D6.5: Inventory of Links with e-Infrastructures and CoEs

This deliverable presents the existing and new activities between PRACE and complementary e-infrastructures with the aim to build an integrated Europe wide e-infrastructure for our users. The focus has been on the continuation and further development of the collaboration on security and data management topics.
PRACE has been collaborating on security with other e-infrastructures from its beginning. The collaboration has been extended now to GÉANT and the NREN communities. As a result, a first common workshop was organised in October 2015 under the name of WISE (WISE Information Security for collaborating E-infrastructures). This workshop was attended by representatives from EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, NRENS, PRACE and also included US participation. As a result, several follow up activities have been agreed on. A Steering Committee will coordinate the follow-up activities of the new collaboration, among which is the setup of some working groups for specific topics. PRACE actively participated in the Programme Committee of the workshop and will continue to participate also in the Steering Committee and working groups.
PRACE has a long history of collaboration with EGI and EUDAT for security incident handling and this collaboration will continue and may be extended through the WISE initiative.
For authentication and authorisation services it can be of interest for PRACE to use services provided by the Identity Provider (IdP) federations which exist for educational organisations in several countries and which are also federated in eduGAIN. This task follows from activities in this area, especially those of the AARC project [9] which recently started. Working with external IdPs can enhance the security of the PRACE infrastructure because users do not have to use separate credentials for PRACE access. Also credential misuse may be noticed sooner as more services will rely on the same credentials. Feedback has been provided on the requirements PRACE has for the acceptance of authentication services provided by external IdPs.
Regarding data services, the proposal is to collaborate with EUDAT. The requirements gathering and future pilot identification is done essentially through a call for data pilots included in PRACE and DECI calls. The planning work we have undertaken so far with resources from both projects has primarily focused on defining the multiple aspects of the services and the way to ensure we include them all in the integration design. We have already ongoing activities with two initial pilots and expect further ones to come out of DECI Call 13.
Links with CoEs and with the XSEDE project have been initiated and we expect specific activities to start early 2016.
As a result of the pilots we expect to provide PRACE management with some lessons learned and recommendations to build a sustainable collaboration and by this way fulfil user needs.