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news from the EGI communityISSUE 29DECEMBER 2017

TOP STORIES

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MORE

Advanced Computingfor Research

www.egi.eu

Peter Solagna recounts his 8 years at EGIpage 1

Inspired

EGI and Research Infrastructures

05 The OpenAIRE datathon: register now!

LIGO/Virgo collaboration: the search forgravitational waves

07 EGI is awarded i-Space label

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AEGIS and first achievements

08 How AGINFRA+ serves the Agriculture and Food domain

We hope you enjoy reading this last edition of 2017and we want to wish everyone Happy Holidays and awonderful 2018 ahead!

Your feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

Send an email to Sara & Iulia at:

press@egi.eu

Welcome to issue 29!

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Eight years with EGI: Peter Solagna recounts the highlights

1Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

The EGI infrastructure has beenestablished in February 2010, asa long term sustainableevolution of the EGEE projects.

At the same time, the EGIFoundation was created as agoverning body to support longterm sustainability and tocoordinate the infrastructure’sactivities. Today, EGI federatesmore than 20 cloud providersand hundreds of data centres,spread across Europe andworldwide.

I had the pleasure to work in theoperations team of the EGIFoundation from almost thebeginning, where I had aprivileged observation point toappreciate the evolution of theproduction infrastructure of EGIand its operations activities.

From the beginning, EGI hasbeen among the largestinfrastructures supportingresearch in Europe andworldwide.

Some numbersThe usage of the EGI infrastructurehas traditionally been CPU-intensive and the number ofCPU cores available in the EGIproduction infrastructure is agood metric to track its size.

One of the first times I lookedinto the number of cores in EGIwas back in in 2011: the totalwas about 240,000 cores.

A few months ago I calculatedabout 710,000 cores, whichmeans that the CPU capacity ofEGI has almost tripled in only sixyears of existence.

This upturn is responding to theincrease of CPU demand of newand existing research communi-ties led by the LHC experiments.The CPU tasks accounted by theEGI infrastructure, are currentlyusing ~80% of the availablecapacity.

Another interesting metric is thenumber of data centres, or sites

as the old-fashioned operationspeople (like me) call them. Thetotal number of data centres hasdecreased in the past years,going from ~330 to about ~240today.

The backbone of the productioninfrastructure is solid and it ishere to stay, but in the pastyears some changes of plans inthe national infrastructures or inthe local institutions caused thedecommissioning of some of thesmaller data centres. On theother hand, the coordi-nationwork of the national operationscentres improved and the totalcapacity has never stopped toincrease.

More information

Peter Solagna was the EGIFoundation SeniorOperations Manager untilNovember 2017, when hedeparted for multicolouredpastures.

The EGI Foundation teamwishes him all the best!

2Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

ServicesEGI’s approach to communitiesand to our members has greatlyevolved during the past years,thanks to the work of all mycolleagues. The EGIinfrastructure is now moreservice and user-oriented thanever before. The new servicecatalogue is much richer, better-structured and fulfills therequirements of new researchcommunities.

In parallel, the services that areoffered to the members of thefederation have beenconsolidated with a plan for along-term, fee-based support.These services include forexample service monitoring,accounting, securitycoordination and helpdesk.

The operational tools in thisportfolio have evolved as well tobe more reliable and flexible.For example, monitoring is nowcentrally provided by ARGO tobetter support new monitoringprobes and be able to react torequirements quickly; theOperations Portal now allowsbrowsing the informationsystem in a GUI, and themessaging network has a newHTTP API that can be easily re-used by new use cases. Lookingat the current service portfolio, itcan be noted how the burst ofnew services involved to someextent the federated cloud. Andit has been a great achievement

of EGI to design, build and bringto production a new set ofservices, based on newtechnologies that brought newcapabilities.

A lot of hard work has beenspent from 2014 onward intuning the new services to theoperational framework of EGI,and the other way around, inadapting the operations to thenew requirements. Securitycoordination evolved thesecurity operations to deal tothe “new dimension” added bythe cloud, and so did theoperational tools and supportactivities.

Looking to the futureWhat are the future challengesfor the EGI Operations?

The project EOSC-hub will startin January 2018, and it is the firstEOSC-related project thatfocuses on the provisioning ofproduction services.

EGI already has a solidexperience in providingproduction services, but theproject brings together both EGIproviders and external ones.

The challenge will be to integratethe various best practicesimplemented by the serviceproviders and find a lowestcommon denominator to buildwhat will be the EOSCoperational framework.

