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

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1 SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond Use Cases & Position Papers SIENA is a Specific Support Action funded by the GÉANT & e-infrastructure Unit, DG Information Society & Media, European Commission

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3 Index Executive Summary...3 Introduction: Forces Driving Change... 5 Future European e-infrastructure...6 e-infrastructure Requirements...8 e-infrastructure Technology...9 Enabling Standards International Co-ordination...12 Clouds Standards Coordination...13 Conclusions/Recommendations/Future Directions Target Audience...15 Timeline...15 Scope...15 Roadmap Editorial Board (REB) Member List SIENA Project Description 18 Cloudscape III Use Cases & Position Papers The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 1

4 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 2 Disclaimer The views expressed in this roadmap are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official European Commission s view on the subject.

5 SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond Executive Summary The future European 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 European levels 1, and future projects such as those described in the Roadmap of the European 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 European 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 SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 3 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] 4] 5] cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/high-level-group_en.html

6 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond of the European Community also represents a risk for fragmentation due to national objectives (e.g. budgetary) possibly being misaligned with European level needs. These risks apply equally to research e-infrastructure and to e-government infrastructure, the use of ICTs in public sector activities. The most important recommendation of this roadmap is to undertake determined and targeted efforts to discourage fragmentation, and to encourage and participate in the development of an adequate set of structures - both organisational (e.g. governance, single sign on, etc.) and technical (e.g. open standards, security, software, etc.) to ensure the interoperability of future European e-infrastructures for research and e-government. 4

7 Introduction: Forces Driving Change Powerful economic and environmental forces are driving a major evolution in the way information and communications technology (ICT) is provisioned for user communities in industry and the public sector. Economies of scale are driving consolidation of IT resources into a smaller number of ever larger data centers. Data centers with hundreds of thousands of computational and storage units are no longer uncommon. Considerations of the cost of powering and cooling such large concentrations of electronic equipment, together with environmental concerns, drive the placing of such data centers in geographic locations where power is plentiful and inexpensive. As communities become more dependent on ICT resources, the desire to assert their ownership of their data, legal concerns on the locality of the data, and the need for geographical redundancy may lead to a diffusion of data centres. The forces now driving change within ICT are many and potentially contradictory, leading to different solutions that optimise the needs of different communities and their use cases. These forces and their consequences simultaneously enable and drive the move towards a utility model of ICT. The current manifestation of this model is cloud computing through the commoditisation of the underlying virtualisation technology and the globalisation of service provision. The dynamic flexibility and reduced cost of accessing ICT resources in the cloud are beginning to overwhelm most other considerations on provisioning ICT resources. Such a fundamental shift poses numerous challenges to user communities. For example the Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe (EGI- InSPIRE) project partially funded by the EC is responding to the demands from its user communities by exploring aspects of cloud computing, notably flexible and elastic provisioning, within its grid of federated resource providers. This document addresses a number of these challenges, with a primary focus on standardization and interoperability of the infrastructures built around the utility model. Finally, market forces may be working against standardization in cloud computing 6. The differing requirements of diverse customer communities lead naturally to market segmentation. These differing requirements also enable vendor differentiation through the development of different cloud architectures to address different market segments. Competition among vendors can then lead to locking customers into distinct cloud offerings. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 5 6] See article Cloud Computing Standards Not This Year, by John Considine, January 2011 at cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/

8 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 6 Future European e-infrastructure Electronic infrastructures at a European level are becoming fundamental resources for supporting activities across the public sector - primarily e-research, e-government and e-health - as society attempts to exploit the data deluge it is facing from the numerous existing and future digital data sources. Obtaining knowledge from this data to benefit many areas of society requires convergence at three main levels: The provision of a cost-effective, flexible, adaptable and reliable e-infrastructure that is able to support different user groups and use cases; Access to persistently identifiable data sources - open access for public data and restricted access for confidential data; The development of appropriate applications, algorithms and environments that use the e-infrastructure to extract knowledge from the data sources. Tackling these issues cuts across many of the areas identified within the Digital Agenda for Europe 7 as being critical for Europe s continued growth towards a smart society: reducing the fragmentation of services, improving their interoperability, providing secure access to valuable data and resources, driving innovation and development in these services, and educating a generation of users and developers in the benefit of such technologies. Europe has already built up significant knowledge and momentum in one public sector area - e-research - after over a decade of investment through the European Commission s Framework Programmes and national funding sources. A succession of projects has resulted in capacity building across Europe and its regional partners in both grids of high throughput computing (e.g. EGEE 8, EGI-InSPIRE 9 ) and high performance computing (e.g. DEISA 10, PRACE 11 that are linked by the pan-european networking infrastructure GÉANT 12. Alongside the establishment of this e-infrastructure, innovative scalable middleware 13 has been developed and deployed into operation to meet the needs of researchers across many disciplines investigating such scientific and societal challenges as particle physics, the human genome, or climate modeling. The e-research community comprises researchers in such domains as high-energy physics, astronomy and astrophysics, energy research, and the earth, material, biological and life sciences. For this e-research community, the next decade will see European e-infrastructure being used as a foundation for establishing multi-national multi-disciplinary research infrastructures such as those described in the ESFRI roadmap. Although the maturity of these individual projects varies, together they have common needs that if provided consistently across the sector will promote many aspects of the Digital Agenda for Europe and provide cost-effective return on investment. Central to meeting these different use cases across the public sector is to provide a best 7] ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/index_en.htm 8] 9] 10] 11] 12] 13] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/middleware

