DCIs and Workflows
C. Vuerli
Contributions by G. Sipos, K. Varga, P. Kacsuk
Definitions• Distributed computing: distributed systems to solve
computational problems– Computer clusters: sets of loosely connected or tightly
connected computers that work together so that in many respects they can be viewed as a single system
– Grids: distributed, highly loosely coupled, heterogeneous and geographically dispersed systems with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files
– HPC systems: enable users to run a single instance of parallel software over many processors.
– Cloud computing: applications and services offered over the Internet from data centers all over the world, which collectively are referred to as the “clouds”. The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization which abstracts the physical infrastructure – which is the most rigid component – and makes it available as a soft component, easy to use and manage.
DCI Projects• EDGI (European Desktop Grid Initiative)
– http://edgi-project.eu/• EGI – InSPIRE (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European
Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe)– http://www.egi.eu/projects/egi-inspire/
• EMI (European Middleware Initiative)– http://www.eu-emi.eu/
• IGE (Initiative for Globus in Europe)– http://www.ige-project.eu/
• StratusLab (Enhancing Grid Infrastructures with Virtualization and Cloud Technologies)– http://www.stratuslab.eu/
• VENUS-C (Virtual multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud Infrastructures)– http://www.venus-c.eu/
EGI• European
– Over 35 countries• Grid
– Secure sharing• Infrastructure
– Computers– Data– Instruments– …. and beyond!!
EGI Resource Infrastructure Providers:National Grid Initiatives
(Snapshot: April 2012)
EGI, EGI.eu, EGI-InSPIRE• EGI – an open collaboration
– To support the digital European Research Area through a pan-European research infrastructure based on services federated from the NGIs
• EGI.eu – a Dutch foundation owned by the NGIs– To coordinate the work of EGI (operations, technology,
user support, policy, community & communications, administration)
– Sustainable small coordinating organisation• EGI-InSPIRE – an FP7 project
– Supports EGI.eu and EGI to transition to sustainable operational model
EGI’s Strategic Focus• Community & Coordination
– Community building through events. • Next event: EGI Technical Forum, Madrid, Sept. 2013• http://tf2013.egi.eu/
– Community networking, marketing and outreach through the NGIs
• Operational Infrastructure– Operate a European wide infrastructure– Offer its use to other research infrastructures– Build a federated cloud environment
• Virtual Research Environments– Enable 3rd party integration & operation of VREs
Guiding Principles• Be a neutral resource provider
– Any application, any domain, any technology– A platform for domain specific innovation & use– Integration of any compliant resource
• End-user needs and technologies change– Allow communities to deploy their own services– Give communities the power to meet their own
needs
Virtual Organizations• VOs – Virtual Organizations
– Groups of researchers with similar scientific interests and requirements, who are able to work collaboratively with other members and/or share resources (e.g. data, software, expertise, CPU, storage space), regardless of geographical location.
• Researchers must join a VO in order to use grid computing resources provided by EGI.
• Each virtual organization manages its own membership list, according to the VO’s requirements and goals.
• EGI provides support, services and tools to allow VOs to make the most of their resources
Virtual Reseach Communities• VRCs – Virtual Research Communities
– Self-organized research communities which give individuals within their community a clear mandate to represent the interests of their research field within the EGI ecosystem.
– They can include one or more VOs and act as the main communication channel between the researchers they represent and EGI
• EGI establishes partnerships with individual VRCs through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
• VRCs can access the computing resources and data storage provided by the EGI community through open source software solutions. VRC members can store, process and index large datasets and can interact with partners using the secured services of EGI’s production infrastructure
Virtual Reseach Environments• VREs – Virtual Research Environments
– A combination of environments that provide the researcher with easy access to the services deployed in EGI to enable their data analysis activities.
– Initially, the VRE consisted of a command line interface for the researcher to access the services deployed across the infrastructure.
– Over the years, higher-level generic tools and domain specific environments have been developed by many research communities to simplify the data analysis process.
SSO Authentication• SSO – Single Sign On
– A session/user authentication process that permits a user to present his/her credentials to access multiple applications and resources.
– The process authenticates the user for all the applications they have been given rights to and eliminates further prompts when users switch from one application to another during a particular session.
SSO Authentication Concepts
• Authentication– The process of determining whether someone or
something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be on the basis of provided credentials.
– Authentication is commonly done through the use of username/password pairs.
– The use of digital certificates issued and verified by a Certificate Authority (CA) as part of a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is considered likely to become the standard way to perform authentication on the Internet.