The biggest contribution of EGIOperations to the futureEuropean Open Science Cloud isour combined experience (EGIFoundation and 38 operationscentres) in building productionoperations.

It has been a pleasure to worktogether and to see how EGIevolved during these years, andalso an honour to be able to givemy small contribution to thisprocess.

While leaving my position at theEGI Foundation, I would reallylike to thank everybody whocontributed at every level to theEGI Operations during theseyears, and wish all the best forthe exciting times ahead for EGI!

3Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

With thanks to:

Michele Punturo, Virgo DataAnalysis Software ComputingCoordinator, and to PeterCouvares, LIGO DataAnalysis ComputingManager, for their help withwriting this article.

Gravitational waves are tinyripples of energy that propagatethrough the Universe. Researchersbelieve that gravitational wavesare emitted by spinning stars inbinary systems, black holes ormassive stellar explosions. AlbertEinstein predicted their existencein his general theory of relativity.

Almost 100 years after, the Virgoand LIGO Scientific Collaborationsannounced the first confirmedobservation of gravitationalwaves. A second detection of agravitational wave event, thoughtto be originated by thecoalescence of two stellar-massblack holes, was announced inJanuary 2017, followed by twomore in August.

The observations paved the wayto the Physics Nobel Prizeawarded in 2017 to Rainer Weiss,Kip Thorne and Barry Barish fortheir role in the detection ofgravitational waves.

But the detection of gravitationalwaves is not a three man job.

The LIGO Scientific Collaborationis a group of more than 1000scientists from universities in theUS and in other countries. Thetwo LIGO detectors are located inHanford and Livingston in the US.

The Virgo Collaboration consistsof more than 250 physicists andengineers affiliated with Euro-pean institutions such as CNRS,INFN, Nikhef, Wigner RCP, thePOLGRAW group and the Euro-pean Gravitational Observatorynear Pisa.

The two collaborations sharescientific data and computingresources, technologies, compu-ting teams and publications.

Looking for the ripple effectGravitational wave detectors arebased on the concept of aMichelson interferometer. Thesystem takes in the infrared lightof a laser and splits it in twobeams that are injected in twolong arms placed at 90 degreesof one another. The laser beamsare recombined at the end of thearms and reflected toward aphoto-detector. If a gravitationalwave passes through, it gene-rates a small interference thatcan be spotted by the detector.

And "small" in this context meansreally-really small: the amplitudeof the interference is in the orderof 10-20m, the size of what is leftof a proton if you divide it intoten million parts. Just the factthat it is possible to detect such adifference is a massive technicalachievement.

What happens to the data?The two LIGO detectors sendtheir raw and reduced data to acentral data repository atCaltech, and store a local copy forredundancy. From Caltech, thereduced data is distributedacross the LIGO Data Grid, anetwork of large dedicatedcomputing clusters run by LIGO,and also the Condor Clusters

federated in Open Science Grid-one of the major e-Infrastruc-tures collaborating with EGI - andHPC resources from XSEDE.

Virgo data is collected at theEuropean Gravitational Observa-tory site but its final repositoriesare the CCIN2P3 computingcentre in Lyon and the INFN-CNAF computing centres inBologna.

The lion share of the data analysisis performed by dedicated LIGOData Grid clusters. Parts of theanalyses are submitted ascomputational grid jobs both inthe US (to Open Science Grid)and in Europe (to EGI).Continuous wave analyses arerun thorough EGI via the VirgoVirtual Organisation (VO) mainlyat CNAF.

The Virgo VO consumedcollectively 40 Million CPU hoursin 2015 and 2016.

LIGO/Virgo: the search for gravitational waves

Sara Coelho on the computing challenges of the collaboration and how EGI issupporting their groundbreaking work

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Research Infrastructures (RIs)and research collaborations arevital partners of the EGIcommunity.

They are the main adopters ofour services and they operatecommunity cloud/storage/HTCand data systems. They alsocontribute with thematicservices such as scientific portalsand tools, made scalable andaccessible through the use ofEGI services.

EGI is currently working withover 30 research infrastructuresfrom all fields of science: fromphysics to astronomy, environ-mental sciences to humanities,life sciences, chemistry andmany other disciplines.

Here is an overview of our workand achievements with researchinfrastructures during the EGI-Engage project:

Environmental sciencesEMSO is a researchinfrastructure of seafloor &water-column observatories, setup to monitor environmentalprocesses and their interactions.EMSO uses EGI Cloud Computeresources to help them scale-uptheir data management systems.