9 of breed e-infrastructure that brings together public and commercial providers to deliver a series of increasingly sophisticated platforms that are tuned to the particular needs of these communities. At the heart of this vision is the provision of a federated, virtualised e-infrastructure: Federated: Bringing commercial and public sector providers from different countries that are able to inter-operate with each other - ultimately through the adoption of open standards; Virtualised: Using new and emerging software to flexibly partition these resources on demand to meet the needs of various user communities dynamically; e-infrastructure: Having a set of common services (e.g. identity management, accounting, provisioning, data access, etc) that provides a platform for adoption, portability and reuse across different communities. The vision presented in this document is by no means guaranteed. The investment that has been committed by national governments and the European Commission in GÉANT, EGI and PRACE provides vital structural building blocks in the e-infrastructure community, but in moving from core e-infrastructure to higher-level components the priorities for investment begin to diverge across Europe and between communities. The need for software to manage, deploy and run in the federated virtualized environments remains. To avoid a single monolithic software deployment across Europe the development and implementation of standards remains essential if individual sectors are not to fragment into using their own bespoke and non-interoperable software solutions. While the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model is at the heart of this vision for Europe as a whole, it will be used as a basis for deploying platforms (Platforms as a Service - PaaS) and software, notably application software (Software as a Service - SaaS) that are developed to meet the needs of particular communities. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 7

10 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 8 e-infrastructure Requirements Different communities will have different needs from the future European e-infrastructure. 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. Single Sign-On: Inter-domain access to services from different communities demands secure, portable, electronic identity that can be used across different service providers. The federated identity providers that are being established in Europe present one possible solution to this requirement. Security: Supporting secure and dynamic resource (including data, knowledge, and services) sharing and collaborations across institutional and national boundaries is an essential part of achieving the vision of an e-infrastructure. Robust electronic authentication capable of reliably identifying remote users (human beings or software components) with a certain level of assurance in authentication strength is an important pre-requisite to facilitate effective user authorisation and fine-grained access control to distributed services 14. Group Management: Managing individual access to resources across Europe is not feasible considering the number of users and resources. Using group based access control, such as the virtual organisation models used in grids, the project model used in HPC and the attributes model used in federated identities, provides a more scalable access control model. Persistent Data Identifiers: The ability to uniquely identify a data set, and from that data set identify its ownership, access rights, privacy attributes provenance, life-time, stored locations, etc. is vital for systematic reuse of data across communities. User Support: Support is needed for all types of users (end-users, system administrators, developers, etc.) across the complete life-cycle of e-infrastructure adoption. This includes training on the deployed technologies, consultancy on their use and problem solving when something goes wrong. This is needed both for the core infrastructure and any domain specific software that is deployed on top of it. Virtualisation: Communities need to deploy their own services, potentially co-located with particular data sets, on sites across Europe on demand. Such activity can then be decoupled from the deployment activities of other communities. High Throughput Data Analysis: Such communities need to be able to move large datasets to where the computing resources are available, and to move the results from such analysis to where long-term storage capacity is available. In addition to the previous requirements this requires a high-performance pan-european networking infrastructure closely coupled to data-centres with large computing and storage capabilities as supported through the EGI-InSPIRE project. High Performance Computing: Peta-scale computing resources are essential for the small proportion of researchers solving science s most demanding problem through projects such as PRACE. Efficient access to the small number of peta-scale machines in Europe is facilitated through high-performance networking links. 14] See E-infrastructure Security: Levels of Assurance Final Report:

