D6.6: Final Report on Collaborations with e-Infrastructures and CoEs
Creators: name: Coutin, Stéphane
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2017
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure
Security
Training

description: This deliverable presents the existing and new activities between PRACE and complementary e-Infrastructures with the aim to build an integrated Europe-wide e-Infrastructure for our users. The focus has been on the continuation and further development of the collaboration on security and data management topics.<br> PRACE has some ongoing collaboration with the major European e-Insfrastructure (EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, Human Brain Project). There are also some ongoing preliminary discussions with the Centres of Excellence (CoE) and with worldwide organisations (XSEDE and RIST).<br> PRACE has been collaborating on security with other e-Infrastructures from its beginning. The collaboration has been extended now to GÉANT and the NREN communities. As a result, a first common workshop was organised in October 2015 under the name of WISE (WISE Information Security for collaborating E-infrastructures). The 4th workshop, attended by representatives from EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, NRENs, PRACE and also included US participation, was held from 27 to 29 March 2017 in Amsterdam. A Steering Committee coordinates the follow-up activities of this active collaboration, organised in working groups for specific topics. PRACE actively participates in the Steering Committee and working groups.<br> PRACE has a long history of collaboration with EGI and EUDAT for security incident handling and this collaboration will continue through the WISE initiative.<br> For authentication and authorisation services it can be of interest for PRACE to use services provided by the Identity Provider (IdP) federations which exist for educational organisations in several countries and which are also federated in eduGAIN. This task follows from activities in this area, especially those of the AARC project. Working with external IdPs can enhance the security of the PRACE infrastructure because users do not have to use separate credentials for PRACE access. Also credential misuse may be noticed sooner as more services will rely on the same credentials. Feedback has been provided on the requirements PRACE has for the acceptance of authentication services provided by external IdPs.<br> Regarding data services, we collaborate with EUDAT, which offers a service catalogue complementing PRACE in order to fulfil user needs during the full research data life cycle. The requirements gathering and future pilot identification is done essentially through a call for data pilots included in PRACE and DECI calls. We launched four data pilots as a result of DECI-13 call and might expect two more from DECI-14 call.<br> As the first data pilots have been running for nearly a year, we have implemented some integration in the areas of data transfer, data storage and data sharing. We have used the Data Management Plan template to ease requirements gathering and will recommend using it systematically. We have also identified the need for cross PRACE and EUDAT trainings, some have been delivered to support data pilots. This collaboration increases now with EUDAT delivering some sessions in PRACE training events and vice versa.