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

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures

Future opportunities and trends for e-infrastructures and life sciences: Going beyond the grid to enable life science data analysis

With the increasingly rapid growth of data in life sciences we are witnessing a major transition in the way research is conducted, from hypothesis-driven studies to data-driven simulations of whole systems. Such approaches necessitate the use of large-scale computational resources and e-infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI, one of key the enablers of the digital European Research Area, is a federation of resource providers set up to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners. Here we aim to provide the state of the art of Grid/Cloud computing in EU research as viewed from within the field of life sciences, focusing on key infrastructures and projects within the life sciences community. Rather than focusing purely on the technical aspects underlying the currently provided solutions, we outline the design aspects and key characteristics that can be identified across major research approaches. Overall, we aim to provide significant insights into the road ahead by establishing ever-strengthening connections between EGI as a whole and the life sciences community

EGI: anOpen e-Infrastructure Ecosystem for the Digital European Research Area

Bringing the digital European Research Area (ERA) online means modernising Europe’s research infrastructure by promoting open science through the availability, accessibility and reuse of scientific data and results, the use of web- based tools that facilitate scientific collaboration and ensuring public access to research. As the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is the largest European distributed computing infrastructure providing 24/7 access to large scale computing, storage and data resources through a federation of national resource providers, it allows scientists from all disciplines to make the most out of the latest computing technologies for the benefit of their research. This paper describes the methodology and approach for defining EGI’s role in bringing this digital ERA online. The work presented defines the roles and functions of EGI as an open ICT ecosystem, required service redesign, the added value of EGI for the European research communities and demonstrates the role that EGI plays in contributing to the Europe 2020 strategy for social-economic impact