Fedcloud-tf:How to use VMDIRAC

DIRAC has started a collaboration with EGI.eu to offer an open service to the european e-Infrastructure. This service is pilot by several communities of different fields: Astrophysics, Life-Science, Engineering, etc. and will then be offered to others as single access point to all kind of distributed computing and storage resources in Europe and beyond.

VMDIRAC is the DIRAC extension to integrate Federated Clouds in a transparent manner to the user. DIRAC 4 EGI portal integrates EGI Fedcloud infrastructures. Users registered at Fedcloud VO are automatically included in DIRAC 4 EGI service, by default they are included in the fedcloud_user DIRAC group.

DIRAC offers services which access to the resources in a transparent manner to the user.

Access to the services:

• Web API acceess: Users are authenticated with their browser certificated, then they can use fedcloud_user group to submit jobs to EGI Fedcloud infrastructures.
• External services (science gateways, VREs, etc): can use python or REST interfaces to submit jobs to EGI Fedcloud using X509 proxy with the fedcloud_user group.
• DIRAC PaaS: user jobs can be wrapped with python scripting to use DIRAC python API which provides Hight Througput Computing PaaS in the client side (simplifying logics and network protocols, ensuring load balancing)

By default VMDIRAC at EGI uses cernvm-batch-node golden image with dynamic contextualization, to save image management. Image management is transparent for the user. If a particular software stack is not supported in cernvm platform, then it is necessary to prepare an specific deployment.

Please have a look to VMDIRAC users FAQs. (80% of the doubts are correspondint to these 20% of posible questions :)

Current DIRAC 4 EGI / VMDIRAC Status

June 2014. Integrating and testing EGI Fedcloud infrastructure.

Additional Documentation

• DIRAC project portal: News, user guide, developers guides, publications, etc
• VMDIRAC installation and setup: details for admins and advanced users