Training events

Information technology has become an essential ingredient in most of research fields. The variety and amount of data to acquire, process and understand in fact has significantly increased, and the typical desktop is no longer sufficient. Even more, large collaborations are necessary to carry out research, involving complex logistics for handling distributed data collection, analysis and management. It is therefore clear that new approaches (computer architectures, software and methodologies) are needed to enhance the scientific research. eScience studies, enacts, and improves the ongoing process of innovation in computationallyintensive or data-intensive research methods; typically, this is carried out collaboratively, often using distributed infrastructure. eScience encompasses all fields of research and addresses all stages of the research lifecycle, from formulation of the research questions, through large scale simulations and data analytics, scientific discovery, up to long-term sharing, reusing, and reapplying of the results, data as well as the relevant tools, processes and knowledge.

CAPRI (Critical Assessment of Predicted Interactions) is a community wide experiment designed to test methods for predicting the structure of macromolecular complexes based on the known structure of their components.

The meeting program will include an overview of the performance of protein docking and scoring procedures obtained for targets evaluated since the spring of 2013. It will also feature several plenary lectures by prominent scientists, as well as talks by the best CAPRI performers, and/or groups developing innovative computational approaches. CAPRI groups selected for oral representations will be notified, once the predictions for all outstanding targets have been completed.

Get the latest update on the current status of computational procedures for modeling protein-protein interactions and the association of proteins with other macromolecules from this 7th CAPRI evaluation meeting. For more information - http://www.ebi.ac.uk/msd-srv/capri/

EGI CSIRT provides operational security to distributed compute infrastructures coordinated by EGI. One of EGI CSIRTs activities is to assess the overall incident response capabilities, which is done through security exercises, so called Security Service Challenges (SSCs). Operational security in an agile environment with different job management systems, logging information at different locations and entities coordination of the involved security teams is key.

The used services need to provide sufficient traceability of user actions as well as interfaces to the systems that offer methods needed to contain an incident, i.e. suspending of credentials found in activities violating approved security policies.

In an assessment of the overall incident response capabilities one of the core aspects will be the junctions between the acting security teams, each having a different view on the situation and different tools available to contain the incident.

To be able to run Security Service Challenges (SSCs) targeting multiple Resource Centres (RCs) and Workload Management Systems (WMS) a framework, the SSC-Monitor, was developed, that allows for central management of the malicious activities as well as for recording and evaluating the expected actions of the participating CSIRTs. This SSC-Monitor was already used for earlier SSCs. While large parts of this framework remains constant several adoptions are needed to implement the Virtual Organisations WMS. Also to be able to measure the incident response of the participants various metrics have to be developed and made available to the SSC-Monitor, and in order to realistically hide the malicious activities, alternative methods for getting the payload to the compute nodes had to be researched and implemented into the SSC-Monitor. Details are presented in separate contribution to this conference.

In the SSC presented here we focused on the WMS Dirac developed and used by the LHCB VO. Incidents involving a VOs WMS require actions and information flow from/to the VOs security team, the RCs security teams and, eventually, additional entities providing authentication frameworks. The information flow and the orchestrated incident response activities are coordinated by EGI CSIRTs Incident Response Task Force (IRTF).

To assess the readiness of the above mentioned security teams, EGI CSIRT together with the VO LHCB created a realistic incident scenario, where valid user credentials are used to submit jobs to the infrastructure using LHCBs workload management system DIRAC as well as using generic services available for job submission directly to the sites.

In this presentation we will show the detailed incident scenario created by the SSC-Monitor, the expected actions described in the incident response procedures as well as the efficiency of the actions described in the developed metrics.