Interoperable geographically distributed astronomical infrastructures: technical solutions

The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing infrastructure involving an international cloud facility, EGI federated, and a set of services implementing IVOA standards and recommendations for authentication, data sharing and resource access. In this paper we describe technical problems faced, specifically we show the designing, technological and architectural solutions adopted. We depict our technological overall solution to bring data close to computation resources. Besides the adopted solutions, we propose some points for an open discussion on authentication and authorization mechanisms.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP

Phenomenology Tools on Cloud Infrastructures using OpenStack

We present a new environment for computations in particle physics phenomenology employing recent developments in cloud computing. On this environment users can create and manage "virtual" machines on which the phenomenology codes/tools can be deployed easily in an automated way. We analyze the performance of this environment based on "virtual" machines versus the utilization of "real" physical hardware. In this way we provide a qualitative result for the influence of the host operating system on the performance of a representative set of applications for phenomenology calculations.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures; information on memory usage included, as well as minor modifications. Version to appear in EPJ

Identity management in cloud platforms using VOMS and SPID

Cloud computing is being adopted more and more in recent years. It offers several benefits, such as high elasticity, availability and cost reduction, but yet presents some issues. Among the most important, the potential lack of security can affect the spreading of this technology. As cloud computing is pushing forward to the digital era, where users can have their own digital identity to access restricted resources or services, a reliable authentication and authorization system would attract more users to get involved in such process. This paper proposes an integration of the VOMS (Virtual Organization Membership Service) system for authorization and SPID (Sistema Pubblico per la gestione dell'Identità Digitale) system for authentication, within Cloud Foundry PaaS (Platform as a Service) model. Considerations, differences and interoperability matters will be addressed in order to provide a comprehensive scheme

EMI Security Architecture

This document describes the various architectures of the three middlewares that comprise the EMI software stack. It also outlines the common efforts in the security area that allow interoperability between these middlewares. The assessment of the EMI Security presented in this document was performed internally by members of the Security Area of the EMI project

The user support programme and the training infrastructure of the EGI Federated Cloud

The EGI Federated Cloud is a standards-based, open cloud system as well as its enabling technologies that federates institutional clouds to offer a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services. The EGI Federated Cloud is based on open standards and open source Cloud Management Frameworks and offers to its users IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities and interfaces tuned towards the needs of users in research and education. The federation enables scientific data, workloads, simulations and services to span across multiple administrative locations, allowing researchers and educators to access and exploit the distributed resources as an integrated system. The EGI Federated Cloud collaboration established a user support model and a training infrastructure to raise visibility of this service within European scientific communities with the overarching goal to increase adoption and, ultimately increase the usage of e-infrastructures for the benefit of the whole European Research Area. The paper describes this scalable user support and training infrastructure models. The training infrastructure is built on top of the production sites to reduce costs and increase its sustainability. Appropriate design solutions were implemented to reduce the security risks due to the cohabitation of production and training resources on the same sites. The EGI Federated Cloud educational program foresees different kind of training events from basic tutorials to spread the knowledge of this new infrastructure to events devoted to specific scientific disciplines teaching how to use tools already integrated in the infrastructure with the assistance of experts identified in the EGI community. The main success metric of this educational program is the number of researchers willing to try the Federated Cloud, which are steered into the EGI world by the EGI Federated Cloud Support Team through a formal process that brings them from the initial tests to fully exploit the production resources. © 2015 IEEE

Phenomenology Tools on Cloud Infrastructures using OpenStack

We present a new environment for computations in particle physics phenomenology employing recent developments in cloud computing. On this environment users can create and manage “virtual” machines on which the phenomenology codes/tools can be deployed easily in an automated way. We analyze the performance of this environment based on “virtual” machines versus the utilization of physical hardware. In this way we provide a qualitative result for the influence of the host operating system on the performance of a representative set of applications for phenomenology calculations.Peer Reviewe