**4.2 GRIDSEED training tool**

The GRIDSEED tool (Gregori, 2011) , a set of virtual VM machines preconfigured with several grid services, is by far the most successful training tool developed within EuindiaGRID projects. GRIDSEED is not just a software package, but a complete training tool containing a software package and all the information to use it as training platforms, targeting different user community and different kind of aspects (users vs. sys administrator training).

Applications Exploiting e-Infrastructures Across

There is a clear need for a tool like MILU:

bridged.

"just works".

Atmospheric Sciences.

requirements

activity.

steps:

Europe and India Within the EU-IndiaGrid Project 295

We believe that MILU, possibly extended in the future to include the EMI "unified client" to be, can have an impact for the users and developers belonging to emerging communities, as a lower-level tool upon which more sophisticated Grid access mechanisms can be built.

 To provide a smooth transition between different middleware systems, e.g., when the old software still needs to be around as the new one is too immature to completely replace it, or when two infrastructures with different access methods have to be

 To provide a preconfigured environment that can satisfy the needs of the average scientific user, who does not care about the technical details and only needs a tool that

Milu 1.1 is now distributed with Gridway middleware bundled together and properly configured to access both GARUDA and gLite infrastructure. User communities have therefore at disposal a simple and efficient interoperability tool to use both infrastructures at

In the course of the last five years a specific effort was dedicated to the support of several user communities including Biology, High Energy Physics, Material Science, and Earth &

For each user community specific applications were deployed on the grid infrastructure and each application was supported by a collaboration of European and Indian partners. Scientific and technical results were presented at relevant international conferences or published on journals and represent a clear measure of success of the user communities'

A short guideline on how to enable applications on Grid infrastructure has been also drawn up by the EU-IndiaGrid projects based on the experience collected within various user communities. The document had the goal to offer a first support to users interested in using the EU-IndiaGrid infrastructure to its best. In such a document we propose that a successful procedure for Grid-enabling application should be performed in the following five major

Initial Step: Awareness of Grid computing opportunities/analysis of the computational

At the end of each intermediate step an evaluation procedure takes place to understand if the action should move to the next step, should be stopped with the execution of the final step, or should go back and repeat the step previously done. It is worth to note that such procedure was elaborated keeping in mind the point of view of the users: this is why we

the same time. Milu was downloaded more that 2500 times so far.

(see http://eforge.escience-lab.org/gf/project/milu/)

Step 1: Technical deployment on the infrastructure

Final Step: Dissemination of the results among peers.

Step 3: Production runs and final evaluation

Step 2: Benchmarking procedures and assessment of the efficiency

**5. Applications exploiting e-infrastructures** 

The development of this tool, coordinated by CNR/IOM laboratory for e-science (eLab) continued after the closing of the first project and was quite active also during the EUIndiaGRID2 project. This tool was used in several ICTP training events and in the entire official training events of the projects. Gridseed is now an open laboratory where interoperability solutions and ideas are tested and experimented jointly by European and Indian partners (Amarnath, 2010). Version 1.6.2 was released in December 2010. This latest version includes not only gLite services but also Globus/GARUDA Services allowing setup a portable and interoperable environment between the two Grid infrastructures of the project. Components of GRIDSEED were downloaded more than 2000 times so far.

GRIDSEED provides a simple tool to setup a portable and interoperable Grid infrastructure based on virtual machines. The GRIDSEED tool was originally developed to easily deploy a training gLite Grid infrastructure almost everywhere in the world with a set of machines (simple PC's) locally connected among them as the only requirement. It uses standard virtualization tools (VirtualBox and/or VMmare) easily and widely available. Recently the virtual environment is enriched with other different middleware (Arc and Globus Toolkit) to make it the first virtual training laboratory for interoperability and interoperation among different middleware. GRIDSEED is therefore a complete training environment formed by a virtual infrastructure complemented by some demo applications and training materials ready to be used both in standard training events and advanced interoperation demo/events session.
