REPORT: Updated ELIXIR Technical Services Roadmap

This version of the ELIXIR Technical Services Roadmap (ELIXIR-EXCELERATE deliverable D4.2) has been written at the end of PY2 of the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE project (August 2017) and represents an update to the previous version that was established in August 2016 ( Deliverable D4.1 ). It will be updated again in Summer 2018 following the 3rd Annual meeting of the ELIXIR Compute Platform (ECP). The ELIXIR Technical Services Roadmap is a living document that provides advice as to the current and future implementation activities, and is subject to change between versions that is publicly accessible and commentable. 

This version contains information relating to the technical work undertaken primarily within the ELIXIR Compute Platform during PY2, an assessment of the Platform’s capability that was defined through a number of Technical Use Cases (TUCs), and an assessment of the ability of the ELIXIR Compute Platform (through these TUCs) to support user-driven use cases. Overall, the ELIXIR Compute Platform will need to support these TUCs directly through services hosted by the ELIXIR Nodes or indirectly in partnership with European e-Infrastructure providers. These integrated services - the ELIXIR Compute Platform - will be available to bioinformatics experts for use to analyse globally significant data resources.

Progress in PY2 has been extensive with a range of services now becoming available for end-users to consider adopting. The ELIXIR AAI allows a user to create 1 an ELIXIR identity based on a pre-existing identity (e.g. Google, ORCID or the researcher’s home university as an attribute and an identity provider) and for that individual to be enrolled into the ELIXIR Virtual Organisation, and potentially into groups within this Virtual Organisation (using Perun2). This organisational information has then been exposed through the ELIXIR Proxy IdP to identified relying parties to use this information for authentication and authorisation decisions. These include the ELIXIR Intranet, other ELIXIR services, the EGI AAI Gateway to access EGI services. The expansion of the relying service provider network using the ELIXIR identity continues with commercial cloud service providers within the Helix Nebula Science Cloud project, and integration with EUDAT’s B2ACCESS service which would allow access to EUDAT services.

Moving files (i.e. data) between sites is a key capability for the ECP. GridFTP servers have been deployed and integrated with the ELIXIR AAI and a ‘heartbeat’ service makes regular file transfers between 9 GridFTP services to provide a record of reliability and network performance. The Reference Data Set Distribution Service that is being developed in collaboration with the EUDAT2020 project will be introduced into the ECP in PY3 with the support of an ELIXIR Implementation Study.

Work within the ECP to integrate the cloud resources affiliated to the ELIXIR Nodes continues. The EGI Federated Cloud model continues to be evaluated by the ECP, especially within the context of the emerging European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, where it may be used as the federation model. The ECP is engaging with EOSC through an ELIXIR Competency Centre that will be funded as part of the EOSC-Hub project which builds upon the work that has been undertaken in the EGI-Engage project. Using the EGI services to monitor ELIXIR services and record ELIXIR usage has been delayed while the impact of adopting the EGI model is fully assessed.

Technical discussions with the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE Use Cases (the four scientific use cases and the training activities) continue as the effort undertaken with Marine Metagenomics in PY1 is consolidated, and the focus in PY2 on Human Data starts to yield results. The PY2 activity started with a joint workshop between WP4 and WP9(September 2017, EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK) to identify how the key issues (i.e. step-up authentication, secure data transport and secure cloud compute) could be achieved during PY2. Results will be presented via a webinar in Autumn 2017.

As the midpoint of the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE project is reached, the basic infrastructure of the ECP has been defined and the work needed to see how these components can be integrated, optimised and sustained to support European life-science research has begun.