SSO Authentication Concepts
• IdP – Identity Provider– Provides Single Sign-On services. In addition
to a simple yes/no response to an authentication request, the Identity Provider can provide a rich set of user-related data to the Service Provider
• IdF – Identity Federation– Enables IdPs to exchange identity information
securely across domains, providing browser-based SSO
EGI Platforms
Community Platform
EGI resources (cores & storage)
VMVM
VMEGI Core
InfrastructurePlatform
EGI Cloud Infrastructure
Platform
Virtual Research Communities
EG
I Co
llabo
ration
platfo
rm
Community Platform
(gLite Grid)
Grid services
Core Infrastructure Platform Services
• Service monitoring• Service usage accounting• Security (Authentication, Authorization)• Staged rollout of services• ...
Unified Middleware Distribution• External technology providers: EMI (ARC, gLite, UNICORE, dCACHE),
IGE (Globus), EDGI (desktop grids), SAGA, …• UMD capabilities captured in UMD roadmap• Staged Rollout: updates of the supported middleware are first released
to and tested by Early Adopter sites before being made available to all sites through the production repositories.
Operations
Provisioning Infrastructure
StagedRollout
CriteriaVerification
ProductionCriteria
Definition
External Technology Providers
Deployed Software
Helpdesk unit
Requirements
Software
Core infrastructure platform
User communities of the UMD
User
User
User
User User
User
User
VO VO VO
Virtual Research
Community
Virtual Research
Community
Mem
bers
Virtual
Org
anisationsR
esearch com
mun
ities
Largest user communities:
• High Energy Physics• Astronomy & Astrophysics• Life Sciences• Earth Sciences• Computational Chemistry• Fusion• …
~25.000 users in ~200 Registered VOshttp://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo
UMD use case 1:workload management with gLite
Computing service Storage Service
Site X of YOUR VO
Information System
Submit job
query
Retrieve output
Create job definitionSubmit job(batch executable + small inputs)Broker service
User environment
publishstate
VO Management Service (VOMS)
createProxy (~login)
process
Retrieve status&
(small) output files
Logging and bookkeeping service
Job status
Job status Loggin
g
Read/write files
20
Core in
frast
ruct
ure p
latfo
rm
Core in
frast
ruct
ure p
latfo
rm
UMD use case 2:data management with gLite
Computing service Storage service
Site X of YOUR VO
Information System
Query
Command line or Portal
publishstate
VO Management Service (VOMS)
createproxy
Upload fileDownload file
File Catalog and/orMetadata catalog
Register file Lookup file File
content
Filereferences 21
Cloud infrastructure platform
Hardware
OS
Gridmiddleware
Scientific portal
Hypervisor
Community specific, grid enabled services
OS OS
Scientific portal
Scientific portal
Hardware
OS
Grid middleware
Scientific portals(SaaS environments)
Community specific, grid
enabled services
OS OS
Custom services
OS OS
• Structural biology – We-NMR project: Gromacs training environments
• Ecology – BioVel project: Remote hosting of OpenModeller service
• Linguistics – CLARIN project: Scalable ‘British National Corpus’ service (BNCWeb)
• Software development – SCI-BUS project: Simulated environments for portal testing
• Space science – ASTRA-GAIA project: Data integration with scalable workflows
Some of the cloud infrastructure pilot use cases
Join as pilot use case, or as provider of high level service on top of the EGI Cloud!
What does the EGI.eu User Community Support Team do?
European level coordination and support to enable research communities to evolve into routine EGI users
– Knowing and driving technical activities(Virtual Team projects)
– Knowing and responding to technical needs• Support the development and deployment of innovative,
collaborative VREs– Integrating applications with EGI platforms– Training and consultancy– Facilitate the reuse of services across communities– Provide services for the EGI Collaboration Platform
• Applications Database, Training Marketplace, Requirements tracker, CRM
Services of the Collaborative platform 1: Applications Database
Benefits:• Gives recognition to reusable
scientific applications,application developer tools, portals, workflow systems, etc.
• Gives recognition to application developers (people profiles)
• Access through web page AND web gadget
• Community features such as commenting, rating, tag-based groupings
http://appdb.egi.eu
Benefits:• Register & share
• training events, expertise, services, materials, resources, online courses, university courses
• Browse and search items
• Community features such as commenting, rating
• Access through web page and web gadget
http://training.egi.eu
Services of the Collaborative platform 2:
Training Marketplace
Services of the Collaborative platform 3: Customer Management System (CRM)
• To capture leads and needs of scientific communities• EGI CRM – main capabilities (based on vTiger CRM):
– Register projects/communities– Register personal leads– Register details about ‘Potential for EGI use’ and
‘Interest in e-infrastructures’
• Available to NGI International Liaisons and their collaborator at http://crm.egi.eu
Services of the Collaborative platform 4: Requirements tracker
Technology Coordination
Board
EGIRequirements
TrackerNGIs
VRCs
VOs
User Community
Support Team of EGI.eu
Technology providersprojects
events
Input channels for community
requirements
EGI Helpdesk
User Community
Board
Operations Management
Board
Resource centres
Structured scientific
communities
NGIs&
projects http://go.egi.eu/requirements
EGI Web Gadgets: Embed EGI services into Websites!
