE application is written in Java and thus IPv6 is transparently supported for this application. However, since the gLite middleware is partially ported to IPv6 at this moment, we were not able to execute tests with IPv6 to the HellasGrid sites. Thus, in order to make some pilot tests with IPv6 support, by using the DORII developed middleware, a special IPv6 enabled testbed is being created. In this testbed, an IPv6 enabled VCR is installed in GRNET in order to be accessible via IPv6 from the IE in EUCENTRE.

More specifically, native IPv6 connectivity has been enabled between EUCENTRE and GRNET:

  • EUCENTRE LAN, hosting the IE
  • Italian NREN (GARR)
  • GÉANT
  • Greek NREN (GRNET), hosting a VCR that supports IPv6, SEs and CEs

Network Monitoring

You can access the network monitoring tools of the DORII infrastructure from here

Back to top
DORII project receives funding from the EC's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211693.