Applications on Demand Service - architecture
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This page provides information about the 'EGI Applications on Demand' infrastructure, hereafter referred to as the Infrastructure.
The EGI Applications on Demand service (also called AoDs) is the EGI’s response to the requirements of researchers, scattered across Europe, without dedicated access to computational and storage resources, as well as other facilities needeed to run scientific applications.
The new service, through a lightweight user registration process, offers authorised users a grant, with a pre-defined quota of resources, which can be used to run a growing number of scientific applications from a portfolio. The grant to run scientific applications can be renewed or increased upon request. The portfolio of scientific applications is currently composed by a pre-defined set of applications from different scientific areas. This portfolio can be further extended thanks to the contributions of users of the service.
Overview
The EGI Applications on Demand service architecture is presented in Figure 1.
This architecture is composed by the following components:
- The User Registration Portal (URP) is a web portal which is used to authenticate users interested to access the Infrastructure. For the authentication, the portal relies on the EGI AAI CheckIn service which provides AAI services for both users and service providers. The EGI AAI CheckIn service supports different IdPs, eduGain, the international inter-federation service, and social credentials (e.g. Facebook, Google). During the authentication process, users can provide information about their contact, institutions and research topic. Such information will be taken into account by the operator(s) to evaluate whether the user is entitled to access and use the resources and the scientific applications available in the Platform. This User Registration Portal (URP) is accessible at http://access.egi.eu
- A catch-all VO called ‘vo.access.egi.eu’ and a pre-allocated pool of HTC and cloud resources configured for supporting the EGI Applications on Demand research activities. This resource pool currently includes cloud resources from Italy (INFN-Catania and INFN-Bari) and Spain (BIFI, CESGA) and HTC clusters from Belgium (VUB), Italy (INFN-Catania and INFN-Bari), Poland (CYFRONET) and Spain (CESGA).
- The X.509 credentials factory service (also called eToken server) is a standard-based solution developed for central management of robot certificates and the provision of Per-User Sub-Proxy (PUSP) certificates. PUSP allows to identify the individual user that operates using a common robot certificate. Permissions to request robot proxy certificates, and contact the server, are granted only to Science Gateways/portal integrated in the Platform and only when the user is authorized.
- A set of Science Gateways/portal to host scientific applications that users can run accessing the EGI Applications on Demand service. Currently the following three frameworks are used: The Catania Science Gateway (CSG), the WS-PGRADE/gUSE portal and the Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster (EC3).
Available resources
Current available resources grouped by categories:
- Cloud Resources:
- 229 vCPU cores
- 244 GB of RAM
- 6TB of object storage
- High-Throughtput Resources:
- ~13Million HEPSPEC
- 1.4 TB of disk storage
Type | Name | Description |
Cloud and storage |
INFN Catania (upgrading to OpenStack Mitaka in progress) |
INFN-CATANIA-STACK site capacity:
|
INFN Bari |
RECAS-BARI site capacity:
| |
BIFI |
BIFI site capacity:
| |
CESGA |
CESGA site capacity:
| |
High-Throughput Compute and Storage |
INFN Catania |
INFN-CATANIA site capacity: High-Throughput Compute
File Storage
|
INFN Bari |
INFN-Bari site capacity: High-Throughput Compute
File Storage
| |
CYFRONET-LCG2 |
CYFRONET-LCG2 site capacity: High-Throughput Compute
File Storage
| |
BEgrid-ULB-VUB |
BEgrid-ULB-VUB site capacity: High-Throughput Compute
File Storage
| |
CESGA |
CESGA site capacity: High-Throughput Compute
File Storage
|
The HTC, cloud and storage resources of the platform are federated through the 'vo.access.egi.eu' Virtual Organisation of EGI (VO).
Technical details of this VO are the following:
- ID Card in the EGI Operations Portal: http://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/view/voname/vo.access.egi.eu
- Name: vo.access.egi.eu
- Scope: Global
- Homepage URL: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Long-tail_of_science
- Acceptable use policy for users: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2635
- Discipline: Support Activities
- VO Membership management: VOMS+PERUN
- perun.cesnet.cz. The enrollment url is https://perun.metacentrum.cz/perun-registrar-cert/?vo=vo.access.egi.eu
- voms1.grid.cesnet.cz and voms2.grid.cesnet.cz
- Contacts:
- <long-tail-support@mailman.egi.eu> for all support issues.
