Virtual Research Environment for Value-Added Services in National and Regional NRENs: Case Studies

Case studies are presented for the role of national and regional NRENs beyond connectivity, encompassing computing (grid, cloud and High-Performance computing) services and big data management services. The case studies are the recently started VI-SEEM and MAGIC projects. The VI-SEEM project, started in October 2015, unifies the existing e-Infrastructures in South-East Europe (SEE) and the Eastern Mediterranean (EM), including Grid, cloud, and High-Performance Computing resources. It does so in order to better utilise synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to be provided to the scientific user communities in this large region. The overall objective is to provide a user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for scientific communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEE and EM regions; by linking networking, computing, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, software and tools. The Virtual Research Environment provides the scientists and researchers with the support in the full lifecycle of scientific research: accessing relevant data necessary for their research, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing and integrating new knowledge and data - which is stored and shared within the same VRE. The project is founded on the serviceoriented data-driven approach, where a specific set of activities deals not just with simple eInfrastructure data storage (live, dropbox-like), but includes the support for the full data lifecycle for the 3 target communities. The value-added computing services provided to the researchers include grid and cloud computing, as well as large-scale High-Performance Computing platforms, with a set of management tools provided for the unified management of computing resources. All project services will be provided through a service catalogue. Similarly the MAGIC project, started in May 2015, aims to adopt a service-oriented approach to advertising specifically the NREN cloud services, and this approach will be implemented through a compatible service catalogue, based on the GEANT cloud catalogue: thus the envisaged MAGIC cloud catalogue is also briefly discussed.

本文呈现了国家和区域研究与教育网络（NRENs）在连通性之外的角色案例研究，涵盖计算服务（网格、云及高性能计算）与大数据管理服务。案例研究聚焦于近期启动的VI-SEEM与MAGIC项目。VI-SEEM项目于2015年10月启动，旨在整合东南欧（SEE）与东地中海（EM）地区现有的电子基础设施（e-Infrastructures），包括网格、云及高性能计算资源。此举旨在更好地发挥协同效应，通过统一的虚拟研究环境（VRE）向该广阔区域的科研用户群体提供更优质的服务。该项目的总体目标是为东南欧与东地中海地区的气候学、生命科学及文化遗产领域科研群体提供一个易用的集成电子基础设施平台；具体方式为整合网络、计算、数据及可视化资源，以及相关服务、软件与工具。虚拟研究环境为科研人员提供科研全生命周期的支持：获取研究所需的相关数据，利用提供的代码与工具在大规模电子基础设施上开展新实验与模拟，以及生成并整合新知识与数据——这些知识与数据将存储并共享于同一虚拟研究环境内。该项目基于面向服务的数据驱动方法，其一系列特定活动不仅涉及简单的电子基础设施数据存储（实时、类Dropbox式），还包括为三大目标群体提供全数据生命周期支持。为科研人员提供的增值计算服务包括网格计算、云计算及大规模高性能计算平台，并配备一套管理工具以实现计算资源的统一管理。所有项目服务将通过服务目录提供。同样，2015年5月启动的MAGIC项目旨在采用面向服务的方法专门推广NREN云服务，该方法将通过基于GEANT云目录的兼容服务目录实现：因此文中亦简要讨论了拟议的MAGIC云目录。