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This page provides detailed information about the user communities and use cases who are using/integrating the EGI Federated Cloud services.

Current FedCloud Users and Communities

This table provides a summary of the communities that are already collaborating with the EGI Federated Cloud offering use cases, requirements and valuable feedback.

Project or Application	Description	Use Cases	Further information	Contacts
BioVeL	The BioVel project provides workflows for the processing of data in major areas of biodiversity research: ecological niche modelling, ecosystem functioning, and taxonomy.	Use case 1: OpenModeller web-service in Europe (niche modelling). The Ecological Niche Modelling (ENM) Workflow takes as input a file containing species occurrence points to create a model with the openModeller Web Service. The EUBrazilOpenBio ENM service is exposed through an extended openModeller Web Service interface. Multi-staging and multi-parametric oM experiments are implemented through COMPSs that dynamically creates the virtual resources to execute the operations. An OCCI connector is used for the VMs management while data management supports CDMI endpoints. Use case 2: Sustain BioSTIF web-service (data visualization). BioSTIF provides an easy GIS interface to vizualize and quality control biodiversity data in time and space. Use case 3: Portal to access/visualize Catalogue of Life taxonomy data (EDIT). Use case 4: OpenRefine (originally developed as Google Refine) is a framework for viewing and cleaning large amounts of messy data. It is used within BioVeL for taxonomic data to ensure data quality and integrity. The service integrates existing know-how of taxonomic data with existing functionality in Google Refine to develop BioVeL specific data cleaning tools.	FedCloudBioVel	EGI: Nuno Ferreira (nuno.ferreira@egi.eu), Salvatore Pinto (salvatore.pinto@egi.eu) BioVel: Renato De Giovanni (renato@cria.org.br), Matthias Obst (matthias.obst@bioenv.gu.se), Giacinto Donvito (giacinto.donvito@ba.infn.it), Yulia Fetyukova (yuliya.fetyukova@uef.fi), Karl-Heinz Sylla (karl-heinz.sylla@iais.fraunhofer.de) EUBrazilOpenBio: Daniele Lezzi (daniele.lezzi@bsc.es)
BNCWeb	BNCWeb is an interface to the British National Corpus, a dataset of 100 million words, carefully sampled from a wide range of texts and conversations to provide a snapshot of British English in the late 20th century. This is a key reference work in English studies, linguistics and language teaching and is widely used in a wide variety of computational linguistic applications. BNCWeb offers powerful search and analysis functions for searching the text and exploiting the detailed textual metadata. It is an open source project, and the BNC is freely available for educational and research purposes.	Use case: Running BNCWeb services on the EGI Federated Cloud.	FedCloudBNCweb	EGI: Gergely Sypos (gergely.sypos@egi.eu)
BSIM2	BSIM2’s mission is to boost the discovery and optimisation of new drug candidates, led by efficient computational methodologies and workflows.	Use case 1: this startup company is exploring a set of Proof's of Concept on the EGI Federated Cloud.	FedCloudBSIM2	EGI: Nuno Ferreira (nuno.ferreira@egi.eu), Diego Scardaci (diego.scardaci@egi.eu) BSIM2: Bruno Victor (bruno.victor@bsimsquare.com)
Catania Science Gateway Framework	The Catania Science Gateway Framework (CSGF) has been developed by INFN, Division of Catania (Italy), to provide application developers with a tool to create Science Gateways in short time and in a very easy way. CSGF is made of a set of libraries to manage Authentication & Authorization mechanisms and to interact with several different kinds of DCIs (grid, cloud, HPC, local, etc.). The CSGF exploits the EGI Federated Cloud capabilities through a new plugin implementing the service model SaaS exploiting OCCI. Furthermore, the CSGF can orchestrate the cloud services through their OCCI-compliant and rOCCI-enabled interfaces acting as infrastructure broker.	Use Case 1: the use case is an interoperability test, implemented as a new Liferay portlet in CSGF, to make the portal capable of submitting applications to the EGI Federated Cloud, grids and HPC resources in a user-trasparent way. The portlet includes a set of VMs, each pre-configured with some test applications and provides an application specific SaaS environment built on grids and IaaS clouds. Users will see cloud sites are resources that are available to execute applications without worrying about technical matters. The CSGF will select and start a VM to execute an application on behalf of user, according to application characteristics. The VM management issues will be completely managed by CSGF and will be hidden from end users. Use Case 2: the second use case aims to show how the cloud-tenant of a real or virtual organisation can sign in on a Science Gateway using his/her federated credentials, select VMs from a geographically shared repository and deploy/move/copy it/them across the “personal virtual-cloud” he/she is entitled to use. The VMs should belong to the same domain name independently of the site where it/they are instantiated and of the underlying cloud middleware stack. This service is named MyCloud and uses the CLoud-Enabled Virtual EnviRonment (CLEVER) to orchestrate the cloud services through their OCCI-compliant and rOCCI-enabled interfaces.	FedCloudCSGF	EGI: Nuno Ferreira (nuno.ferreira@egi.eu), Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu), Diego Scardaci (diego.scardaci@egi.eu) INFN: Roberto Barbera (roberto.barbera@ct.infn.it), Giuseppe La Rocca (giuseppe.larocca@ct.infn.it)
