South African Science Gateways

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1 Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-infrastructures for Research and Education Data Sharing Research Infrastructures Grant Agreement n South African Science Gateways Bruce Becker, Coordinator, SAGrid Africa-Arabia (South) All-Hands Meeting Pretoria, 03/2013

2 Outline e-infrastructures and barriers to entry Building blocks of science gateways Examples of new science gateways Work in progress Conclusions and outlook 2 2

3 Unwittingly creating barriers HPC site Shared Data Store Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 3

4 Unwittingly creating barriers HPC site Shared Data Store Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 4

5 Unwittingly creating barriers HPC site Shared Data Store Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 5

6 Unwittingly creating barriers Shared Data Store HPC site 1 Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 :-( HPC site 2 Shared Data Store Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 HPC site n Shared Data Store Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 6

7 Integrated Services Infrastructure Shared Data Store HPC site 1 Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 3 :-/ Shared Data Store Shared Data Store HPC site 2 Stack 1 HPC site 3 Stack 1 Stack 2 Stack 2 Stack 3 Stack 3 Common Authentication and execution environment :-/ :-/ 7

8 What about the interface? Providing access to users across a distributed infrastructure removes a big barrier to entry: Complexity of managing different credentials Common execution environment Common namespace for data storage, etc However, the interface you provide for them still has to be acceptable Some groups prefer CLI Most would like point and click 8

9 What about the user's research environment? E-Science and e-scientists is about making use of all of the services at your disposal Are we forcing users into an unnatural environment? Can the infrastructure understand and interact with other tools that users need External data repositories Metadata catalogues Instrumentation Social and scientific networks Etc.. The Virtual Research Environment should provide the tools that the particular researcher or collaboration needs and they should decide what these are. 9

10 Science Gateway Access through Open Standards Scientific E-Collaboration Social Standard Services Users of different Institutions and/or other partners grid Local Cluster Cloud 10

11 Science Gateway Access through open standards Scientific E-Collaboration Social Standard-based (SAGA) middleware-independent Grid Engine Users of different Institutions and/or other partners 11

12 Access via Identity Federation 12

13 Access via Identity Federation 13

14 CHAIN Science Gateway Demo 9 Demo applications in 3 scientific domains: Life sciences Humanities Computer Science No barrier to entry: Just register with existing credentials, and run the job Multi-middleware 6 different middleware Jobs running on stand-alone HPC clusters, p2p grids, production grids... No difference to users. 14

15 CHAIN worldwide interoperability 15

16 AfricaGrid Science Gateway Many widely-used applications... Just register to use it 16

17 Yes, but I want MY application!... The Science Gateway paradigm relies on Identity federation and identity provider standards (Shibboleth,SAML-2) Grid and Data Standards (SAGA, OMI-PMH, etc) Java portlet standards (JSR 168/286) to drastically reduce the barrier to entry for users However, we still need to provide them with their favourite application! interfaces need to be developed for each application (although the CLI is always there) Porting the applications and developing the interfaces is by definition a work in progress Some widely-used applications already available 17

18 Calling all developers! A huge community of users can now access incredible computing and data resources Portlet developers need only know standards-based technology Java/JSP, HTML s ported are published in the application repository visible to all users worldwide Good motivation to collaborate with us! 18

19 Conclusions and Outlook Web interfaces based on established standards can drastically reduce the barrier to entry for users to any compute resource Development of Identity Federations allows users to keep one set of credentials no matter which service they use, and to collaborate easily The Science Gateway concept is being demonstrated by CHAIN AfricaArabia ROC is participating A science gateway and catch-all services are being installed at UFS all currently deployed SAGrid applications will be included We are looking for motivated developers to collaborate on building a versatile VRE for researchers across Africa. 19