Category: Software Team

3. Etienne URBAH

Etienne URBAH
_ LAL, Univ Paris-Sud, IN2P3/CNRS
_ Bat 200 91898 ORSAY France
_ Tel: +33 1 64 46 84 87
_ urbah (at) lal.in2p3.fr

Profile
Having a broad scientific background, I am able to easily :
– understand the general goals and needs of scientific users,
– capture their use cases and requirements for the goal of automatic data processing.

My framework is professional software engineering and infrastructure operation, based on best practices and tools (CMMI, ITIL, UML) :
– Documentation (even through reverse engineering if needed),
– Change and configuration management,
– Life cycle : capture of initial requirements, design, specification, prototyping, validation of the requirements, development, testing, integration, packaging, validation of the software, documentation, deployment, operation, capture of software issues and new requirements, …
– Traceability, resilience to attacks, modularity, robustness, user friendliness, performance.
This permits software quality, software improvement, and software adoption by users.

For me, ‘computing’ is only a tiny part of the more general ‘data processing’, which requires precise data management, with definition and enforcement of access rights.

Overall summary from 2006 to 2012
– Software Engineer at ‘LAL, Univ Paris-Sud, IN2P3/CNRS’

– Focus on ‘service grids’ (EGI), ‘desktop grids’ (BOINC, XtremWeb-HEP) and the ‘3G bridge‘ connecting service grids to desktop grids.
Instead of ‘grid’, I prefer the concept of ‘distributed data processing’ using distributed infrastructures.

– Member of the EGEE-II, EDGeS and EDGI projects.

– Active contributor to OGF PGI and SIENA.

June 2010 – Mai 2012 : Member of the EDGI project
– Standardization, in particular with OGF PGI and SIENA :
-* Proposal of a Diagram presenting useful grid standards and OGF recommendations.
-* Proposal of a Diagram presenting grid functionalities and interfaces, with corresponding standards.
-* Active participation to PGI, JSDL and OCCI sessions at OGF29 and OGF30.

– Support to the scientific communities which have to develop a desktop grid version of their application(s).

– Quality Assurance for desktop grid versions of scientific applications (supported by other EDGI members, in order to avoid self-conflicts).

Mai 2008 – April 2010 : Member of the EDGeS project
– Standardization, in particular with OGF PGI :
-* Active participation to OGF events from OGF23 to OGF28,
-* Proposal of a document presenting requirements for credentials (obsolescence of GT2 proxies, broader adoption of SAML),
-* Proposal of a state diagram for the PGI Execution Service.

– Inside EDGeS, dissemination of information about useful grid standards and OGF recommendations, in particular :
-* RFC 3820 (X509 proxies)
-* GLUE
-* JSDL + BES

October 2006 – June 2008 : Member of the EGEE-II project
Work inside JRA2 ‘Quality Assurance’.

– Design and implementation of some tests concerning middleware performance, and publication of the results.

– Creation of the MIG web site presenting all available tools providing operational metrics on the EGEE grid.

– Review of EGEE-II DSA1.7: Assessment of production Grid infrastructure service status

– For EGEE, proposal to fully separate :
-* Support to scientific communities, using academic best practices,
-* Operation of the distributed infrastructure, using ITIL best practices,
-* Software engineering, using CMMI best practices.

– Inside Software Engineering, proposal to fully separate responsibilities :
-* On one side, the project owner is responsible for requirements and validation,
-* On the other side, the project manager is responsible for design, specification, implementation, testing and integration.