EGI: advanced computing for research


DESCRIPTION

EGI is a federated e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing services for research and innovation. 

The EGI e-infrastructure is publicly-funded and comprises almost 300 data centres and cloud providers spread across Europe and worldwide.



 

EGI offers a wide range of services for compute, storage, data and support. More about EGI Services.

EGI provides access to over 650,000 logical CPUs and 500 PB of disk and tape storage.


TED-like SEMINAR


ABSTRACT

D15.4 reports about relevant e-infrastructure courses that can underpin RI data processing tools,  and about training events and webinars that have been organized in the ENVRIplus context to facilitate the harmonized uptake of e-infrastructure services within the RIs.

The contents reported in D15.4 are based on an extensive survey and intelligence gathering that was conducted by EGI during 2016 to build an understanding about the training priorities of RIs with respect to data storage and processing.

This list of training events and webinars reported in the below table are now published in the ENVRI Training Platform:

Event

Date

Link

Webinar on the EGI Open Data Platform – Towards Scientific Data Hubs

17 May 2016

https://training.envri.eu/course/view.php?id=6

 

Webinar on Workflow applications on EGI with WS-PGRADE

26 May 2016

https://training.envri.eu/course/view.php?id=7

 

Webinar on DIRAC system for EGI communities

07 June 2016

https://training.envri.eu/course/view.php?id=8

 


The EGI Applications Database (AppDB) was recently expanded with the Virtual Machine Operations (VMOps) dashboard. The VMOps dashboard provides graphical interfaces and high-level services for users to manage Virtual Machines and Virtualised Appliances on federated cloud infrastructures, particularly on the EGI Federated Cloud and community-specific cloud federations, for example the ELIXIR Competence Centre Cloud Federation

The EGI Federated Cloud is a seamless network of academic private clouds and virtualised resources, built around open standards and focusing on the requirements of the scientific community. Access to this infrastructure was until now possible via programming APIs and command line interfaces. The VMOps dashboard, the topic of this webinar, recently extended the possibilities with a graphical portal interface, significantly reducing the burden to manage virtualised resources in federated clouds.

This webinar will introduce the key capabilities of the VMOps dashboard, particularly: 

  • A wizard-like builder that guides users through the selection of virtual machine images, virtual appliances, cloud resources and contextualization scripts to deploy complex applications or services in federated clouds.
  • Graphical interfaces and tools to monitor and manage your applications/services in federated clouds, independently of underlying cloud technologies.
  • A scalable architecture composed of a generic front-end and several, technology-specific back-ends for load balancing, and with a RESTful API to integrate with 3rd party services. 

The EGI Applications Database is developed and operated by the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA) on behalf of the EGI Foundation as an EGI Core Service.


To meet customer needs and provide valuable services, it is important to maintain a high quality of service, which requires a well-structured approach to how the service is managed.

IT Service Management is a discipline that helps provide services with a focus on customer needs and in a professional manner. It is widely used in the commercial and public sectors to manage IT services of all types, but current solutions are very heavyweight with high barriers to entry.

Existing approaches to formal IT Service Management (ITSM), such as ITIL and the ISO/IEC 20000 standard are useful but not always well suited to the challenges of providing distributed services, especially federated environments, and can often be seen as overly complex.

This one hour webinar will provide a clear-cut view of how service management, and the lightweight approach provided by the FitSM standard which is suitable for distributed, federated and research services.

FitSM is a lightweight approach to professionally managing services. It brings order and traceability to a complex area and provides simple, practical support in getting started with ITSM. FitSM training and certification provide crucial help in providing services and improving their management. It provides a common conceptual and process model, sets out straightforward and realistic requirements and links them to supporting materials.

This webinar will have a large discussion element of how FitSM applies to research infrastructures, including how the principles and lessons learned could apply to research infrastructures that provide services requiring physical access.


We are inviting Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to join a one-hour webinar demonstrating computer-aided engineering (CAE) in the EGI Federated Cloud Infrastructure, with the example of OpenFOAM software containers taking place on 20 October between 16:00-17:00 CET.

