PhenoMeNal eInfrastructure Landscape

Overview

The European e-Infrastructure landscape contains several key projects that are either, directly or indirectly, relevant to PhenoMeNal. In addition, commercial public cloud providers also offer e-infrastructure services that are of importance to the scientists. However, there is currently a gap between the researchers that want to analyze data and the current e-infrastructure providers. It is simply a technically too complex process for most scientists to take advantage of the e-infrastructure offerings. PhenoMeNal aims to bridge this gap by providing easily accessible scalable Virtual Research Environments that hide the complexity of e-infrastructure under user-friendly interfaces.

Relevant EU EINFRA projects

• INDIGO Datacloud is developing a platform-as-a-service that can be provisioned over hybrid, private or public, e-infrastructures.

  • There is an opportunity to deploy PhenoMeNal CREs on INDIGO managed clusters. However, currently INDIGO only supports Mesos clusters. PhenoMeNal interacts with INDIGO and has provided feedback on the need for INDIGO to support Kubernetes clusters, which has been placed in the roadmap of INDIGO.
  • PhenoMeNal will evaluate and likely use the OneData component, developed in INDIGO, to support data federation.

• ELIXIR has a goal to bring together Europe’s laboratories and data centres to help coordinate the collection, quality control and storage of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments.

  • PhenoMeNal is working closely with the ELIXIR Compute Platform, which in turn is closely collaborating with e.g. EGI.

• EGI is a federated e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing services for research and innovation.

  • PhenoMeNal was selected as one of the highly prioritized Use Case providers for EGI, highlights the importance of EGI to support containers and container-orchestration
  • PhenoMeNal developers interact with EGI developers, and participate/present at workshops and conferences
  • EGI developers visit PhenoMeNal workshops

See article Deploying PhenoMeNal virtual research environments on the EGI Federated Cloud published in EGI Newsletter, June 2018.

• The Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) Initiative is a partnership between industry, space and science to establish a dynamic ecosystem, benefiting from open cloud services for the seamless integration of science into a business environment.

  • We succeeded in deploying KubeNow in the HNSciCloud Open Telekom Cloud provider, hence KubeNow-based PhenoMeNal CREs can now run in such environment.

• The Glenna2 project aims to provide added value to the Nordic national cloud and data intensive computing initiatives by supporting national cloud initiatives and using such national resources to establish an internationally leading collaboration on data intensive computing in collaboration with user communities.

  • PhenoMeNal was selected as one of Use Case providers for Glenna2, highlights the importance of Glenna2 to support and leverage pooled competency on cloud operations and big data.
  • PhenoMeNal developers participate/present at Glenna2's workshops and conferences under the NeIC umbrella

An extensive updated mapping of (e-)infrastructures relevant to PhenoMeNal is available here.