The European Space Agency(ESA) is Europe’s gateway tospace. ESA wanted to develop acloud infrastructure to supportthe Geohazards and Hydrologythematic exploitation platforms(TEPs). The two TEPs wereintegrated within the EGIFederated Cloud to give themenough computational powerfor their work.

How EGI supports Research Infrastructures

Gergely Sipos summarises our accomplishments in working with RIs

EISCAT_3D will be the world’sleading facility for research ofthe upper atmosphere and thegeospace environment. EGI &CNRS partnered with EISCAT todevelop a web portal forresearchers to discover andanalyse the data generated bythe EISCAT_3D radar.

EPOS is the ESFRI initiative forthe solid Earth sciences. Duringthe EGI-Engage project, EGIsupported EPOS in collecting,analysing and comparing EarthScience community needs withEGI technical offerings.

ICOS is a pan-European researchinfrastructure for quantifyingand understanding Europe’sgreenhouse gas (GHG) balance.EGI is currently offering cloudresources to support the ICOSCarbon Portal and thedevelopment of a GHG-footprintcalculation tool.

Life & Biomedical SciencesELIXIR unites Europe’s leadinglife science organisations inmanaging the volume of datagenerated by publicly-fundedresearch. EGI supported ELIXIRin establishing a cloud

Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

infrastructure to support lifescience use cases and to setupscientific demonstrators to pilotits use.

The MoBrain CompetenceCenter (CC) has developedonline portals for life scientistsworldwide, by integratingstructural biology and medicalimaging services and data.Mobrain collaborated with sevenEGI data centres allowing the CCto use High-ThroughputComputing and Online Storageservices needed to develop theirportals.

ERIC is a European organisationdedicated to improving theoutcome of patients with chroniclymphocytic leukemia (CLL) andrelated diseases. EGI supportsERIC with cloud and storageresources in the development ofa VRE for data repository(patient and clinical trial data).

LifeWatch is Europeaninfrastructure for biodiversityand ecosystem research.LifeWatch’s work with EGI led toa total of seven LifeWatchservices for data managementand modelling that use thecomputational resources of theEGI Federated Cloud.

More information

Gergely Sipos is the EGIFoundation Customer andTechnical OutreachManager

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Psysics & AstronomyThe Cherenkov Telescope Array(CTA) will be the world’s leadinggamma-ray public observatory.CTA is using EGI’s High-Throughput Compute andOnline Storage services tohandle computational demandsduring the project’s preparatoryphase.

The CTA Virtual Organisation isone of the most active users ofEGI’s HTC services.

WLCG is a global collaboration ofover 170 computing centres witha mission is to provide globalcomputing resources to store,distribute and analyse the datagenerated by the High Energy

Physics experiments hosted bythe Large Hadron Collider (LHC)at CERN. WLCG is the biggestconsumer of EGI computeresources. The four largest EGIVirtual Organisations are all LHCexperiments: ATLAS, ALICE, CMSand LHCb.

Arts & HumanitiesDARIAH EU is a pan-Europeaninfrastructure for arts andhumanities scholars workingwith computational tools.DARIAH partnered with EGI tomake databases and digitalapplications available to scholarsand provide transparent accessto cloud resources via theDARIAH Science Gateway.

Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

EGI is dedicated to supportingboth established and newlyemerging RIs. The next phase ofwork will start with the EOSC-hub project in January 2018.

The OpenAIRE datathon

The OpenAIRE datathon startedon 30 November 2017 and willtake place until the end ofFebruary 2018.

The purpose of the datathon isto encourage developers anddata scientists to analyse theOpenAIRE Information Spaceand improve its user base andthird-party services.

The OpenAIRE informationspace consists of a scholarlycommunication graph inter-linking publications, datasets,software, research organi-sations, funders, and projects.The graph is the result ofharvesting and harmonisingmetadata from about 3000 dataproviders and counts around 60million objects.

The graph is accessible via APIsand a web portal and is used tooffer research impacts statistics,

access trends, and discovery ofinterlinked scholarly products.

The datathon encourages teamsof computer scientists, datascientists and experts fromother fields to join the challengeof studying and analysing theOpenAIRE graph to enhance itsdiscovery and statisticalcapabilities.