11 e-infrastructure Technology e -infrastructure in Europe has reached a production status over the last decade by driving innovation in middleware and networking technology. This innovation needs to continue over the next decade in areas such as:»» Virtualisation: High-quality hypervisors that underpin virtualisation in modern datacentres are becoming commonplace. Commercial solutions provide integration with data centre operations. Open-source solutions, such as the OpenNebula environment, are being used as powerful tools for innovation and interoperability in the research community, and as platforms to implement new standards in cloud computing.»» Networking: Driven by the worldwide growth of the Internet commercial networking solutions are available for deployment to support public service activities. A focus on on-demand cross-domain provisioning of high-speed data transfer links (light paths) with defined service level agreements is an area which needs continuing investment.»» Software: The software platforms and services necessary to federate the virtualised resources to provide seamless access and to run within the virtualised environments continue to need investment. Increasingly, investment needs to take place through acquisition of commercially provided software solutions where they exist and allowing the research community to innovate through open-source software in areas where they can add unique value beyond the scope of commercial solutions. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 9

12 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond Enabling Standards Standardisation and interoperability are invaluable characteristics to a successful application of distributed computing. The importance of the need for open standards to support interoperability goals is now well documented in the e-business world. Of particular relevance to the e-research and e-government communities are the statements made in the EICTA Interoperability White Paper of , the ETSI White Paper No. 3. Achieving Technical Interoperability 16 and the EC s European Interoperability Strategy (EIS) 17 and Interoperability Framework (EIFv2) 18 documents of Given a policy of using open standards to achieve interoperability, the next question is which standards? At present this is not easy to answer. There are many initiatives to define the optimum set of standards to support all aspects of cloud computing 19, but as yet the full set does not exist. Putting in place the necessary on-going procedures for tracking emerging standards and technologies in order to a) set up and maintain a central agreed list of open standards, and b) provide best practice advice to e-infrastructure projects, is a significant task, and will require future investments. In an effort to align the needs of both the research and e-government communities it may be beneficial to take into consideration current EC work on Project CAMSS 20 and SEMIC.eu 21. However the following questions will persist for some time to come: 1. How does one proceed with interoperability if sufficient standards do not yet exist? 2. What happens if a large market develops for commercial offerings without open standard specifications? 3. What if relevant open standard specifications exist but are not, or not yet, supported by industry? 10 The EIS/EIF provides the following pragmatic guidance on these questions which should be equally applicable to the research communities: Public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In some cases, public administrations may find that no suitable formalised specification is available for a specific need in a specific area. If new specifications have to be developed, 15] EICTA Interoperability white paper In March 2009 EICTA was rebranded DIGITALEUROPE. 16] ETSI White Paper No. 3 Achieving Technical Interoperability - the ETSI Approach. By Hans van der Veer (Alcatel- Lucent), Anthony Wiles (ETSI Secretariat). 3rd edition, April ] COM(2010) 744 final, Annex 1 ec.europa.eu/isa/strategy/doc/annex_i_eis_en.pdf 18] COM(2010) 744 final, Annex 2 ec.europa.eu/isa/strategy/doc/annex_ii_eif_en.pdf 19] See, for example forge.gridforum.org/sf/go/doc ] ec.europa.eu/isa/workprogramme/doc/detail_description_of_actions.pdf. CAMSS, an initiative of the European Commission s IDABC programme, aims to initiate, support and coordinate the collaboration between volunteer Member States in defining a Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications and to share the assessment study results for the development of egovernment services. 21] SEMIC.EU is a participatory platform and a service by the European Commission that supports the sharing of assets of interoperability to be used in public administration and egovernment.

13 public administrations may either develop the specifications themselves and put forward the result for standardization, or request a new formalised specification to be developed by standards developing organisations.»» Even where existing formalised specifications are available, they evolve over time and experience shows that revisions often take a long time to be completed. Active government participation in the standardization process mitigates concerns about delays, improves alignment of the formalised specifications with public sector needs and can help governments keep pace with technology innovation. In the context of the SIENA Roadmap, it is essential that the research communities who need e-infrastructures for their work define their requirements of the relevant e-infrastructures. Without such definitions and conformance, little can be done to furnish standards-compliant solutions that meet any community requirements. They should also support and contribute to the current standardization initiatives and not seek to re-invent wheels. As an interim measure they should consider building adaptors to fill gaps in the standards landscape, but adapters should not be seen as the long term solution to achieve interoperability. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 11

