D6.6: Final Report on Collaborations with the e-Infrastructures and CoEs
Creators: name: Jourdain, Cédric
name: Affinito, Fabio
name: Stoffers, Huub
name: Puskaric, Miroslav
name: Virtanen, Joni
name: Alberto, Pedro
name: Niederberger, Ralph
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure
Security
Training
Centres of Excellence

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 been collaborating on security with other e-Infrastructures from its beginning. This includes cooperation with major European organisations (EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, Human Brain Project), as well as with Centres of Excellence (CoEs) such as EoCoE, POP or BioExcel and CoeGSS. During the first call for projects, the PRACE council reserved 0.5% of the total calculation resources available for the use of the initial nine CoEs. The same has applied to the second call, which began in January 2019, with two more new centres: HiDALGO and EXCELLERAT. There are also some ongoing preliminary discussions with worldwide consortiums (XSEDE and RIST).<br> Workshops attended by representatives from EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, NRENs, PRACE as well as US participants, are held regularly to organise these partnerships The follow-up activities of this forceful collaboration are organised in working groups, which cover specific topics such as networks, authentication and security, data storage, training, etc. that are coordinated by an informal Steering Committee, in which PRACE is actively engaged. PRACE has a long history of collaboration with these e-Infrastructures and uses the services of these e-Infrastructures in various areas of interest to it.<br> PRACE collaborates with EUDAT for data services, which offers a service catalogue complementing PRACE in order to fulfil user needs during the full research data life cycle. During the past years, some integration in the areas of data transfer, storage and sharing has been implemented as data pilots were run as part of the DECI-13 call and the DECI-14 call. A Data Management Plan template has been used to ease requirements gathering during the early phase of each pilot and its systematic use is now highly recommended. The need for cross PRACE and EUDAT trainings has been identified. This collaboration with EUDAT is increasing, with delivering some sessions at PRACE training events and vice versa.<br> Regarding authentication and authorisation services, PRACE is considering to use services provided by the Identity Provider (IdP) federations which exist for educational organisations in several countries and which are federated in eduGAIN. Working with external IdPs can enhance the security of the PRACE infrastructure because users will not have to use separate credentials for PRACE access. This task follows other activities in this area, especially those of the AARC project which is coordinated by GÉANT.<br> Within the framework of the European Cloud Initiative, a desire has emerged to federate world-class supercomputer capabilities with high-speed connectivity and leading-edge data and software services for science, industry and the public sector. This is how the European Data Infrastructure (EDI) project was born, where GEANT and PRACE have a fundamental role to play.<br> For security alert and incident management, PRACE has been collaborating with EGI and EUDAT for a long time. This cooperation will continue through the WISE community initiative.