Cloud infrastructure of INP'S Astana branch - PE "NULITS" and its integration with distributed JINR cloud infrastructure

The article describes the Institute of Nuclear Physics’ (INP) Astana branch - private establishments “Nazarbayev University Library and IT services” (PE NULITS) cloud and its integration with the distributed cloud infrastructure consisting of the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) cloud as well as clouds of some JINR Member State organizations. It explains a motivation of that work, an approach it is based on, working plan of the integration

Integrated cloud infrastructure of the LIT JINR, PE “NULITS” and INP's Astana branch

The article describes the distributed cloud infrastructure deployed on the basis of the resources of the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (LIT JINR) and some JINR Member State organizations. It explains a motivation of that work, an approach it is based on, lists of its participants among which there are private entity “Nazarbayev University Library and IT services” (PE “NULITS”) Autonomous Education Organization “Nazarbayev University” (AO NU) and The Institute of Nuclear Physics’ (INP's) Astana branch

Integrated cloud infrastructure of the LIT JINR, PE “NULITS” and INP's Astana branch

The article describes the distributed cloud infrastructure deployed on the basis of the resources of the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (LIT JINR) and some JINR Member State organizations. It explains a motivation of that work, an approach it is based on, lists of its participants among which there are private entity “Nazarbayev University Library and IT services” (PE “NULITS”) Autonomous Education Organization “Nazarbayev University” (AO NU) and The Institute of Nuclear Physics’ (INP's) Astana branch

Present Status and Main Directions of the JINR Cloud Development

The JINR cloud is growing not only in terms of the amount of resources, but also in the number of activities it is used for, namely, COMPASS production system services, a data management system of the UNECE ICP Vegetation, a service for disease detection of agricultural crops through the use of advanced machine learning approaches, a service for scientific and engineering computations, a service for data visualization based on Grafana, the jupyterhub head and execute nodes for it, gitlab and its runners, as well as some others. Apart from that, there was a successful attempt to deploy a virtual machine in the JINR cloud with a GPU card passed through from the server for developing and running machine and deep learning algorithms for the JUNO experiment. Moreover, the JINR distributed information and computing environment, combining resources from JINR Member State organizations with the help of the DIRAC grid interware, began to be used for running BM@N and MPD experiment jobs. The software distribution on these remote resources was performed using the CernVM File System. All these topics are covered in detail

Creating a Unified Educational Environment for Training IT Specialists of Organizations of the JINR Member States in the Field of Cloud Technologies

Modern science heavy relies on the usage of information technologies (IT). It is important to organize knowledge transfer from IT specialists to non-IT and to less educated and/or skilled IT ones. Nowadays a speed of IT development (as well as achievements of the results these IT are used for) can be sufficiently increased by joining efforts and resources of cooperating organizations, which solve similar tasks. An important aspect of such cooperation is an experience exchange and knowledge transfer, which can be obtained by participating in conferences, seminars, workshops, master classes, etc. That article provides information on the activities around a cloud infrastructure created at the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). It describes a purpose of its creation, implemented features, use-cases and training events it is used in. A relevance of the JINR and its Member State organizations clouds integration based on the DIRAC middleware is described too. Particular attention is paid to a process of knowledge transfer from JINR colleagues to fellows of other participating institutions through the organizing and holding of seminars, schools, conferences, round tables as well as semestrial training courses for students

New features of the JINR cloud

The report covers details on such aspects of the JINR cloud development as migration to high availability setup based on Raft consensus algorithm, Ceph- based storage back-end for VM images and DIRAC-based grid platform for external partner clouds integration into distributed computational cloud environment