DCH-RP	DCH-RP Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation is a coordination action supported by EC FP7 e-Infrastructures Programme, launched to look at best practice for preservation standards in use. The project aim to harmonize data storage and preservation policies in the digital cultural heritage sector; to progress a dialogue and integration among institutions, e-Infrastructures, research and private organisations; to identy models for the governance, maintenance and sustainability of the integrated infrastructure for digital preservation of cultural content. The DCH-RP project is willing to run data preservation services on the EGI Federated Cloud.	Use Case 1: running the following data preservation services on the EGI Federated Cloud. (1) Preservation Aware Data Management: dropbox equivalent online storage for direct and dynamic data handling during information creation time, (2) OAIS Complaint Archive, (3) collaborative Task-based Search & Access: ElasticSearch Server for searching metadata, provenance, full-text, pictures and video and, (4) User Interface.	FedCloudDCHRP	EGI: Diego Scardaci (diego.scardaci@egi.eu), Salvatore Pinto (salvatore.pinto@egi.eu) FernUniversitat in Hagen: Dr. Claus-Peter Klas
DIRAC interware for eScience communities	The DIRAC interware project provides a framework for building ready to use distributed computing systems. It has been proven to be a useful tool for large international scientific collaborations integrating in a single system, their computing activities and distributed computing resources: Grids, Clouds and HTC clusters. In the case of Cloud resources, DIRAC is currently integrated with Amazon EC2, OpenNebula, OpenStack and CloudStack. The work integrates the resources provided by the multiple private clouds of the EGI Federated Cloud and additional WLCG resources, providing high-level scientific services on top of them by using the DIRAC framework.	Use Case 1: running LHCb simulations of Monte Carlo jobs using IaaS federated manner, for integration and scaling tests. Use Case 2: VMDIRAC as portal for VM scheduler, with third party job broker.	FedCloudDIRAC	EGI: Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu) DIRAC: Victor Mendez (vmendez@caos.uab.es)
ELIXIR	The goal of ELIXIR is to orchestrate the collection, quality control and archiving of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments. Some of these datasets are highly specialised and would previously only have been available to researchers within the country in which they were generated.	Use Case 1: evaluate the EGI Federated Cloud tools to support the "enlighten your Research" project. Use Case 2: execution of the Ensamble application in the EGI Federated Cloud environment.	FedCloudELIXIR	EGI: Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu)
DIRAC interware for eScience communities	The DIRAC interware project provides a framework for building ready to use distributed computing systems. It has been proven to be a useful tool for large international scientific collaborations integrating in a single system, their computing activities and distributed computing resources: Grids, Clouds and HTC clusters. In the case of Cloud resources, DIRAC is currently integrated with Amazon EC2, OpenNebula, OpenStack and CloudStack. The work integrates the resources provided by the multiple private clouds of the EGI Federated Cloud and additional WLCG resources, providing high-level scientific services on top of them by using the DIRAC framework.	Use Case 1: running LHCb simulations of Monte Carlo jobs using IaaS federated manner, for integration and scaling tests. Use Case 2: VMDIRAC as portal for VM scheduler, with third party job broker.	FedCloudDIRAC	EGI: Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu) DIRAC: Victor Mendez (vmendez@caos.uab.es)
ENVRI	The ENVRI target is on developing common capabilities including software and services of the environmental and e-infrastructure communities. While the ENVRI infrastructures are very diverse, they face common challenges including data capture from distributed sensors, metadata standardization, management of high volume data, workflow execution and data visualization. The common standards, deployable services and tools developed will be adopted by each infrastructure as it progresses through its construction phase. In the context of the ENVRI project, the EGI Federated Cloud will host data access and dissemination service on the Federated Cloud Storage as a Service and provide computing resources to ENVRI processing services via the EGI Federated Cloud IaaS service. The objective is to offer to the ENVRI partners a reliable, flexible and easy to use system to perform data discovery and dissemination and to support computing services.	Use Case 1: data access, catalog and dissemination (EISCAT 3D). Use Case 2: data processing (CNR-Pisa).	EGI_ENVRI	EGI: Malgorzata Krakowian (malgorzata.krakowian@egi.eu), Salvatore Pinto (salvatore.pinto@egi.eu) ESA: Roberto Cossu CNR: Leonardo Candela
European Space Agency	In the context of the Helix Nebula initiative, the European Space Agency organized a Proof of Concept using EGI Federated Cloud resources. The objective is to prove the interoperability between commercial (Helix Nebula) and academic (EGI Federated Cloud) cloud providers and to prove the possibility to provide processing services to scientists using the Federated Cloud IaaS system. ESA target is volcano and earthquake monitoring in the context of the SuperSites Exploitation Platform project.	Use Case : the proof of concept deploys and test performances of a computing cluster, by running a set of processing jobs on it. The cluster will use the Globus Grid middleware and will be connected to the ESA Grid-Processing On Demand system for job submission.	FedCloudESAPoC	EGI: Salvatore Pinto (salvatore.pinto@egi.eu) ESA: G-POD Team (eo-gpod@esa.int)