14 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond International Co-ordination Work on the SIENA roadmap complements that of the far larger US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud Computing Program 22. A US Federal Cloud Computing Strategy document has been released which outlines the Federal Government s approaches to Cloud Computing 23. The SIENA project is concerned with e-infrastructure for research including grids and clouds. The NIST program is concerned with government use of cloud computing. The NIST SAJACC initiative 24 develops cloud system use cases to drive the formation of cloud computing standards. Cross communication between SIENA and the NIST program is proving beneficial. A number of members of the SIENA REB are also participants in the NIST cloud computing expert group. Similar work is going on in Japan 25 China 26 and other countries. The NIST program in the US, GICTF in Japan, and CESI in China are all potential partners in evaluating potential cloud standards relevant for European e-infrastructure ] collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-cloud-computing/bin/view/cloudcomputing/ WebHome 23] Federal Cloud Computing Strategy - Vivek Kundra U.S. Chief Information Officer, February 8th gov/itl/cloud/ 24] 25] See and the presentation Smart Cloud Strategy in Japan by Yasu Taniwaki, Division Director, ICT Strategy Division, Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, November 2010 items-int.eu/img/pdf/1011_smart_cloud_strategy_global_forum_.pdf 26]

15 Clouds Standards Coordination Cloud standardisation efforts led by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Open Grid Forum (OGF) are frequently cited as being enablers that could have a major impact on compute infrastructure in the future. Work on additional standards for various aspects of cloudbased services is underway in the Organisation for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). At the same time, market adoption of some of these standards is mixed, and different regions (US, China, Japan) are still evaluating their approaches to cloud standards, so it is difficult to predict whether consensus will emerge in the near term. The standards listed below that have emerged from analysis of use cases collected to date are being coordinated through an alliance between the OGF and SNIA as well as through a cross-sdo cloud standards collaboration group 27 : Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 28 developed by DMTF. OVF is a packaging standard designed to address the portability and deployment of virtual appliances. This is recognised as a DMTF, ANSI standard categorized under IaaS, Interoperability. There are firms who provide tools for conversion between various appliance formats, including OVF format to Amazon Machine Image (AMI) format. 29 The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) 30 developed by the OGF. OCCI describes application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable cloud providers to expose their services. It focuses on IaaS based clouds and allows the deployment, monitoring and management of virtual workloads (like virtual machines), but is applicable to any interaction with a virtual cloud resource through defined http(s) header fields and extensions. While there are several open-source implementations, OCCI has not yet been widely adopted in commercial platforms. OCCI is also an input to the DMTF standard for cloud management. The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) 31 developed by SNIA. CDMI defines the functional interface that applications use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the Cloud. CDMI is not yet widely implemented in commercial platforms. Other standards may emerge that enable interoperability between clouds and grids. For example, the OGF GLUE 32 standard provides one information model for describing grid and cloud entities while the CIM model from DMTF 33 provides an alternative model used frequently in industry. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 13 27] See the summary at the Cloud Standards Wiki is available at cloud-standards.org 28] A description is available at dmtf.org/standards/ovf 29] aws.amazon.com/amis/ 30] occi-wg.org/ 31] 32] GLUE Specification v. 2.0, by S. Andreozzi (INFN); S. Burke (RAL); F. Ehm (CERN); L. Field (CERN); G. Galang (ARCS); B. Konya (Lund University); M. Litmaath (CERN); P. Millar (DESY); JP Navarro (ANL). March ]

16 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond Conclusions Recommendations Future Directions The most important recommendation of this roadmap is to: Undertake determined and targeted efforts to discourage fragmentation, while at the same time preserving innovation in the development of e-infrastructure. In support of this recommendation we believe the following actions are necessary by all stakeholders to achieve the desired outcomes: Fund participation in the long-term development of an adequate set of open standards to ensure the interoperability of future European infrastructures for research and e-government. Public sector and commercial providers should engage more to explore shared standards requirements. An ongoing process is needed to track emerging standards, technologies, and best practices in order to create and maintain a structured repository of open standards (from various SDOs) for grids and clouds, and provide updated guidance to European e-infrastructure projects. This activity will benefit from interaction with worldwide initiatives and other European projects (e.g. NIST, GICTF, CESI, CAMSS 34, SEMIC.eu 35, etc.). Encourage and fund the definition of sound security policies concerning the access, use and provisioning of services within distributed infrastructures. Introduce guidelines for dealing with data privacy, long term data curation, liability and taxation issues in clouds and grids for work across legislative boundaries. 14 Fund procurement of open source or commercially provided software solutions allowing the research community to innovate in areas where they can add unique value beyond the scope of commercial solutions. Fund on-demand cross-domain provisioning of high-speed data transfer links (light paths) with defined service level agreements. Involve Europeans citizens in e-science through volunteer computing (using, e.g., desktop grids and clouds). 34] ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7407.html. See also footnote n ] See also footnote n. 21.

