The Home Pages of Project Sinergia Initiative

GRID SINERGIA ADMINISTRATION

This page provides administrative details regarding the operation and management of the Grid Sinergia Computational Grid. Information presented here includes the Grid Sinergia Charter, instructions regarding how to join the Grid Sinergia Initiative and how to gain access to Grid Sinergia resources, as well as a list of the current software packages which form the Grid Sinergia Software Stack.

THE GRID SINERGIA CHARTER

The following is an informal set of guidelines for resource providers and grid users outlining how the Grid Sinergia Computational Grid is expected to be managed and operated.

		Description
	1.	Each site will be asked to nominate atleast one member of staff to be their representative on the Grid Sinergia Management Committee (mc-sinergia@ic.uff.br). The committee's basic objective is to provide input as to how this Grid Sinergia Initiative can evolve and be improved.
	2.	Management Committee members are responible for informing the Tecnical Support Team (st-sinergia@ic.uff.br) of any local site-specific decisions which may affect the operation (or users) of the Grid Sinergia Computational Grid.
	3.	The Grid Sinergia Computational grid is available for researchers, primarily, as a testbed to investigate, test and become familiar with grid technologies. Since Grid Sinergia currently has few dedicated resources, it use as a production grid will be restricted. Users are therefore not permitted to run large-scale compute or communication intensive applications across the grid unless previously approved by the Grid Sinergia Management Committee. Note that each individual grid sites may adopt an alternate policy for grid applications. In general, priority will be given to the needs of local users. In the near future, as more (dedicated) resources become available, this (global) policy is likely to change.
	4.	Only members of research projects which have been approved by the Grid Sinergia Management Committee will be permitted to access Grid Sinergia resources.
	5.	Approved projects will be listed on the Grid Sinergia Home Pages. A home page for each project should be available containing information about the project, the institutions involved and the names of the coordinator and other project members.
	6.	Each Grid Sinergia site has the right to determine their own resource security policy. It is possible to operate Grid Sinergia behind firewalls. Also, access to individual resources can be restricted on a per-user basis (i.e. limited to particular grid users as determined by the local site manager).
		Last modification: 15th April 2005. Approved by the Grid Sinergia Management Committee. (The current members of the Grid Sinergia Management Committee can be found on the Grid Sinergia Sites page).

GRID SINERGIA CERTIFICATION

Grid Sinergia operates it own Certification Authority. An internationally accepted certification policy is being drawn up and once approved will be available on this page.

JOINING GRID SINERGIA

Although Grid Sinergia is an initiative to create a research oriented computational grid centred across RNP's high speed optical network GIGA, we gladly welcome and encourage colaboration with other institutions world-wide. If you have resources that you would like to integrate with Grid Sinergia, please enter in contact with us at info-sinergia@ic.uff.br.

If you are interested in setting up a grid or are having problems with the installation and/or configuration of Globus 2.x Toolkit, we may be able to help.

		An Administrator's Guide to Joining Grid Sinergia
	1.	Drop us an email describing your system configuration (e.g. number and type of processors, operating system and whether each node has a valid IP) and you how would like to use your resources.
	2.	Depending on how you wish to operate your resources, we will reply with some of the options available and, if appropriate, we will send you our quick start installation and configuration guide (written in portuguese) for the Grid Sinergia software stack.
	3.	The installation guide covers just about everything you to get a basic grid up and running. The current version of the guide (Versão 2.4.2 de fevereiro 2005) describes how to: Download and install the Globus Toolkit 2.4.2 software; Obtain certificates for grid resources; Configure the gatekeeper and gridmap file; Configure the Monitoring and Discovery Service (GIS and GIIS) and gsiftp; Setup the Globus Services to operate behind a firewall; Configure resources to accept certificates signed by an alternative Certificate Authority Install MPICH-G2 and/or MPI-LAM to operate with Globus.

THE GRID SINERGIA SOFTWARE STACK

From the outset, Grid Sinergia computational grid was planned to be a heterogeneous computing resource. Few prior requirements/restrictions will be placed on administrators with regard to the hardware and software configuration of resources to be include in Grid Sinergia. On the other hand for users, this implies that not all computing resource will be capable of executing a given application (perhaps caused by conflicts due differing operating systems, library versions ou available middleware). The following tables presents a list of required (available at all GS sites) and optional middleware (available at most GS sites). Keeping the list of required middleware as short as possible, faciliates the inclusion more grid resources.

	Software	Description
	Globus Toolkit	[Required]
	MPICH-G2	[Required]
	MPILAM	[optional]
	GNU Scientific Library	[optional]
	The Network Weather Service (NWS)	[optional]

BECOMING A GRID SINERGIA USER

As set out in the Grid Sinergia Charter for the assurances of system administrators, user access is restricted to members of approved projects. Coordinators of projects who's team members would like to use Grid Sinergia should enter in contact with their local Management Committee representative or, if no such member exists for your institution, with us at info-sinergia@ic.uff.br.

		Grid Sinergia Users
	1.	Each approved project is required to have a WWW home page with a brief description of the project and list of project members. A list of approved project appears on the Grid Sinergia Home Pages.
	2.	A simple Getting Started User Guide (in portuguese) is available for users at IC/UFF. [The online version (Versão 1.2 Maio 2003) will be updated soon. Email us for the latest version.] Although, specific information is likely to differ from site to site, the basic steps should still apply at other sites.
	3.	All active users will be given access to the Grid Sinergia User's mailing list (sinergia@ic.uff.br).

CONTACT INFORMATION

This table outlines each of the mailing lists available for the Grid Sinergia Initiative. Note that access to these lists is restricted, if you think you should be receiving email from, or be allowed to send mail to, one of these lists but aren't or can't, send us an email.

	Email	Description
	sinergia@ic.uff.br	A grid computing related discussion group for Grid Sinergia users. Also used to keep users informed of events specific to the operation of Grid Sinergia. Certified users will automatically be included in this mailing list.
	mc-sinergia@ic.uff.br	Management Committee mailing list: This committee is responsible regulating grid related use of resources available to GridRio. The commitee consists one faculty member from participating site.
	st-sinergia@ic.uff.br	Support Team mailing list: The Support Team provides technical support for configuring Grid Sinergia resources and installating the software stack or other grid related software. Basically, the Support Team is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Grid Sinergia Computational Grid. Each Management Committee member will nominate at least one person to represent their site on the Support Team.
	ca-sinergia@ic.uff.br	Email address for requesting (Globus) authentication certificates for resources and users.
	info-sinergia@ic.uff.br	Email address for all other enquires.