1. eInfrastructures: Usage Policy Mike Garrett Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands) eInfrastructure meeting, Dublin, April 2004.

2. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions

4. Custom built (single-purpose) Supercomputer:  Equivalent ~ 10-20,000 CPUs

5. (e)VLBI – an (e)Infrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions A Telescope > 2000 km Across 0.5 Degrees VLBI provides a resolution equivalent to seeing features as small as 1 meter on the surface of the moon!

6. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions Current recording data rates limited to 1 Gbps per telescope.

7. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions Tapes have reasonable bandwidth (~ 512 Mbps) but high error rates and shipping delays. Reduces quality and timeliness of astronomers data… Reliability & performance of telescope network affected too. Reduced flexibility of instrument…

8. eVLBI – an eInfrastructure of Continental & Trans-Continental Dimensions

9. Westerbork Netherlands Gbit link eVLBI Network Topology Onsala Sweden Gbit link Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg Network North-West 150Mbit link Cambridge UK Jodrell Bank MERLIN Microwave link Dwingeloo DWDM link

10. Onsala/Cambridge Fringe @ 256Mb/s Onsala/Cambridge/Westerbork Image @ 128Mb/s

11.  160 Mbytes/second  Terrabyte scale data sets from 12 hours of observations!  Embarassingly Parallel application…

12. General Policy Issues Some general thoughts:  eInfrastructures are not just distributed, networked computer clusters… (see also St.Arnaud)  eInfrastructures can be distributed (multi-disciplinary) sensor networks (e.g. LOFAR, Square Km Array:).

13. Other General Policy Issues  Access to some eInfrastructures will occur via the traditional process of peer-review.  Low-level of external use of some GRID projects is not healthy.  Researchers could be directly supported at these infrastructures by other researchers, experienced in this specific area (e.g. EGEE).  Access should be flexible, response immediate – otherwise this kind of distributed computing will always remain a “niche activity”.  Global policy required beyond EU borders (USA, Asia, China, South Africa)

14. Usage Policy “ The main areas that the AUPs cover are… admissable use & possibly some exceptions or extreme cases (disasters) ” – eIRG White Paper, Sec. 6.6, p. 40.  eVLBI might (currently) be one of these “disaster” cases…  Currently could muster 16 Gbps flowing across GEANT into the NL for sustained periods of 1 month (3 times per year), plus unpredictable, random short observations (1 day) throughout the year.  The “last mile” problem currently limits us from this “disaster” scenario.

15. Usage Policy But… “Technology is far ahead of the applications…”  Good funding opportunities for pushing networking technology  Not enough being done to stimulate and support those applications that can take great advantage of pan-European high-speed networks/computing.  High bandwidth (research) applications (e.g. currently eVLBI) could make use of unreliable (best efforts) “research” (non-production) networks (e.g. as proposed in GN2).