Publication and Protection of Sensitive Site Information in a Grid Infrastructure

In order to create a successful grid infrastructure, sites and resource providers must be able to publish information about their underlying resources and services. This information makes it easier for users and virtual organizations to make intelligent decisions about resource selection and scheduling, and can be used by the grid infrastructure for accounting and troubleshooting services. However, such an outbound stream may include data deemed sensitive by a resource-providing site, exposing potential security vulnerabilities or private user information to the world at large, including malicious entities. This study analyzes the various vectors of information being published from sites to grid infrastructures. In particular, it examines the data being published to, and collected by the Open Science Grid, including resource selection, monitoring, accounting, troubleshooting, logging and site verification data. We analyze the risks and potential threat models posed by the publication and collection of such data. We also offer some recommendations and best practices for sites and grid infrastructures to manage and protect sensitive data

User Applications Driven by the Community Contribution Framework MPContribs in the Materials Project

This work discusses how the MPContribs framework in the Materials Project (MP) allows user-contributed data to be shown and analyzed alongside the core MP database. The Materials Project is a searchable database of electronic structure properties of over 65,000 bulk solid materials that is accessible through a web-based science-gateway. We describe the motivation for enabling user contributions to the materials data and present the framework's features and challenges in the context of two real applications. These use-cases illustrate how scientific collaborations can build applications with their own "user-contributed" data using MPContribs. The Nanoporous Materials Explorer application provides a unique search interface to a novel dataset of hundreds of thousands of materials, each with tables of user-contributed values related to material adsorption and density at varying temperature and pressure. The Unified Theoretical and Experimental x-ray Spectroscopy application discusses a full workflow for the association, dissemination and combined analyses of experimental data from the Advanced Light Source with MP's theoretical core data, using MPContribs tools for data formatting, management and exploration. The capabilities being developed for these collaborations are serving as the model for how new materials data can be incorporated into the Materials Project website with minimal staff overhead while giving powerful tools for data search and display to the user community.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of 10th Gateway Computing Environments Workshop (2015), to be published in "Concurrency in Computation: Practice and Experience

Making QCD Lattice Data Accessible and Organized through Advanced Web Interfaces

The Gauge Connection at qcd.nersc.gov is one of the most popular repositories of QCD lattice ensembles. It is used to access 16TB of archived QCD data from the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Here, we present a new web interface for qcd.nersc.gov which allows physicists to browse and search the data, as well as download individual files or entire ensembles in batch. Our system distinguishes itself from others because of its ease of use and web based workflow

Integrating Grid Services into the Cray XT4 Environment

ABSTRACT: The 38640 core Cray XT4 "Franklin" syste

Integrating Grid Services into the Cray XT4 Environment

The 38640 core Cray XT4 "Franklin" system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a massively parallel resource available to Department of Energy researchers that also provides on-demand grid computing to the Open Science Grid. The integration of grid services on Franklin presented various challenges, including fundamental differences between the interactive and compute nodes, a stripped down compute-node operating system without dynamic library support, a shared-root environment and idiosyncratic application launching. In our work, we describe how we resolved these challenges on a running, general-purpose production system to provide on-demand compute, storage, accounting and monitoring services through generic grid interfaces that mask the underlying system-specific details for the end user

Interactive Supercomputing with Jupyter

Rich user interfaces like Jupyter have the potential to make interacting with a supercomputer easier and more productive, consequently attracting new kinds of users and helping to expand the application of supercomputing to new science domains. For the scientist-user, the ideal rich user interface delivers a familiar, responsive, introspective, modular, and customizable platform upon which to build, run, capture, document, re-run, and share analysis workflows. From the provider or system administrator perspective, such a platform would also be easy to configure, deploy securely, update, customize, and support. Jupyter checks most if not all of these boxes. But from the perspective of leadership computing organizations that provide supercomputing power to users, such a platform should also make the unique features of a supercomputer center more accessible to users and more composable with high performance computing (HPC) workflows. Project Jupyter’s core design philosophy of extensibility, abstraction, and agnostic deployment, has allowed HPC centers like NERSC to bring in advanced supercomputing capabilities that can extend the interactive notebook environment. This has enabled a rich scientific discovery platform, particularly for experimental facility data analysis and machine learning problems

A beta test of linear tape-open (LTO) ultrium data storage technology

NERSC is participating in several HPSS (High Performance Storage System) research and development projects as part of the Probe testbed. One of these projects involved beta testing of the IBM 3584 UltraScalable Tape Library, which uses the new ultra-high-density Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium tape drives. Ultrium tape cartridges have a capacity of up to 300 GB of compressed data, greatly reducing the number of cartridges needed to store massive scientific datasets. NERSC's preliminary performance testing indicates that LTO Ultrium technology, with compatible products and media available from several vendors, may be a viable alternative for computer centers seeking higher-density archival storage media with a small footprint and relatively low cost per drive

Publication and Protection of Sensitive Site Information in a Grid Infrastructure

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