Glenna2/Glenna2-Newsletter-Nov-2017

Glenna2 Newsletter, November 2017

Welcome to read the newsletter of the Nordic Glenna2 cloud computing project.

Background:

Glenna2 is the continuation of the Glenna initiative and will be aligned with the efforts and roadmaps of the Nordic national e-infrastructure providers' and other involved organizations.

Glenna2 aims to provide added value to the national cloud and data intensive computing initiatives by:

1. Supporting national cloud initiatives to sustain affordable IaaS cloud resources through financial support, knowledge exchange and pooling competency on cloud operations.

2. Using such national resources to establish an internationally leading collaboration on data intensive computing in collaboration with user communities.

3. Leveraging the pooled competency to take responsibility for assessing future hybrid cloud technology and communicate that to the national initiatives.

4. Supporting use of resources by pooling national cloud application expert support and create a Nordic support channel for cloud and big data. The mandate is to sustain a coordinated training and dissemination effort, creating training material and providing application level support to cloud users in all countries.

The project is organised into four Aims. The focus of Aims 1-3 is largely technological, while Aim 4 focuses on disseminating pooled knowledge down to end-users.

More about the four aims and the Glenna2 project can be found at: https://wiki.neic.no/w/ext/img_auth.php/7/7d/Glenna2_Project_Plan.pdf

News:

NORDNWP

The NORDNWP consortium is in discussions with Nordforsk and NeIC concerning a expanded use case to the Glenna2 project.

NORDNWP is a collaboration between the national weather service's (NWS) in the eight Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Sweden, aiming at a common numerical weather prediction (NWP) production within the framework of the Nordic meteorological cooperation, NORDMET, from 2022. The goal for NORDNWP is to provide the best short-range weather forecast for the Nordic domain and support the Nordic NWS in enhancing safety and securing life and property for the citizens of the Nordic countries. To this end, the world-leading numerical modelling system HARMONIE-AROME is used to assimilate observations and forecast the atmospheric evolution, including high-impact weather events.

The national weather services are approaching a new situation where new private-enterprise players come in from computer science, HPC companies and artificial intelligence research, and challenge the established practices and technical regulations. Both in the US and Asia "private" observational networks and several big computing vendors are branding their big data capabilities for exploiting novel observational networks, e.g. IBM bought the weather company and Panasonic announced global prediction capabilities utilising their TAMDAR aircraft sensor network.

The NWS must constantly identify new areas of investigation and new directions for interdisciplinary and joint research, while providing guidance well beyond NWP and climate monitoring applications. This is achieved through involvement and leveraging of individual non-expert contributions and their contributions in, for instance, expert mathematical tools and computer science. The existing operational NWP value chain structure at the partner NWS enables an efficient transformation of research results into better informed decision making for users of weather information in the Nordics. Academic excellence is thereby tied into the end-user experience and knowledge that is derived from continuous service delivery to a large number of different users and stakeholders.

SNIC Science Cloud - Presentation at KTH

Recent developments in SSC were presented in a talk by Salman Toor at KTH in Stockholm. SSC is one of the primary cloud infrastructures in Nordic research and the service is a OpenStack based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) built on legacy hardware from three SNIC HPC centers SSC aims are:

• Design a national-scale cloud infrastructure for research and academic use

• Provide a platform to develop scalable, agile and vendor agnostic applications

• Offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

• Help community to leverage the cloud environments

Read more about SSC at: https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/File:SSC-AE.pdf

Bioinformatics Use Case

The Kubernetes and Container related efforts in Glenna2 will get a big boost by Ola Spjuths Uppsala based research group and their extended knowledge in cloud technologies.

We are currently discussing where we can best align our efforts and have identified a number of interesting options. Ola’s group is involved in the PhenoMeNal infrastructure (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) which is a comprehensive and standardised e-infrastructure that supports the data processing and analysis pipelines for molecular phenotype data generated by metabolomics applications. The infrastructure is aimed to address the H2020 Societal Challenge in Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing and PhenoMeNal provides services enabling computation and analysis to improve the understanding of the causes and mechanisms underlying health, healthy ageing and diseases.

Potential scenarios are:

1. Start to include in Phenomenal the option to run on OpenStack providers such as SSC and Pouta. 2. User needs to run on sensitive raw data which need to be pre-processed. If two groups work on similar data in different countries compute could move close to the data. 3. Combine datasets in a data federation. Data federation in which users could combine sets. Look at OneData or OwnCloud/NextCLoud 4. Scenario for potentially injecting dataset from a center to e.g. a hospital.

Dissemination

The Glenna project will be described in a chapter about research cloud federations in a book about OpenStack scheduled to be released during the Supercomputing Conference (SC17).

The Glenna project was also referenced at the 13th IEEE eScience Conference in Auckland, New Zealand Oct 2017 as a reference in a talk titled: SNIC Science Cloud (SSC): A National-Scale Cloud Infrastructure for Swedish Academia.

NeIC AHM 2018

For all the members of the Glenna2 team we have the NeIC All Hands Meeting January 29 - February 01, 2018 at Skeikampen, Norway coming up. Please remember to register before the 24th of November 2017 at: https://neicnordic.github.io/ahm18.neic.nordforsk.org/

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About Glenna2:

Glenna2 is a three-year project to continue Nordic collaboration on cloud computing in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The aim of the project is to build on already existing services and infrastructure at the participating centers. The work is supported and directed by the Nordic e-infrastructure providers.

More about the project: https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Glenna2

The name Glenna is an Icelandic name and means "Opening in the clouds"

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The Glenna2 Newsletter is distributed to team members and affiliated parties.

Feel free to contact me for more information!

On behalf of the Glenna2 team,

Dan Still

Glenna2 Project Manager, NeIC

https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Glenna

email: Dan.Still@csc.fi tel: +358 50 381 9037