Four main OpenAIRE datasetswill be made available as LinkedOpen Data, Scholix exchangeformat (JSON scholarly graphrepresentation), XML collections,and full-text collections.

Topics:- Enabling multi-disciplinary ordiscipline-specific discovery andstats functionality.

- Novel techniques to enablemeasurement of scientificimpact.

- Innovative techniques tomeasure scientific impact.

- Enabling reproducibility.

- De-duplication of theinformation space.

Prizes: an Apple iPad Pro and afeaturing on the OpenAIRE website!

More information

The datathon will last for 3months, from 30 Novemberto 28 February 2018.Registration is open until 15January 2018!

Find all the details and howto register:https://datathon.openaire.eu

The AARC Engagement Groupfor Infrastructures (AEGIS) bringstogether representatives fromresearch and e-infrastructures,operators of AAI services andthe AARC team to bridgecommunication gaps and makethe most of common synergies.

The group was set up during thesummer and has recentlyendorsed the AARC “guidelineson expressing group member-ship and role information”. Byagreeing to these guidelines,AEGIS has taken its first step inproviding practical supporttowards the wider uptake ofAARC’s interoperable federatedaccess solutions.

The current members of AEGISwho endorsed the guidelines arefrom five e-infrastructures (EGI,EUDAT, GÉANT, PRACE andXSEDE) and two domain-specificresearch infrastructures (ELIXIRand DARIAH).

Why do we need guidelinesfor group membership?Information about groupmembership is commonly usedby Service Providers (SP) toauthorise user access toprotected resources. Apart fromthe group information that ismanaged by the user’s homeIdentity Provider (IdP), researchcommunities usually operatetheir own group managmentservices. Such services often actas Attribute Authorities (AA) ,maintaining additionalinformation about the users,including VO membership,group membership within VOs,as well as user roles. It is

therefore necessary that allinvolved SPs and IdPs/AAs caninterpret this information in auniform way.

Specifically, the followingchallenges need to beaddressed:

Standardising the way groupmembership information isexpressed:

- Syntactically: uniformformatting; for example,representing group membershipas URNs within a specificnamespace and a set of rules forthe NSS portion

- Semantically: commonrepresentation of equivalentconcepts; for instance, “admin”and “manager” should becommunicated to end SPs as"manager”

- Indicating the entity that isauthoritative for each piece ofgroup membership information

- Expressing VO membershipand role information

- Supporting group hierarchies ingroup membership information

The guidelines documentendorsed by AEGIS agrees on acommon way to exchange groupinformation across differentinfrastructures, ensuring thateveryone uses the sameconcepts and formats.

The recommendations weredefined based on experiencesfrom multiple parties in theAARC project and havesubsequently been discussedand tested through the ServiceActivity 1 Pilots (SA1) attribute

management pilot [AARC-SA1-AMP]. Furthermore, it should benoted that a group membershiprepresentation scheme followingthese recommendations hasalready been adopted to enablecross-infrastructure exchange ofgroup information between theEGI and the ELIXIR AAI.

Bi-directional channelAEGIS provides a bi-directionalchannel so that AARC and theresearch- and e-infrastructurescommunities can advise eachother on developments andimplementation aspects of theproject. AEGIS in practiceprovides a mechanism to ensurethat AARC results are fit forpurpose and are known to thosethat will need to deploy them.AEGIS helps participatinginfrastructures to understandthe importance of adoptingAARC frameworks, and helps touncover issues that mayotherwise emerge during thedeployment phase.

6Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

AEGIS group endorses AARC guidelines on exchangeof membership information

Licia Florio writes about the group's first achievement

More information

Licia Florio is thecoordinator of the AARC2project.

AARC website: https://aarc-project.eu/

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The European Innovation Spaces(or i-Spaces) are trusted dataincubators with a mission toaccelerate the uptake of data-driven innovation in commercialand non-profit sectors. i-Spacesenable stakeholders to developnew businesses, facilitated byadvanced Big Data Value (BDV)technologies, applications, andbusiness models.

The foundation of i-Spaces is anexisting infrastructure that canbe based on a geographic,sectoral or company-ground or acombination of them.

What are i-Spaces?- Bring technology and applica-tion developments together andcatering for the development ofskills, competence, and bestpractices.

- Ensure that data is at thecentre of Big Data Value acti-vities. i-Spaces make accessibledata assets based on industrial,private and open data sources.

- Serve as incubators for testingand benchmarking of techno-logies, applications, andbusiness models.

