Training infrastructure

Engagement overview

Community requirements

Community events

Training

EGI Webinars

Documentations

Introduction

During 2015 the EGI community has established a cloud based e-infrastructure for training, under the coordination of the EGI-Engage project. This training infrastructure is hosted as a dedicated resource pool, a Virtual Organisation (VO), on the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure. The infrastructure is operated to provide resources and services for face-to-face events, online training courses or self-paced learning.

The training VO is integrated with the ‘per-user proxy factory’ solution of EGI to generate personal, but short-living proxy certificates in an easy way, for trainers and trainees. Such proxy certificates can identify students individually, and have limited lifetime - typically few hours or days, depending on the length of the training event or module.

Usage models

The goals and possible usage modes of the EGI training infrastructure are:

1. Provide an infrastructure that demonstrates services of the EGI federated cloud. In this operational mode the infrastructure can accommodate courses that focus on the usage of the EGI cloud services themselves. Such courses typically target programmers or other technical members of scientific communities or projects.
2. Offer a baseline cloud infrastructure for training courses about scientific software and services. In this operational mode the representatives of the community or project deploy their own Virtual Machine images on the cloud before the training, and these images offer the training environment for the students. Because of the cloud-based operational model the students can have dedicated training environments, and the community can benefit from the easy deployment, predictability and repeatability of courses.

Available capacity

The infrastructure currently federates the following resources:

1. CESNET cloud site (Czech Republic)

• 64 vCPUs, �110 GB of RAM, �1 TB of persistent storage

1. BIFI cloud site (Spain)

• 50 vCPUs, 50 GB of RAM�50 storage volumes, 50 public IP addresses

1. UKIM cloud site

• 48 vCPUs, 48 GB of RAM, 48 public IP addresses

Want to join as a resource provider? Please email support@egi.eu.

Experiences and examples

The training infrastructure was used in July 2015 for two face-to-face training courses that trained programmers about the use of the EGI Federated Cloud (so the first operational model above). The focus of these courses were on the use of the rOCCI client interface to interact with the EGI cloud (instantiate, delete, access VMs). During these courses the training infrastructure included three cloud sites (CESNET, UKIM, CSIC) and The tutorials were delivered for multi-national audiences in the UK and NL and resulted in a reusable tutorial package about the standard-based EGI federated cloud. This package can be used to train users and user communities on how to integrate applications, services and frameworks with the Federated Cloud, and can also serve as an example for PaaS and SaaS providers who are planning to develop materials in the EGI context.

Upcoming courses on the infrastructure

No course is scheduled. To book the infrastructure for a course please email the EGI User Community Support Team: support@egi.eu.