- Managers: Gergely.Sipos@egi.eu, Diego.Scardaci@egi.eu, Peter.Solagna@egi.eu and Giuseppe.LaRocca@egi.eu
Per-user sub-proxies
The purpose of a per-user sub-proxy (PUSP) is to allow identification of the individual users that operate using a common robot certificate. A common example is where a web portal (e.g., a scientific gateway) somehow identifies its user and wishes to authenticate as that user when interacting with EGI resources. This is achieved by creating a proxy credential from the robot credential with the proxy certificate containing user-identifying information in its additional proxy CN field. The user-identifying information may be pseudo-anonymised where only the portal knows the actual mapping.
Example of a Per-User Sub-Proxy (PUSP):
subject : /C=IT/O=INFN/OU=Robot/L=Catania/CN=Robot: EGI Training Service - XXXXX/CN=user:test1/CN=1286259828 issuer : /C=IT/O=INFN/OU=Robot/L=Catania/CN=Robot: EGI Training Service - XXXXX/CN=user:test1 identity : /C=IT/O=INFN/OU=Robot/L=Catania/CN=Robot: EGI Training Service - XXXXX type : RFC3820 compliant impersonation proxy strength : 1024 path : /home/XXXXX/proxy.txt timeleft : 23:59:15 key usage : Digital Signature, Key Encipherment, Data Encipherment === VO training.egi.eu extension information === VO : training.egi.eu subject : /C=IT/O=INFN/OU=Robot/L=Catania/CN=Robot: EGI Training Service - XXXXX issuer : /DC=org/DC=terena/DC=tcs/OU=Domain Control Validated/CN=voms1.grid.cesnet.cz attribute : /training.egi.eu/Role=NULL/Capability=NULL timeleft : 23:59:17 uri : voms1.grid.cesnet.cz:15014
E-Token Server
The platform adopted the e-Token server [1] as a central service to generate PUSPs for science gateways. In a nutshell the e-Token server is a standard-based solution developed by and hosted in INFN Catania for central management of robot certificates and provisioning of digital, short-term proxies from these, allowing seamless and secure access to e-Infrastructures with X.509-based Authorisation layer.
The e-Token server uses the standard JAX-RS framework [2] to implement RESTful Web services in Java technologies and provides, to the end-users, portals and new generation of Science Gateways, a set of REST APIs to generate PUSPs given a unique identifier. PUPS are usually generated starting from standard X.509 certificates. These digital certificates have to be uploaded into one of the secure USB smart cards (e.g. SafeNet Aladdin eToken PRO 32/64 KB) and plugged in the server.
The e-Token server was conceived for providing a credential translator system to Science Gateways and Web Portals that need to interact with the EGI platform for the long-tail (and in general with any e-Infrastructure).
[1] Valeria Ardizzone, Roberto Barbera, Antonio Calanducci, Marco Fargetta, E. Ingrà, Ivan Porro, Giuseppe La Rocca, Salvatore Monforte, R. Ricceri, Riccardo Rotondo, Diego Scardaci, Andrea Schenone: The DECIDE Science Gateway. Journal of Grid Computing 10(4): 689-707 (2012)
[2] Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_API_for_RESTful_Web_Services
Policies
Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and Conditions of Use of the 'EGI Applications on Demand Infrastructure'
EGI Applications on Demand Infrastructure Security Policy
Links for administrators
User approval:
- Approve affiliation: https://access.egi.eu:8888/modules#/list/Affiliations
- Approve resource request: https://e-grant.egi.eu/ltos/auth/login
Gateway and support approval:
- VO membership management interface in PERUN: https://perun.metacentrum.cz/cert/gui/
- To register in the VO (relevant for gateway robot certificates and for support staff): https://perun.metacentrum.cz/cert/registrar/?vo=vo.access.egi.eu
Monitoring:
- Detailed accounting data about the VO users can be obtained by the VO managers at https://accounting-devel.egi.eu/user/voadm.php
- To see the list of VO members: https://voms1.grid.cesnet.cz:8443/voms/vo.access.egi.eu/user/search.action
Accounting:
- Accounting data of platform users: From the EGI Accounting Portal it is possible to check the accounting metrics generated for both grid- and cloud-based resources supporting the vo.access.egi.eu VO. From the top-menu click on 'Restrict View' and 'VO Admin' to check the accounting data of platform users.