- Develop skills and sharing ofbest practices linking with otherexisting initiatives at Europeanand national-levels.

- Foster data-driven communi-ties and accelerate value creation.

I-Spaces contribute tocommunity building and act asincubators of data-driveninnovation.

The EGI Federation was recognised as a EuropeanInnovation Space

Roberta Piscitelli on the recent i-Space award from the Big Data Value Association

BDVA i-Spaces ensure thatinnovations and research onBDV technologies and novel BDVapplications can be quicklytested, piloted and exploited.

The main goal is to develop skillsand share best practices, toexpand new business modelsand evaluate societal impact. Inparticular, at societal level, i-Spaces support the adoption ofdigitalisation in SMEs, they bringservices for local governmentsand they provide digital solutionsfor policy development.

What do i-Spaces mean toEGI and to the Big DataValue?The Big Data Value Associationadvertised and granted a labelfor European Innovation Spacesto help drive Big Data adoptionacross all domains of Europeanindustry. Every year, existinghubs can obtain a label as a“BDVA i-Space”.

The Big Data Value Association(BDVA) has granted eight i-Spacelabels this year and one of themwas awarded to the EGIFederation.

The EGI Federation is nowaccredited as one of the keydata-driven innovation centresin both commercial and non-profit domains.

The announcement was madeduring the European Big DataValue Forum in Versailles.Labelled i-Spaces exchange goodpractices to promote datainnovation all over Europe.

Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017

More information

Roberta Piscitelli is aStrategy and Policy Officer atthe EGI Foundation.

For the EGI Federationthis means:

- Access to European fundinginstruments to enableinnovation and federation ofexisting i-Spaces

- An increased visibility in EUBig-Data community

- Possibilities to connect andbenchmark to other iSpacepractices

How AGINFRA+ serves the Agriculture & Food domain

Panagiotis Zervas and Nikos Manouselis give an overview of the project

AGINFRA+ is an EINFRA H2020-funded project, which started on1 January 2017 and will last for36 months. AGINFRA+ aims toexploit core existing e-infrastructures such as EGI,OpenAIRE and D4Science, toserve European scientists fromuser communities aroundAgriculture and Food.

More specifically, AGINFRA+project aims to provide Euro-pean scientists with VirtualResearch Environments (VREs)facilitating them to collaborateand execute resource-intensiveexperiments (by liaising withD4Science), offering them accessto a vast amount of researchpublications and datasets (byliaising with OpenAIRE) andcloud and grid resources forintensive computational appli-cations (by liaising with EGI).

AGINFRA+ targets three mainuser communities, whichaddress problems on:

- Predicting short-term and long-term agricultural yields in theface of both operational, withinseason decision making, andlonger-term decision and policymaking with respect to climatesmart agriculture and climateadaptation.

- Identifying emerging foodsafety issues at an early stageand handling of large-scaledatasets, to visualize complexdata, mathematical models aswell as simulation results and todeploy generated dataprocessing workflows as web-based services.

- Food security, namely the needto efficiently analyse dataproduced by plant phenotyping

and its correlation with cropyield, resource usage and localclimates. AGINFRA+ projectpartners have already initiated astrategic discussion with the keyplayers trying to shape thethematic cloud on agri-food aspart of the European OpenScience Cloud (EOSC) and haveparticipated in variousworkshops and braistormingmeetings.

Thus, the vision of AGINFRA+project is to develop a commontechnical infrastructure thatcould initially serve the threeaforementioned usercommunities and it could beevolved to an AGINFRA foodcloud demonstrator that will bepositioned as the EOSC agri-foodthematic cloud.

This is expected to be achieved by:

- Implementing the e-infrastructure roadmap for openscience in agriculture and food,which is currently beingdeveloped by the eROSA project

- Running pilots in larger scaleaiming to address all stagesacross the food value chain

To this end, the AGINFRA+project will collect and promoteappropriate and mature usecases through the AGINFRA+dissemination channels.

The project will also organisehands-on workshops jointly withother H2020-funded projectswhere use case stakeholders cantest the AGINFRA+ projectservices.

Finally, AGINFRA+ will develop apipeline of mature use casesthat could demonstrate thepotential of a large scale pilotingin an AGINFRA food clouddemonstrator.

More information

Nikos Manouselis andPanagiotis Zervascoordinate the AGINFRA+project.

Website:http://www.plus.aginfra.eu/

8Inspired // Issue #29, December 2017