Next Generation Sequencing Applications and Computational workflow	RNA-sequencing analysis of data has performed to understand different biological features and behaviour. The research team generated a workflow based on a pipeline built to satisfy many experiments using Python 3.4, third party-libraries (numpy, pysam, matplotlib) and some external tools as segemehl and R. The running time heavily depends on the size and type of data. Usually takes some hour to some day. The workflow will be published as open source tool soon. Indeed, it’s a very common approach.	Use Case: the use case consist to run this workflow on the EGI Federated Cloud.	FedCloudRNASeq	EGI: Diego Scardaci (diego.scardaci@egi.eu), Salvatore Pinto (salvatore.pinto@egi.eu) Core Unit Systems Medicine - University of Wurzburg: Konrad Foster
Peachnote	Peachnote.com is a music score search engine and analysis platform. The system is the first of its kind and can be thought as an analog of Google Books Ngram Viewer and Google Books search for music scores. Peachnote provides visitors and researchers access to a massive amount of symbolic music data.	Use Case 1: the ability to upload and start a prepared VMware VM. The VM has only to be able to make outbound connections: to Amazon's SQS for job information, to HBase cluster to retrieve and store data, and to the peachnote server to regularly update the workflow code. No inbound connections are needed, which hopefully means less administrative and security concerns. Use Case 2: the ability to run a small Hadoop and HBase cluster in the cloud.	FedCloudPeachnote	EGI: Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu), Salvatore Pinto (salvatore.pinto@egi.eu) Peachnote: Vladimir Viro (vladimir@viro.name)
VERCE	Earthquake and seismology research addresses fundamental problems in understanding the Earth's internal wave sources and properties, thereby aiding society in the management of natural hazards, energy resources, environmental changes, and national security. VERCE is supporting this effort by developing a data-intensive e-science environment to enable innovative data analysis and data modelling methods that fully exploit the increasing wealth of open data generated by the observational and monitoring systems of the global seismology community.	Use Case : evaluate EGI Federated Cloud capabilities for data analysis and post-processing.	FedCloudVERCE	EGI: Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu) VERCE: andre.gemuend@scai.fraunhofer.de
WeNMR	The objective of WeNMR is to optimize and extend the use of the NMR and SAXS research infrastructures through the implementation of an e-infrastructure in order to provide the user community with a platform integrating and streamlining the computational approaches necessary for NMR and SAXS data analysis and structural modelling.	Use Case 1: using VMs prepared with Gromacs and some other software to run MD simulations for educational purpose, possibly on multi-core VMs. Use Case 2: validating and improving biomolecular NMR structures using VirtualCing (http://code.google.com/p/cing/wiki/VirtualCing), a VM equipped with a complex suite of ~25 programs. The cloud usage framework is based on a pilot job mechanism making use of the ToPoS (https://grid.sara.nl/wiki/index.php/Using_the_Grid/ToPoS) tool. Therefore, such a framework would naturally allow for execution of VirtualCing tasks across multiple cloud providers. Do notice that the framework is independent on the cloud access interface: it would work also with simple grid jobs, as far as the user-defined (or VO manager defined) VirtualCing VM is available at the grid site e.g. in a SE (or in the VO software area mounted by the WNs) and the grid job is allowed to start the VM. Technical details about its current implementation are available at http://code.google.com/p/cing/w/list. A live demonstration about the deployment and use of VirtualCing on the WNoDeS testbed of the INFN-CNAF computing centre has been shown at the EGI TF 2012 held in September: http://prezi.com/hrzwekguwfkx/virtualcing-cloud-demo-on-wnodes.	FedCloudWeNMR	EGI: Nuno Ferreira (nuno.ferreira@egi.eu) WeNRR: Marco Verlato (marco.verlato@pd.infn.it), Alexandre Bonvin (a.m.j.j.bonvin@uu.nl)
WS-PGRADE	WS-PGRADE is a portal environment for the development, execution and monitoring of workflows and workflow based parameter studies on different Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI).	Use Case 1: biologists, chemists simulating molecular docking by the autodock software tool are potential users of this use case. This use case gives the ability to run a small BOINC based desktop grid infrastructure as a DCI and to submit a pre-defined application (called autodock) to this DCI through the WS-PGRADE/gUSE portal as a (predefined) workflow. Use Case 2: any scientists requiring an on-demand, scalable computing infrastructure are potential users of this use case. This use case gives the ability to run a small BOINC based desktop grid infrastructure providing virtualisation support (GBAC) on the computational resource (BOINC client). The job submission interface in this scenario is the WS-PGRADE/gUSE system where compound applications (i.e. workflows) can be easily built and executed on the BOINC based desktop grid DCI. The submitted jobs of the workflow are executed on minimal linux OS used as the virtualised environment. Scalability can be improved by attaching external (non-cloud) resources to the desktop grid server.	FedCloudWSPGRADE	EGI: Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu) WS-PGRADE: Peter Kotcauer (peter.kotcauer@sztaki.mta.hu)