Collaborations with e-Infrastructures

Task 6.3 is in charge of coordination and link with other E-infrastructures in EDI and EOSC. The aim of this task is to individuate synergies and common strategies with other E-infrastructures and stakeholders. PRACE’s objective is to provide its users with a set of services that covers the entire life cycle of scientific data (from creation to sustainable storage, including computation). It is this pooling of infrastructure-specific services that makes it easy to benefit from quality services throughout Europe. Another aspect of this task is the strengthening of relations with e-Infrastructures, but also the establishment of new relations with other projects. This includes the identification of contact points for better communication between infrastructures, the determination of potential areas of collaboration but also the way these infrastructures will collaborate.

Through this task, PRACE offers its computing services to projects or entities and the services of other E-Infrastructures (such as EOSC and GEANT) and CoEs. It offers technical assistance and coordination via engineers spread throughout Europe in different centres in order to contribute to a fruitful cooperation between them. The counterpart of this assistance is the feedback that makes it possible to improve the service quality. The identification of common scenarios between different pilot projects makes it possible to establish specifications and requirements in order to define the development of new prototype services (task that falls under task 6.2). The aim of this approach is to combine efforts, to develop together viable and usable solutions for the maximum number of collaborators. Therefore, there is the idea of creative cooperation. The implementation of use cases is therefore of crucial importance because they allow us to describe and refine the functional and technical requirements of a service.

The objectives of the sixth implementation of PRACE are to continue our collaboration with GEANT, particularly around identity management, the integration of the AAI services offered by their infrastructure. Integrate new data services around data processing and management, in collaboration with EUDAT and ICEI and the cloud service with EOSC-hub. Finally, to provide PRACE services in link with large-scale instruments.

The PHIDIAS project is a pilot project where we are examining potential synergies with PRACE collaborators. The PHIDIAS project, which aims to develop and implement a set of generic services and tools based on high-performance computing for earth system sciences. The purpose is to exploit large datasets of European public interest provided by Earth satellite observation, and to provide FAIR access to these processed datasets and value-added services through extensive storage capacity and a broadband network in Europe.

A MoU is being written between PRACE, GÉANT, CERN and SKA to establish a collaboration in order to address movement of data and application performance on HPC, including community training and support. The Parties agree to bring the accumulated knowledge of the WLCG together with PRACE and GÉANT infrastructures and to solve the challenge of data intensive science on HPC centres by streamlining data delivery and data access in large scale facilities.

Collaborations

This task closely collaborates with the following projects, initiatives and e-Infrastructures.