Training infrastructure

Engagement overview

Community requirements

Community events

Training

EGI Webinars

Documentations

Introduction to the EGI training infrastructure

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 provides resources and services for face-to-face events, online training courses (Webinars, MOOCs) or self-paced learning modules.

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.

The infrastructure can be extended with customised training environments on-demand.

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 (the trainers) deploy custom Virtual Machine images on the training infrastructure 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 resources

The infrastructure currently federates the following resources:

Sites through the training.egi.eu Virtual Organisation (VO):

• VO sites and endorsed Virtual Machine images in AppDB: https://appdb.egi.eu/store/vo/training.egi.eu
• VO ID card in the EGI Operational Portal: http://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/view/voname/training.egi.eu

Available capacity:

• CESNET OpenNebula cloud site (Czech Republic)
  • 64 vCPUs, 110 GB of RAM, 1 TB of persistent storage
  • Contact: Miroslav Ruda <ruda@ics.muni.cz>, Boris Parak <parak@cesnet.cz>

• BIFI OpenStack cloud site (Spain)
  • 50 vCPUs, 50 GB of RAM, 500 GB for storage volumes, 50 public IP addresses
  • Contact: Ruben Valles <rvalles@bifi.es>

• UKIM OpenNebula cloud site (Macedonia)
  • 48 vCPUs, 48 GB of RAM, 48 public IP addresses
  • Contact: Boro Jakimovski <boro.jakimovski@finki.ukim.mk>

• CETA-CIEMAT OpenStack cloud site (Spain)
  • 20 physical CPU cores (or virtual cores), 40 GB of RAM, 5.4TB storage shared among all the VOs (CDMI is not provided), 10 public IPs (up to 20 in case of need)
  • Contact: miguelangel.diaz@externos.ciemat.es, admin.iaas@ceta-ciemat.es

Want to join as a resource provider? Want to connect your custom training environment? Please email support@egi.eu.

Modules 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, BIFI, UKIM) and hosted approx 25 student per event. Before the event the trainers prepared a basic VM that included the rOCCI client (with the training VO pre-configured in it), one user account for each student with a short-term certificate copied under each (with 24h lifetime). One instance of the VM was started on the infrastructure by the trainers before the event and the student were provided with login details for the user accounts. After logging in the students could use the OCCI commands of the rOCCI client with their own short-term certificates and could manage virtual machines on the 3 cloud sites of the training infrastructure. The presentations and hands-on materials from the teo events are available here:

• EGI Federated Cloud tutorial package (Software Carpentry Bootcamp, 2015. July 17, Feltham, London, UK). Training materials from the event: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2551
• EGI Federated Cloud tutorial package (HPCS 2015 conference, 2015. July 20-24, Amsterdam, NL). Training materials from the event: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2553
• EGI Federated Cloud for users (Training for MTA SZTAKI, 2015. October 14, Budapest, HU). Training materials from the event: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2622
• Next Generation Sequencing Analysis Training Workshop (2015. October 21, Thessaloniki, GR). Training materials from the event: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2641

Upcoming events using the infrastructure

• Tutorials at the EGI Community Forum in Bari, Italy (10-12 November 2015): https://indico.egi.eu/indico/internalPage.py?pageId=7&confId=2544
  • Introduction to the EGI Federated Cloud – the user perspective
  • Dos and Don'ts for Virtual Appliance Preparation
  • DIRAC Service tutorial
  • Running Chipster data analysis platform in EGI Federated Cloud
  • NGS Data Analysis Training Workshop
  • Programming Distributed Computing Platforms with COMPSs
  • A Tutorial on Hybrid Data Infrastructures: D4Science as a case study

Want to book the infrastructure for an upcoming course? Please email support@egi.eu.