17 Target Audience This initial draft document is for circulation to the SIENA Roadmap Editorial Board (REB), Industry Expert Group (IEG), Special Liaison Group (SLG) and the European Commission. Timeline Since October 2010, REB members have been contributing material to the SIENA Wiki. The material is structured according to a table of contents for a final document. This initial draft has been prepared as a SIENA deliverable to the EC. The REB has developed a publishable version circulated at Cloudscape-III (Brussels, 15-16/03/2011). The REB will then integrate further elements, namely the use cases presented at Cloudscape III from SIENA and NIST. Scope This document addresses requirements, technologies, and interoperability and standards for e-infrastructure to support existing, ongoing, and future research in the European Research Area. The term e-infrastructure encompasses the distributed information and communications technologies (ICTs), together with federating software, that together provide services and access to resources needed to support public sectors such as research in the natural and social sciences and humanities. While not a focus of this specific document, some consideration is given to aspects of e-infrastructure that apply also to e-government. The most recent European Commission call under Framework Programme 7 for proposals relevant to e-infrastructure can be found in the European Commission Work Programme 2011 Capacities Part 1 Research Infrastructures 36. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 15 36] cordis.europa.eu/fp7/wp-2011_en.html

18 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond Roadmap Editorial Board (REB) Member List REB Member Role & Organisation Country John Borras Independent Consultant & OASIS United Kingdom Goetz-Philip Brasche Mark Carlson Guy Coates Juan Cáceres Program Director Cloud Computing EMIC & Venus-C representative Senior Architect, Oracle & SNIA & DMTF representative Group leader, Informatics systems group at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Middleware Technologies Specialist, Telefónica I+D & StratusLab representative Germany United States United Kingdom Spain Michel Drescher EGI.eu Technical Manager The Netherlands Åke Edlund Mike Fisher Patrick Guillemin KTH project manager and researcher & ECEE representative Distributed Computing Research Group Leader BT & Chair of Technical Committee, ETSI ETSI Secretariat, Strategy & New Initiatives Sweden United Kingdom France Jenny Huang AT&T, OMG representative United States Gershon Janssen Independent Consultant & OASIS Standards Group representative The Netherlands 16 Craig Lee The Aerospace Corporation United States Bob Marcus ET-Strategies United States Ignacio Martin Llorente Complutense University of Madrid & OpenNebula representative Spain Steven Newhouse EGI.eu Director & EGI-InSPIRE Director The Netherlands Alexander Papaspyrou Morris Riedel Alan Sill Technische Univ. Dortmund & IGE representative Jülich Supercomputing Centre & EMI representative VP of Standards, OGF & Senior Scientist, Texas Tech University Germany Germany United States Etienne Urbah LAL, Univ Paris-Sud & EDGI representative France Martin Antony Walker Independent Consultant & REB Chair France

19 Roadmap content has been contributed by members of the SIENA Roadmap Editorial Board (REB) and Industry Expert and Special Liaison Groups (IEG and SLG), who also contributed to the editing process. Roadmap content structuring, production, and final editing were done by Martin Antony Walker, REB chair, John Borras, co-chair, and Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI.eu and EGI-InSPIRE, with contributions by Silvana Muscella, SIENA technical coordinator, and James Ahtes, ATOS Origin. Organisation and coordination of the REB and editorial activities have been carried out by the SIENA consortium. The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond 17

20 The SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-science and Beyond SIENA Project Description eu S IENA (RI ) the Standards and Interoperability for einfrastructure Implementation Initiative ( ), is a Support Action funded by the European Commission under Framework Programme 7 ( ) Research infrastructures projects. SIENA will contribute to defining a future einfrastructures roadmap focusing on interoperability and standards, in close collaboration with the European Commission, Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) projects and Standard Development Organisations (SDOs) to gain an in-depth understanding of how distributed computing technology is being developed in this context. The roadmap will define scenarios, identify trends, investigate the innovation and impact sparked by cloud and grid computing, and deliver insight into how standards and the policy framework is defining and shaping current and future development and deployment in Europe and globally. 18