Armenian e-Science Foundation
Goals of ArmeSFo
A number of Armenian scientific centres are part of the large international scientific collaborations. Among them are the Yerevan Physics Institute (YerPhI) that participates in numerous experiments in USA, Germany, Switzerland and other countries, as well as the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO) where the large-volume data on the Markarian Galaxy surveys are collected and used by many world observatories. Also worth mentioning is the cooperation of the Armenian organizations with the world ecology, seismic and meteorology programs.
The Foundation will promote the introduction, development and dissemination of the e-Science technologies in Armenian scientific and educational Institutions and other organizations. This will serve to the deeper involvement of the national specialists in International Collaborations ranging from the study of intimate structure of the matter to the timely diagnosis and cure of genetic illnesses, and finally it will bring improvement of the knowledge of the Earth and the ability in foreseeing environment changes.
The acquired knowledge will be made available to industrial enterprises, governmental organizations, research and medical centres as well as private companies, situated in different parts of Armenia.
One of the main objectives of ArmeSFo is creation of the e-Science environment in Armenia. ArmGrid is a Program of ArmeSFo for building national-wide Grids. Within the ArmGrid Program, ArmeSFo has started in March 2005 the work on a special initiative, called Educational Grid in Armenia or Enabling Grid in Armenia (EGinA-project), aimed at the deployment of the first Armenian Grid infrastructure with the participation of the national scientific and educational institutions.
Together with the activity in Armenia, ArmeSFo is planning creation of the regional e-Science infrastructure with colleagues from the South Caucasian republics, Iran and Turkey. Besides of pure professional interests, this will serve to the improvement of the relations between the specialists from these countries as well as to the promotion of the exchanges amongst their populations.
Security in Virtual Organizations (VOs) is provided via the asymmetric (or public) key cryptography, with identification of the individual users, machines and services on the base of the certificates that are requested from Certification Authorities (CA) trusted by VOs. ArmeSFo Certification Authority (ArmeSFo CA) is the first Armenian Certification Authority established in 2003 by ArmeSFo. ArmeSFo CA is maintained by ArmeSFo as a courtesy service to the Armenian Grid community. ArmeSFo CA is a member of the European Certification Authority groups: European Policy Management Authority group for Grid Authentication in e-Science, EUGridPMA (former European Data Grid CA group, EDG_CA) and the LCG_CA_group of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid Project of CERN.