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The motivation of this work fits with the general vision to enable e-health for European citizens, irrespective of their social and financial status and their place of residence. Services to be provided include access to a high-quality early diagnostic and prognostic service for the Alzheimer Disease and other forms of dementia, based both on the European Research and Education Networks and the European Grid Infrastructure. The present paper reports on the architecture and services of a Science Gateway developed in the context of the DECIDE project, which aims to support the medical community in its daily duties of patients’ examination and diagnosis. The implementation of the Science Gateway is described with particular focus on the standard technologies adopted to ease the access by non IT-.expert users. The work leverages on an authentication and authorization infrastructure based on Identity Federations and robot certificates and on the adoption of the SAGA standard for middleware-independent Grid interaction. The architecture and the functionalities of the digital repository for medical image storage and analysis are also presented.

One of the benefits of OCCI stems from simplifying the life of developers aiming to integrate multiple cloud managers. It provides them with a single protocol to abstract the differences between cloud service implementations used on sites run by different providers. This comes particularly handy in federated clouds, such as the EGI Federated Cloud Platform, which bring together providers who run different cloud management platforms on their sites: most notably OpenNebula, OpenStack, or Synnefo. Thanks to the wealth of approaches and tools now available to developers of virtual resource management solutions, different paths may be chosen, ranging from a small-scale use of an existing command line client or single-user graphical interface, to libraries ready for integration with large workload management frameworks and job submission portals relied on by large science communities across Europe. From lone wolves in the long-tail of science to virtual organizations counting thousands of users, OCCI simplifies their life through standardization, unification, and simplification. Hence cloud applications based on OCCI can focus on user specifications, saving cost and reaching a robust development life-cycle. To demonstrate this, the paper shows several EGI Federated Cloud experiences, demonstrating the possible approaches and design principles.

This paper details the state of the art, the design, development and deployment of the EGI Federated Cloud platform, an e-infrastructure offering scalable and flexible models of utilization to the European research community. While continuing support for the traditional High Throughput Computing model, the EGI Cloud Platform extends its reach to other models of utilization such as long-lived services and on demand computation. Following a two-year period of development, the EGI Federated Cloud platform was officially launched in May 2014 offering resources provided by trusted academic and research organisations from within the user communities and consistently with their standard funding regime. Since then, the use cases supported have significantly increased both in total number and diversity of model of service required, validating both the choice of enforcing cloud technology agnosticism and of supporting service mobility and portability by means of open standards. These design choices have also allowed for the inclusion of commercial cloud providers into an infrastructure previously supported only by academic institutions. This contributes to a wider goal of funding agencies to create economic and social impact from supported research activities.

The EGI Federated Cloud is a standards-based, open cloud system as well as its enabling technologies that federates institutional clouds to offer a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services. The EGI Federated Cloud is based on open standards and open source Cloud Management Frameworks and offers to its users IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities and interfaces tuned towards the needs of users in research and education. The federation enables scientific data, workloads, simulations and services to span across multiple administrative locations, allowing researchers and educators to access and exploit the distributed resources as an integrated system. The EGI Federated Cloud collaboration established a user support model and a training infrastructure to raise visibility of this service within European scientific communities with the overarching goal to increase adoption and, ultimately increase the usage of e-infrastructures for the benefit of the whole European Research Area. The paper describes this scalable user support and training infrastructure models. The training infrastructure is built on top of the production sites to reduce costs and increase its sustainability. Appropriate design solutions were implemented to reduce the security risks due to the cohabitation of production and training resources on the same sites. The EGI Federated Cloud educational program foresees different kind of training events from basic tutorials to spread the knowledge of this new infrastructure to events devoted to specific scientific disciplines teaching how to use tools already integrated in the infrastructure with the assistance of experts identified in the EGI community. The main success metric of this educational program is the number of researchers willing to try the Federated Cloud, which are steered into the EGI world by the EGI Federated Cloud Support Team through a formal process that brings them from the initial tests to fully exploit the production resources. © 2015 IEEE.

