Long-tail of science activity

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This page provides information about the project that develops and maintains EGI's Platform for the Long-tail of Science.

Project coordinators: Peter Solagna, Gergely Sipos/EGI.eu

Developer meetings:  http://indico.egi.eu/indico/categoryDisplay.py?categId=36

Developers' email list: long-tail-pilot@mailman.egi.eu

Motivation

Processes are well established for several years in EGI to allocate resources for user communities. However individual researchers and small research teams sometimes struggle to access grid and cloud compute and storage resources from the network of NGIs to implement ‘big data applications’. Recognising the need for simpler and more harmonised access for individual researchers and small research groups, aka. members of the ‘long-tail of science’ the EGI community started to design and prototype a new platform in October 2014.

This project designs and prototypes a new e-infrastructure platform in EGI to simplify access to grid and cloud computing services for the long-tail of science, ie. those researchers and small research teams who work with large data, but have limited or no expertise in distributed systems. The project will establish a set of services integrated together and suited for the most frequent grid and cloud computing use cases of individual researchers and small research teams.

Members of the project evaluate technologies that can lower the barrier of access to grid and cloud resources, select the best candidates, and assemble these into a coherent platform. The platform will serve users via a centrally operated 'user registration portal' and a set of science gateways that will be connected to resources in a new Virtual Organisation. Through the registration portal users will be able to request resources from the platform, while through the science gateways they consume the resources by implementing big data and compute-intensive use cases. The platform will be relevant for any scientist who works with large data, moreover it will include communication channels and mechanisms to connect these people to their respective National Grid Initiatives where they can receive more customised services. The platform will be open for grid and cloud resource providers, for science gateway providers, and for user support teams. The project welcomes such contributors.

The benefits of the platform:

• A single grid and cloud computing resource allocation at the European scale for individual researchers and small research teams.
• Harmonised and simplified access to grid and cloud resources of EGI.
• Custom Virtual Research Environments available for individual researchers and small research teams at the European scale.
• New and improved connection within the NGIs to individual researchers and small research teams.
• An innovative new security subsystem (per-user sub-proxies) that - in the future - may be used in other EGI community platforms.

Mandate

The project has started in the 5th year of the EGI-InSPIRE FP7 project and current supported by the H2020 EGI-Engage project. The target of this activity is to design and prototype the services of the EGI long-tail platform. The services will be deployed in a new Virtual Organisation of EGI.

Objectives

The capabilities that the long tail of science platform have to support are:

• Zero-barrier access: any user who carries out relevant research can get a start-up resource allocation
• 100% coverage: anyone with internet access can become a user
• User-centric: User support for platform users is available through the NGIs
• Realistic: Reuse existing technology building blocks as much as possible, require minimal new development
• Secure: Provide acceptable level of tracking of users and user activities (Not necessarily f2f vetting)
• Scalable: Can scale up to support large number resource providers, technology providers, use cases and users
• Valuable: Result tangible outcomes