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

Building an Interoperable, Distributed Storage and Authorization System

A joint project between the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) of the Canadian National Research Council, and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste (INAF-OATs), partially funded by the EGI-Engage H2020 European Project, is devoted to deploy an integrated infrastructure to access and exploit astronomical data. This infrastructure will be entirely based on the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) standards, see IVOA (2016). Currently CADC-CANFAR provides scientists with an access, storage and computation facility based on software libraries implementing a set of standards and recommendations developed by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The deployment of a twin infrastructure, basically built on the same open source software libraries, has been started at INAF-OATs. Currently, this new infrastructure provides users with an Access Control Service and a Storage Service. The final goal of the ongoing project is to build an integrated infrastructure providing complete interoperability between the two described geographically distributed infrastructures, both in users access control and data sharing. This paper describes the target infrastructure, the main user requirements covered, the technical choices and implemented solutions

Extending Support for Large Distributed Projects Through Interoperability

Many astronomy projects today are executed by distributed science teams with access to different computation and storage resources. As we move into the era of petabyte and exabyte datasets, it is recognized that moving the code to the data becomes necessary as the alternative becomes infeasible. The question becomes how can resource infrastructures support these large projects such that a team has integrated access to the different distributed resources available to a project. Examples of resources that could be integrated are files and directories, storage allocations, processing allocations, containers and virtual machine images, databases and tables, etc. A first step in this direction is the interoperability of authorization services. The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has developed many standards to support access and interoperability of infrastructure such as Single-Sign On (SSO), Credential Delegation Protocol (CDP) and VOSpace. Both Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) operated by the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre) and INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste (INAF-OAT) use these standards for provision of user storage to support projects. In the VOSpace implementation, users assign read-only and read/write permissions to groups that are defined in their respective home institution Group Management Services. In 2015, the EGI-Engage project in Europe partially funded an exploration of interoperability of authorization services in a joint project between the CANFAR and INAF-OAT. This has also led to the inclusion of this work in the Advanced European Network of E-infrastructures for Astronomy with the SKA (Aeneas) proposal. The joint CANFAR/ INAF-OAT project has added support to interoperate its VOSpace services by adding the capability of granting authorization to access a resource to groups defined in an external Group Management Service and to allow for the dynamic creation of internal user IDs that are associated with an external identify provider