Under a Creative Commons license.-- Trabajo presentado a: 1st International Conference on Cloud Forward: From Distributed to Complete Computing., The EGI Federated Cloud is a standards-based open cloud system that offers a scalable and flexible e-infrastructure to the European research community, and extends the EGI computational offer beyond the traditional High Throughput Computing of the grid plat- form with new models like long-lived services and on demand computation. The EGI Cloud technology enables the federation of institutional clouds to run scientists workloads, simulations and services spanned across multiple administrative locations, allowing the users to access and exploit its resources as a unique system. The architecture of the federation was defined after a two year period of development based on a set of user stories describing operations on a cloud infrascturues and was officially launched in May 2014. Since then the EGI Federated Cloud operates as a federation of heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service type clouds with every participating provider implementing the same set of interfaces towards users and system administrators. Enforcing cloud technology agnosticism and of supporting service mobility by means of open standards has also allowed for the inclusion of commercial cloud providers into an infrastructure previously supported only by academic institutions. This contributes to a wider goal of the funders to create economic and social impact from supported research activities. This paper details the state of the art, the design and development processes, and the organisational effort that have lead to the creation and deployment of the EGI Cloud Platform., The authors acknowledge the support of the EGI-Engage project [RI-654142] and the use of resources provided by the European Grid Infrastructure.

Chipster is an easy to use data analysis platform for bioinformatics. It provides an uniform graphical interface for over 360 commonly used bioinformatics tools including several R/Bioconductor-based tools and standalone programs (i.e. BWA, TopHat). Chipster is based on a client-server system where the user runs locally a Chipster-client that submits analysis tasks to a Chipster server. Even though Chipster is an open source tool, there is no public Chipster server that would be open for everybody. Due to that, a researcher needs to have an access to some of the existing Chipster servers to be able to use this platform. Alternatively, a researcher can set up his own Chipster server. In this paper, we describe how a Chipster server can be launched EGI Federated Could environment, that provides resources for all European researchers. With the instructions provided here, any European researcher can launch and manage his own Chipster server, suited for needs of a small research group or a bioinformatics course. The setup described here is based on a collaboration of several European instances. Chipster is developed by CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. in Finland. European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has fitted Chipster to cloud environment and provides the cloud computing resources. Finally, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory hosts the CVMFS server that provides the scientific tools and data sets for the Chipster servers running in EGI federated cloud.

Interoperability between the grid middlewares gLite, used in European grid infrastructure EGEE, and GOS, used in the Chinese grid infrastructure CNGRID infrastructure, is one of the main activities of the EUChinaGRID project. The EUChinaGRID project is an initiative, funded by the European Commission, to extend the European GRID infrastructure for e-Science to China. The first aim of EUChinaGRID is to facilitate scientific data transfer and processing in a first sample of scientific communities that have already strong collaborations between Europe and China. The interoperability between gLite and GOS middlewares and, then, the interconnection between EGEE and CNGRID infrastructures, is fundamental to achieve this goal. This paper presents the interoperability solution adopted by the EUChinaGRID project, including job submission, data transfer, and information services. The implementation of a gateway for achieving interoperability is discussed and preliminary results are presented.

This paper describes the EGI ‘Applications on Demand service’, a new offering from EGI specifically for individual researchers, small research teams and early phase research infrastructures to support them in scientific data analysis. The described service is available through the EGI Marketplace and, through a lightweight registration and user identity vetting process, allows user-friendly access to a growing number of scientific applications, tools and application hosting frameworks (science gateways; Virtual Research Environments; portal) that are configured to use a dedicated pool of cloud computing and High Throughput Compute clusters donated by members of the EGI federation. The service operates as an open and extensible ‘hub’ for providers and user support teams who wish to federate and share applications and services with individual researchers or small, fragmented communities — typically called ‘the long tail of science’. At the time of writing the service is under integration into the European Open Science Cloud through the EOSC-hub H2020 project.