The infrastructure school of thought “regards Open Science as a technological challenge” and one of its enablers is distributed computing, i.e. using the computing power of many peers (from large provider organisations to single individuals) for research. Distributed computing allows scientists to realize research almost independently from the (their) individual computing resources. It is thereby an opportunity to untie a researcher from locally available resources by providing a highly efficient computer network. Considering the steadily increasing importance of Big Data, scientific computing is becoming more and more an essential research infrastructure.
The Sci-GaIA project consortium strongly promotes the uptake of distributed computing paradigms, such as Grid and Cloud Computing. Sci-GaIA is indeed one of the supporters of the Africa & Arabia Regional Operation Centre (AAROC) and tries to identify new sites, both in Europe and Africa, that could join the EGI Federated Cloud.
The EGI Federated Cloud is a large inter-continental standard-based cloud infrastructure for research that supports a large variety of scientific applications.
The Sci-GaIA project consortium fosters and supports the creation of an African research cloud and having sites interoperable with the EGI FedCloud would open a plethora of possibilities for collaboration. Furthermore, the Africa Grid Science Gateway is already able to submit jobs to EGI FedCloud sites and/or to sites interoperable with it.
The entry point to configure a cloud site to be compliant with the EGI FedCloud middleware stack is this one.
EGI FedCloud supports 3 open cloud middleware. It means that you can base your cloud site installation on one of the following open cloud software:
Inside Sci-GaIA there is a very good know-how regarding OpenStack so we suggest system administrators interested in being supported to make that choice.
If you want to start the installation of a cloud site interoperable with the EGI FedCloud, or you already have a cloud site and want to install the EGI FedCloud middleware, feel free to contact [email protected].
The Sci-GaIA project consortium is also very committed to make the deployment of scientific applications on distributed computing infrastructures (both Grids and Clouds) as easy as possible. On this purpose, the application integration and delivery service has been created, as part of the Continuous Delivery of Research Applications in a Distributed Environment (CODE-RADE) project. (see these links: one and two). Applications are currently delivered via CVMFS, but can also be delivered via Docker.