D10.2: Second Annual Report of WP10 - Progress on Technology Scouting and Development
Creators: name: Schott, Andreas
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2013
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: The major aim of Work Package 10 (WP10) <em>Advancing the Operational Infrastructure</em> in PRACE-2IP is assessing software technologies and promoting services needed for the operation of the integrated PRACE-infrastructure. WP10 partly continued work of the technology task T6.3 of work package WP6 of PRACE-1IP. The results will be handed over to T6.3 <em>Technical evolution of the PRACE services of WP6 Operation of the Distributed Infrastructure</em> in PRACE-3IP.<br> This work is organised in three tasks covering the three goals to be achieved. The first task focused on enhancing the existing infrastructure. The second one concentrated on data services, which go beyond the already existing ones. The third task covered the remote visualization of data.<br> In the first task, the following services have been treated in several sub-tasks: The centralized accounting service Grid-SAFE has been extended covering now Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems and will go into production soon. Another sub-task integrated the announcement and management of PRACE events directly into the PRACE web-site. Work on the <em>Service Certification, the PRACE Information Portal</em> and the <em>INCA Monitoring</em> has been continued by further developing the products or new or additional components for them and thus led to an overall improved infrastructure. The Project Proposal Revision (PPR) tool, already in use for managing Tier-0 calls, has been extended to also handle proposals of the DECI calls in Tier-1. It has already been used for the latest DECI-11 call. Finally, the collaboration with other technologically oriented projects has been continued, especially with concrete pilot projects addressing data requirements of user communities. One pilot dealt with the needs of the Virtual Imaging Platform for the Virtual Physiological Human (VIP4VPH), the other one handled the complex data-workflow of a quantum mechanical problem using local, EGI, and PRACE-resources for the calculation as part of the MAPPER-project.<br> In the second task, <em>Data Services</em>, the <em>Data Strategy</em> group – as one sub-task – generated a questionnaire on Big Data and proposed different recommendations for improvements in data handling, of which some could be implemented easily. The sub-task New <em>File Transfer Technologies</em> compared several file-transfer-tools, currently not yet supported by PRACE in the service-catalog, and assessed their potential benefits for users in PRACE. Initially the iRODS repository technology had been considered the most promising software concerning handling of data identified by persistent identifiers and was therefore included into the software to be evaluated by WP10. As the pilot collaboration with EUDAT showed, there is a real user need for such a technology. Therefore it has been evaluated very deeply. Depending on further user or community requests iRODS may become a generally supported service, at least optional, in PRACE. Finally, several file system technologies have been investigated with respect to their possible use in PRACE. The performance measured and the stability tested does not yet allow recommendations of any of the evaluated file system technologies.<br> The third task, <em>Remote Visualization</em>, continued its investigations in different technological implementations based on VNC technologies. The Remote Connection Manager pilot installation has been finalized and will become a production service in PRACE. Furthermore, performance has been tested for varying hardware and network configurations with different software implementations being able to give recommendations on the best setup and usage of VNC based remote virtualization depending on the infrastructural conditions.