Introduction¶

HNSciCloud¶

Ten of Europe’s leading public research organisations launched the Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) to establish a European cloud platform that will support the high-performance, data-intensive scientific use-cases of this “Buyers Group” and of the research sector at large.

This PCP calls for the design and implementation of an innovative Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions for compute, storage, network connectivity, Federated Identity Management, and Service Payment Models, to augment and to enhance the science community’s existing systems.

The RHEA Group consortium’s HNSciCloud design builds on a solid foundation of engineering expertise, existing open source software and commercial services:

RHEA System Engineering & Cyber Security expertise
SixSq’s Nuvla, a SlipStream-based hybrid-cloud management service
Cyfronet’s OneData for Data Management
Exoscale IaaS Cloud Service (CloudStack)

The R&D innovations will be incorporated into these services as part of our commercial offerings, with minimum intrusion into the buyers’ infrastructure, including:

Peta-scale data management solution, portable to any cloud
Flexible container management
Authentication with users’ home credentials

The Pilot (Phase 3) exercises the Consortium’s platform at a larger scale and allows for continued evolution of the platform to meet the needs of scientific computing.

Functional Overview¶

The cloud platform coming from the design phase provides cost-effective access to large-scale compute and storage resources. The solution brings together two commercial services, an authentication infrastructure that supports federated identities, and a data management infrastructure that can handle the large data sets of the Buyers Group.

Authentication (KeyCloak): Federates external identity providers, allowing users to use their “home” credentials to access the platform.
Orchestration (Nuvla): Allows users to manage the full lifecycle of cloud applications with a high degree of automation.
Data Management (Onedata): Allows users to access and to manage large datasets hosted in hybrid cloud infrastructures and/or at a Buyers Group organization with minimum intrusion.
Networking (peering with GÉANT): Allows access to all the platform services from anywhere with enhanced access from sites connected to GÉANT.
Cloud Resources (Exoscale): IaaS and storage services accessible from the hybrid cloud platform.
Dashboard (Exoscale, Nuvla): Provides an overview of users’ current activities.

All the components are based on open source software released under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows liberal academic and commercial reuse.

The integration of these key components was demonstrated during the prototype phase. The pilot phase concentrates on validating the platform at scale.

Actors¶

The primary users of the hybrid cloud platform will be researchers who want to analyze large datasets. However, there are many other actors involved to make the platform useful. To be as exact as possible when describing interactions with the platform, we have identified the full set of actors:

Researcher: A person from a Buyers Group organization who analyzes scientific data by deploying instances of cloud applications (defined by Application Developers) for himself.
Application Operator: A person from a Buyers Group organization who deploys and manages instances of cloud applications (defined by Application Developers) for others.
Data Service Operator: A person from a Buyers Group organization or the Consortium who is responsible for deploying and maintaining the data services specific to an organization, project, or experiment.
Application Developer: A person from a Buyers Group organization, Consortium or other organization who develops generalized software or services for use by others that use the platform’s services, including data sets maintained by a Buyers Group organization. Defines (scalable) applications on the platform that can be deployed by a Researcher or Application Operator.
Data Coordinator: A person from a Buyers Group organization who is responsible for managing the data (publishing, replicating, validating, archiving, etc.) for a specific organization, project, or experiment.
Account Coordinator: A person from a Buyers Group organization who is responsible for managing the accounts (including credentials and quotas), monitoring resource utilization, and tracking costs.
Platform User or User: A Researcher, Application Operator, Data Service Operator, Application Developer, Data Coordinator, Account Coordinator.
Broker Service Provider: The organization that provides the cloud application management and brokering services for the platform, i.e. Nuvla.
Service Provider: A “broker service provider” or “IaaS service provider”.
Consortium: The organizations that together provide the hybrid cloud platform for HNSciCloud.

Scope and Coverage¶

This documentation covers the essentials for learning about and getting started with the HNSciCloud hybrid cloud platform from the RHEA collaboration. It contains only information specific to the platform as a whole. Documentation for the individual services that comprise the platform are available elsewhere and may need to be consulted for anything other than simple use cases. Links to that documentation are provided in the Platform Services section.