Supporting e-Science Applications on e-Infrastructures: Some Use Cases from Latin America

In this chapter, we describe a successful methodology to support ­e-Science applications on e-Infrastructures put in practice in the EELA-2 project co-funded by the European Commission and involving European and Latin American countries. The heterogeneous requirements of the e-Science applications, coming from several scientific fields, makes difficult to provide them with a support able to satisfy all the different needs. Usually, the grid middleware adopted, gLite in the case of EELA-2, provides applications with general tools not able to meet specific requirements. For this reason, a really powerful e-Infrastructure has to offer some additional services to complete and integrate the functionalities of the grid middleware. These services have to both increase the set of functionalities offered by the e-Infrastructure and make easier the tasks of developing and deploying new applications. Following this methodology, EELA-2 deployed 53 e-Science applications out of the 61 supported in total, in its enriched e-Infrastructure during its life.