Webinar

This webinar supports the public consultation on the EOSC-hub Briefing Paper “Provision of Cross-Border Services”. The paper describes challenges involved in provision of publicly funded rivalrous services such as storage and compute across borders in Europe, with a focus on demanding use cases involving large amounts of resources. The paper discusses opportunities the EOSC could present for key participants and puts forward recommendations for the EOSC, on which feedback is invited via a public consultation. The webinar will describe the work which was undertaken and explain the insights gained and the recommendations which are proposed, and will provide the opportunity for questions and discussion.

The last NI4OS Train the Trainers event focuses on IT Service Management and its relevance to the EOSC service management. The webinar series goal is to study in more details the processes related to IT Service Management and how they will be applied in the NI4OS project. We start with FitSM as one of the standards used for IT service management. Following the presentations from our guests from EGI Foundation, we then continue with NI4OS specific topics to discuss how the FitSM processes will be implemented in the NI4OS pre-production environment and how service management can be related to FAIR data and used to manage data repositories.

IT Service Management is a discipline that helps provide services with a focus on customer needs and in a professional manner. It is widely used in the commercial and public sectors to manage IT services of all types, but current solutions are very heavyweight with high barriers to entry.

FitSM is an open, lightweight standard for professionally managing services. It brings order and traceability to a complex area and provides simple, practical support in getting started with ITSM. FitSM training and certification provide crucial help in delivering services and improving their management. It provides a common conceptual and process model, sets out straightforward and realistic requirements and links them to supporting materials.

FitSM is the reference framework being used in several EOSC initiatives, among other research infrastructures as well. Through FitSM, the aim is to conduct effective IT service management in the EOSC federated environment and achieving a baseline level of ITSM that can act in support of ‘management interoperability’ in federated environments from EOSC related projects.  

In addition, participants have an opportunity to receive a formal certification backed by certification authority APMG for anyone successfully passing the exam (20 multiple choice questions, 13 required to pass). Both the costs of the training and the exam is covered and offered by the EOSC-hub project for free.

In this webinar, we will discuss the basic concepts of cloud computing, including virtualization, containerization, service models, and cloud application development. We will also discuss how clouds can support data management and scientific workflows in the research infrastructures via examples from ENVRIplus and ENVRI-FAIR projects.

The Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) middleware integrates computing resources (usually, computing clusters managed by a batch system), making them available via a secure common layer. Conceptually, ARC provides an edge service to batch systems. Through this service, called ARC Compute Element (ARC-CE), scientific communities can launch and manage computational tasks in a uniform manner. 

A bit more than a year ago a non backward compatible major version, the ARC6.0 was released bringing new functionality, enhanced manageability and increased stability to the community. With the availability of the ARC6 release the support for the previous ARC5 deployments are to be discontinued with the end of June 2020.

This interactive webinar will introduce the major new features of the ARC6 release and cover the deployment steps of an ARC6 CE  both as a new installation and as an upgrade from a previous ARC5-based deployment. Special attention will be given to the accounting system related changes and the new one-shop-stop sysadmin toolbox built around arcctl. 

During this webinar we will show you how the IM framework can be used through the Elastic Cloud Computer Cluster (EC3) portal to create elastic virtual clusters on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. The virtual clusters created by EC3 are self-managed entities that scale out to a larger number of nodes on demand, up to a maximum size specified by the user. Whenever idle resources are detected, the clusters automatically scale in, according to some predefined policies, in order to cut down the costs in the case of using a public Cloud provider. In this particular webinar the EC3 docker CLI will be used to deploy and operate elastic virtual clusters on the EGI Cloud Federation. 

EC3 has been developed by the Grid and High Performance Computing Group (GRyCAP) at the Instituto de Instrumentación para Imagen Molecular (I3M) from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV).

The Infrastructure Manager (IM) is a framework that eases the access and the usability of IaaS clouds by automating the VMI selection, deployment, configuration, software installation, monitoring and update of Virtual Appliances. It supports APIs from a large number of virtual platforms, making user applications cloud-agnostic. In addition it integrates a contextualization system to enable the installation and configuration of all the user required applications providing the user with a fully functional infrastructure. It is a service that features a web-based GUI, a XML-RPC API, a REST API and a command-line application.

IM has been developed by the Grid and High Performance Computing Group (GRyCAP) at the Instituto de Instrumentación para Imagen Molecular (I3M) from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV).

The HTCondor-CE software is a site gateway that accepts remote resource requests (i.e., pilot jobs) and passes them along to the site's local batch system (e.g. Grid Engine, HTCondor, LSF, PBS Pro/Torque, or Slurm). 

Based on HTCondor, HTCondor-CE is widely used across the Open Science Grid (OSG) as the preferred Compute Element (CE) solution, and is now an official part of the HTCondor Software Suite. 

With the retirement of CREAM endpoints across the EGI sites planned by end of 2020, HTCondor-CE could be considered a good alternative as a CE endpoint solution and this talk will explain the reasons by giving an overview of the HTCondor-CE architecture, configuration, APEL and BDII support, and feature roadmap.

Kubernetes is the number one orchestrator to host Docker containers and is offered by all major public clouds. In this webinar Enol will introduce you to Docker containers and Kubernetes on the EGI Cloud Federation and will show you how to get your containers under control. 

The EGI DataHub allows users to make their data available using different levels of access: from completely unrestricted open access to open data to authenticated access to closed data sets. This is possible as a result of the seamless integration with the EGI AAI service. The data hosted on the EGI DataHub can be readily accessible by cloud Virtual Machines (VMs) or running grid jobs thanks to full integration with EGI Federated Cloud and High-Throughput compute resources. The use of protocols such as POSIX and web services guarantees easy and scalable access to data from cloud and HTC applications. This ensures maximum compatibility with existing applications and minimum hassle for developers and users alike. The EGI DataHub is built on top of the EGI Open Data Platform using Onedata technology to connect a wide range of existing storage services, regardless of their underlying technology (e.g. Lustre, Amazon S3, Ceph, NFS, or dCache).