VRCs on EGI and Regional Infrastructures

The CHAIN project, in collaboration with the GISELA project, has organised a workshop during the EGI Community Forum 2012 event. The workshop focused mainly on two topics: 1. The current Virtual Research Communities (VRC) vision of the CHAIN, EGI- InSPIRE, EUMEDGRID-Support, INDICATE and GISELA projects and an update of the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) and Seismic VRCs status and requirements and 2. The expected structure and content of the CHAIN roadmap. Two presentations in the workshop were introducing the CHAIN Project and the current status of its activities, while other three presentations were dedicated to the activities performed by the EGI-InSPIRE, EUMEDGRID-Support, INDICATE and GISELA projects to support VRCs. The workshop has also involved new VRCs (DCH and Seismic) to investigate their requirements, in terms of resources, their actual and potential geographical coverage and understand the possibility for them to exploit the existing regional e-Infrastructures. Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) could span a large organisational spectrum: from a group of researchers working together, sharing means to carry out common investigations, such as distributed resources: instruments, computing, storage and software tools, up to large international well-structured collaborations with or without large dedicated resources. The Grid infrastructures have been promoted, as it is well known, largely by the High Energy Physics community and their success in the analysis of the data coming from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is undisputable. However these infrastructures have demonstrated to be suited as well for several other scientific domains: from Biomedical to Weather Forecast research. Expanding the support to other VRCs is thus strategic not only towards sustainability, but also to evaluate new requirements and possibly evolve the services to fulfil them. CHAIN, EGI-InSPIRE, EUMEDGRID-Support and GISELA present here a status report on their main activities to support the VRCs. The contributions show many similarities, as expected, but also some significant differences due to the different constraints in the various regions of the World. Digital Cultural Heritage and Seismic communities presented their peculiar requirements which are different both in terms of resources and level of maturity. A true intercontinental infrastructure, based on the existing regional deployments, should provide services and organisational structures that allow VRCs to work seamlessly across the continents. The following chapters describe the contributions presented at the workshop and in the final chapter conclusions, coming out from the discussion, are drawn.