Towards interoperable e-Infrastructures

The vast majority of research communities require access to high quality managed infrastructure to conduct their scientific activity. The capability to couple data, compute and network resources together is fundamental to accelerate scientific innovation and advance research frontiers.

To implement this vision and to realize the full potential of available resources offered by the e-infrastructures in Europe, the full interoperability of underlying technologies and practices is necessary. This means, for example, that a user can use the same credentials to access all the e-infrastructure services or that two or more services offered by different infrastructures can be combined according to the specific needs of a community. Such a model brings great advantages to the researchers, since they do not need to spend huge effort to satisfy the various requirements to access those services and can see the whole e-infrastructure services portfolio as a unique set of integrated services.

Nowadays, the e-infrastructure landscape is quite fragmented and presents several limitations from an interoperability point of view. However, first steps have been taken toward the technical interoperability, such as the work being done by GEANT on eduGAIN and the AARC project to harmonise the authentication and authorisation layer in the main European e- and research infrastructures or the collaboration between EGI and EUDAT to integrate the EGI computing services with the EUDAT data management process. In addition, GEANT is developing the capabilities to expose its network-related services as composable components in the e-infrastructures marketplace as well as putting forward inter-eInfrastructure orchestration aspects. 

This session co-organised by EGI, EUDAT and GEANT will present the current status of the technical activities to make these three e-Infrastructures interoperable and so enabling cross-utilization use cases. The preliminary achievements will be showcased with early adopter communities that are already benefiting from this harmonization. User requirements will be collected to drive the technical work in the next months and to update the current roadmap.

The session will start with an introduction to the EGI-EUDAT interoperability collaboration, describing the current status and showcasing the first outcomes with a use case from the EPOS research infrastructure that exploits EGI/EUDAT coupled resources. Then, GEANT will describe its current activity on interoperability. Last talk will present the EUDAT-PRACE collaboraction activity.