• The simplest way to reuse EGI services: embed EGI gadgets into your website
• Benefits– Customisability– Reusability– Compatibility
• Existing gadgets:– Application Database– Training Marketplace– Requirement Tracker– Grid Relational Catalogue
• Use and develop gadgets & share them through EGI:
www.egi.eu/user-support/gadgets
EGI Virtual Team projects• NGI International Liaisons
– Single point of contact in NGIs for various activities, including Technical Outreach
• Virtual Team projects: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Virtual_Team_Projects – Short (1-6 month) project with multiple NGIs involved– Setup through NILs– Help EGI enlarge its user base
• Active VT projects with UCST’s involvement:– Science Gateway Primer (Final editing of the Primer document)– NGI-ELIXIR ESFRI collaboration (Since October)– Technology study for CTA ESFRI (Since January)– Towards a Chemistry, Molecular & Materials Science and Technology
Virtual Research Community (In setup)
Wokflows
• Progression of steps (tasks, events, interactions) that– comprise a work process– involve two or more persons– create or add value to the organization's activities.
• Sequential workflow– each step is dependent on occurrence of the
previous step• Parallel workflow
– two or more steps can occur concurrently
Workflow Management Systems
• A Workflow Management System (WMS) is a piece of software that provides an infrastructure to setup, execute, and monitor scientific workflows– An important function of an WMS during the workflow
execution, or enactment, is the coordination of operation of individual components that constitute the workflow; this process is also often referred to as orchestration
– Scientific workflows and WMSs have emerged to provide an easy-to-use way of specifying the tasks that have to be performed during a specific in silico experiment. The need to combine several tools into a single research analysis still holds, but technical details of workflow execution are now delegated to Workflow Management Systems.
Workflow Editor The skeleton of a workflow is represented by a Graph.Jobs denote the activities, which envelop insulated computations Channels are directed edges of a graph, directed from the output ports towards the input ports.
Workflow Editor
We can rely on a local and a public workflow repository .
• Graph creation• Concrete workflow creation• Concrete workflow configuration
– Job types and corresponding properties
– Port properties
• Certificate handling• Submission
– Log examination
• Submitted instance management• Result evaluation• Repository handling (export/import)
Workflow services
CTA GatewayWorkflows instances
CTA GatewayWorkflows instances
SHIWA MotivationIsolation by technology
– Many different workflow systems exists We expect no change– Technological choice isolates users and user communities– Technological choice determines the adopted DCI/middleware
(WS, gLite, Globus, etc.)
Benefits of the SSP – SHIWA Simulation Platform– Share your own workflow, re-use workflows of others– Create and execute ‘meta-workflows’: built from smaller workflows
that use different workflow languages/technologies– Combine workflows and DCIs
SHIWA ER-flow– SHIWA: FP7 R&D project. Created the SHIWA Simulation Platform (2010-2012)– ER-flow: FP7 support action project. Disseminates the SHIWA technology (2012-
2014).
Generic use-cases
DCI #1DCI #2
CE SECE SE
DCI – distributed computing infrastructure; CE/SE – computing/storage element
Generic use-cases
DCI #1DCI #2
CE SECE SE
combine WFs
find and re-use
with own data
on own CE?
DCI – distributed computing infrastructure; CE/SE – computing/storage element
SHIWA Simulation Platform
Access to various workflow engines and DCIs where these WF applications can be run
CloudsLocal clusters
Supercomputers
Desktop grids(BOINC, Condor, etc.)
Cluster grids(EGI, OSG, …)
Supercomputer grids
(PRACE, XSEDE)
Grid systems
Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs)
What does the developer of a (meta)workflow need?
SHIWA Repository
Access to a large set of ready-to-run scientific workflow applications
SHIWA Portal
A portal/desktop to integrate, parameterize and run these applications
Web services
+ Workflow engines
SHIWA Repository
Facilitates publishing and sharing workflows
Supports:• Abstract workflows with
multiple implementations of over 10 workflow systems
• Concrete workflows with execution specific data
Available:• From the SHIWA Portalhttp://ssp.shiwa-workflow.eu• Standalone interface:http://repo.shiwa-workflow.eu
Example: Create meta-workflow from Moteur and WS-PGRADE workflows
SHIWA Repository
SHIWA portal
DCI 1gLite
DCI 2Cloud
DCI nARC
Access to Moteur WF
Connected workflow engines
Moteur WF engine
Remarks• Scientific workflow landscape is fragmented
– Many workflow system with specialised & small user base
– Many workflows with specialised & small user base
• SHIWA Simulation Platform enables integration– Within disciplines– Across disciplines
• ER-flow project provides user support– Consultancy & Workshops– User forum– Open for new communities