D6.2: Final report on collaboration with other e-infrastructures
Creators: name: Cédric Jourdain
name: Cristiano Padrin
name: Miroslav Puskaric
name: Miroslaw Kupczyk
name: Javier Bartolome
name: Filip Stanek
name: Borislav Pavlov
name: Zoltán Kiss
name: Pedro Alberto
name: Ezhilmathi Krishnasamy
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: This deliverable describes existing and new collaborations between PRACE-6IP members and other e-Infrastructures, as well as those with the Centres of Excellence (CoEs). These activities aim to build and develop a Europe-wide integrated e-Infrastructure for PRACE users, through the identification of new user-friendly services and the implementation of pilot projects incorporating innovative workflows and solutions.
PRACE-6IP is currently collaborating with major European e-Infrastructures (EGI, GÉANT, Fenix-ICEI, EOSC-hub), and continues to consolidate links with CoEs and has started new pilots with large-scale instruments infrastructures (SKAO, CERN, ELI). Preliminary discussions are also underway with health data infrastructures (PaRI, Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH)). The focus was on continuing and further developing collaboration on identity management and data services to best cover the full life cycle of data.
The collaboration with Fenix-ICEI allows the provisioning of new services, such as active and archived data repositories and virtual machine services. Additionally, meetings and workshops have been held to develop a user-friendly authentication and authorisation to these services through the implementation of a PRACE Identity Provider (IdP) that would allow PRACE users to access the services and resources provided by the Fenix-ICEI infrastructure as seamlessly as possible (using a single set of credentials) and vice-versa. A pilot is being defined to evaluate the potential of this identity federation. Moreover, discussions with the Puhuri project are underway to evaluate the integration of certain functionalities, such as direct access to the resource (ssh), in the future PRACE AAI solution.
The strategy to increase the offer of services focused on the data life cycle has been to establish links with large-scale instrument infrastructures which, by their nature, produce a huge amount of data to be processed, sometimes on the fly. The collaboration with CERN lets us understand the workflows already in place and to propose pilots on PRACE Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems, including the services and technologies used to cover the whole data life cycle. In the same perspective and following the Memorandum of Understanding signed between GÉANT, CERN, SKAO, and PRACE, four demonstrators have been initiated to support and assist them in the challenge of data-intensive science.
Finally, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and due to facing a growing demand for data processing and storage by health data infrastructures, PRACE-6IP started new collaborations with some health institutions/projects (LIH, PaRI). Their workflows requiring and drawing on current technologies such as machine learning for large-scale model training for medical imaging applications, or the need for an easy-to-use and secure (e.g. cloud-based) platform where users can upload their data are very interesting issues for the development of interoperable services for HPC users.