During this webinar, participants will be introduced to the EGI Federated Cloud, the benefits and challenges of cloud in the sector and will attend a demo of the OpenFOAM software container prepared by CFD support, a Czech SME. The demo will showcase how OpenFOAM, the leading open source software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), can be easily ported to and used on a public e-Infrastructure such as EGI.

This webinar is part of a joint partnership between EGI, the world’s largest publicly funded computing infrastructure for research and innovation, and UberCloud, the industry leader in development and support of novel cloud software application containers.

As a special offer, anyone participating in the webinar will be offered the possibility to schedule access and use OpenFOAM on the EGI testing infrastructure for up to 24 hours following the event to get hands-on experience. The necessary credentials can be obtained by sending a request to business@egi.eu.

Continued opportunities are available thanks to EGI’s commitment to sharing the benefits of e-Infrastructure technology and services with industry, especially SMEs. For more information about EGI’s business engagement programme visit our business pages or contact business@egi.eu

For further information about this use case, please read here


DIRAC Project is providing a framework for building distributed computing systems and applications with high computating and storage/data demands. Services based on this framework are available for the EGI users since 2014 (at http://dirac.egi.eu/). during the webinar the main capabilities of the system will be introduced and demonstrated.


The DIRAC4EGI service includes a powerful Workload and Data Management System that is able to handle user payloads running on any EGI grid and cloud resource, as well as on other computing resources (such as institutional clusters). The key capabilities of the system are:


The DIRAC job scheduler uses the "pilot job" paradigm which ensures high efficiency and fast turn-around of user tasks both on local and on remote computers.

The versatile File Catalog component keeps track of file locations and replicas and allows the description of data with user defined metadata for efficient data searches.

Services are accessible with friendly user interfaces: a Web Portal, a rich set of command line tools and a Python API. Through these interfaces the user can ineract with distributed resources as they were a single large computer.

A RESTful service interface is also available for the use by existing application gateways and portals.

The Webinar event is open for anyone. Registration is not required, but recommended prior to the event. (Using the 'Apply here' link below)


Webinar connection link: http://connect.ct.infn.it/egi-inspire-jra1


WS-PGRADE is an open source, Liferay-based web portal environment for the design and execution of compute and data intensive applications on grid and cloud platforms. Applications can be defined in the form of data-driven workflows in WS-PGRADE. Steps within a workflow can be executable applications, Virtual Machine images, or online (Web) Services. These computational steps are connected through data-dependencies within the workflow: The output of one computation can serve as input of the next one. WS-PRADE resolves data dependencies and manages the computational operations on the infrastructure resources. The back-end system of WS-PGRADE is compatible with various academic and commercial grid and cloud systems, including federated clouds and gLite clusters of EGI. Moreover, scientific communities can connect workflow-specific Web interfaces to WS-PGRADE to simplify the execution of workflows for researchers. This is enabled by the 'Remote API' component of WS-PGRADE, a programming interface that exposes the workflow registry and the workflow manager service to third party clients. During the webinar the main capabilities of WS-PGRADE will be presented and demonstrated. The event will also provide opportunity to discuss scientific applications that would benefit from the use of WS-PGRADE to access EGI cloud and grid resources. Further information about the system: http://wspgrade.hu
The Open Data Platform is a new service in EGI to support scientific communities in the dissemination and re-use of open, distributed research datasets. The platform is based on the OneData technology and adds data management and data access capabilities - including data replication and 'bring your computation to data' - to existing EGI infrastructure services. The EGI Open Data Platform is developed in the H2020 EGI-Engage project to support communities in the creation of 'Data Hubs' on EGI. Such hubs would offer scalable data access and compute capabilities around scientific datasets for scientific groups at the large scale. The EGI Open Data Platform is currently available as a prototype. The first part of the webinar will introduce this prototype, the second part will provide opportunity to discuss the adoption of the platform for specific use cases.