D4.2 Blue Cloud VRE Common Facilities - Release 1
Creators: name: Assante, Massimiliano
name: Candela, Leonardo
name: Pagano, Pasquale
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Analytics Framework
subject: Architecture
subject: FOS: Civil engineering
subject: Identity and Access Management
subject: Publishing Framework
subject: Release Management
subject: Social Networking
subject: Virtual Research Environment
subject: Workspace

description: The Blue-Cloud project plans to pilot a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to multidisciplinary data from observations and models, analytical tools, and computing facilities essential to support research to understand better and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability. To achieve this goal, Blue-Cloud is developing, deploying, and operating the Blue-Cloud platform whose architecture consists of two families of components: (a) the Blue Cloud Data Discovery and Access service component to serve federated discovery and access to 'blue data' infrastructures; and (b) the Blue Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) component to provide a Blue Cloud VRE as a federation of computing platforms and analytical services. This deliverable presents the Blue Cloud Virtual Research Environment constituents by focusing on both new services and revised existing services that have been developed in the reporting period to serve the needs of the Blue Cloud community. In particular, this deliverable describes a total of 11 services and components. These services and components contribute functionalities to the Blue Cloud VRE Enabling Framework (Identity and Access Management, VRE Management), Collaborative framework (Workspace and Social Networking), Analytics Framework (Software and Algorithm Importer, Smart Executor), Publishing Framework (Catalogue Service) and improved support for RStudio, JupyterHub, ShinyProxy, and Docker Applications. The services are described below by reporting their design principles, architectures, and main features. The deliverable also describes the procedures and approaches governing services and components released by highlighting how Gitea (as Git hosting service), Jenkins (as automation server), and Maven (as project management and comprehension tool) are used to guarantee continuous integration processes. Services and components discussed in this deliverable contribute to 11 gCube open-source software system releases (from gCube 4.16 up to gCube 4.25.1) and are in the pipeline for the next ones. They have been used to develop and operate the Virtual Laboratories of the Blue Cloud gateway https://blue-cloud.d4science.org and its underlying infrastructure. At the time of this deliverable (November 2020), the gateway hosts a total of 8 VREs and VLabs, including five specifically conceived to support the co-development of some of the Blue-Cloud demonstrators (namely, the Aquaculture Atlas Generation for Demonstrator #5, the Blue-Cloud Lab for several demonstrators, the GRSF pre for Demonstrator #4, the Marine Environmental Indicators for Demonstrator #3, the Zoo-Phytoplankton EOV for Demonstrator #1). This gateway and its tools serve more than 400 users that (since January 2020) performed a total of more than 5000 working sessions, more than 1700 accesses to the Workspace, and more than 750 analytics tasks. These exploitation and uptake indicators are likely to grow in the coming months thanks to data updates and continued use, further development of existing VLabs, and finally, the creation of new ones.