Flexible And Secure Access To Computing Clusters

The investigation presented in this paper was prompted by the need to provide a manageablesolution for secure access to computing clusters with a federated authentication framework.This requirement is especially important for scientists who need direct access to computingnodes in order to run their applications (e.g. chemical or medical simulations) with proprietary,open-source or custom-developed software packages. Our existing software, whichenables non-Web clients to use Shibboleth-secured services, has been extended to providedirect SSH access to cluster nodes using the Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules mechanism.This allows Shibboleth users to run the required software on clusters. Validationand performance comparison with existing SSH authentication mechanisms confirm that thepresented tools satisfy the stated requirements

Towards Exascale Computing Architecture and Its Prototype: Services and Infrastructure

This paper presents the design and implementation of a scalable compute platform for processing large data sets in the scope of the EU H2020 project PROCESS. We are presenting requirements of the platform, related works, infrastructure with focus on the compute components and finally results of our work

PROCESS Data Infrastructure and Data Services

Due to energy limitation and high operational costs, it is likely that exascale computing will not be achieved by one or two datacentres but will require many more. A simple calculation, which aggregates the computation power of the 2017 Top500 supercomputers, can only reach 418 petaflops. Companies like Rescale, which claims 1.4 exaflops of peak computing power, describes its infrastructure as composed of 8 million servers spread across 30 datacentres. Any proposed solution to address exascale computing challenges has to take into consideration these facts and by design should aim to support the use of geographically distributed and likely independent datacentres. It should also consider, whenever possible, the co-allocation of the storage with the computation as it would take 3 years to transfer 1 exabyte on a dedicated 100 Gb Ethernet connection. This means we have to be smart about managing data more and more geographically dispersed and spread across different administrative domains. As the natural settings of the PROCESS project is to operate within the European Research Infrastructure and serve the European research communities facing exascale challenges, it is important that PROCESS architecture and solutions are well positioned within the European computing and data management landscape namely PRACE, EGI, and EUDAT. In this paper we propose a scalable and programmable data infrastructure that is easy to deploy and can be tuned to support various data-intensive scientific applications

Flexible and secure access to computing clusters Wygodny i bezpieczny dostęp do klastrów obliczeniowych /

Tyt. z nagłówka.References. p. 34-36.Dostępny również w formie drukowanej.STRESZCZENIE: Badania opisane w tej publikacji zostały przeprowadzone w celu zapewnienia wygodnego sposobu zabezpieczenia dostępu do klastrów obliczeniowych za pomocą federacyjnego mechanizmu uwierzytelniającego. Wymóg ten jest szczególnie istotny w odniesieniu do naukowców wykorzystujących zarówno otwarte oprogramowanie, jak i komercyjne oraz własne pakiety (np. chemiczne lub medyczne), uruchamiane bezpośrednio na węzłach obliczeniowych. Nasze poprzednie rozwiązanie, umożliwiające aplikacjom nie-webowym używanie usług zabezpieczonych mechanizmem Shibboleth zostało rozbudowane tak, aby zapewnić bezpośredni dostęp poprzez protokół SSH do węzłów klastrów, za pomocą mechanizmu "Pluggable Authentication Modules" Linuksa. Umożliwiło to użytkownikom shibbolethowym uruchamianie niezbędnego oprogramowania zainstalowanego na klastrach. Proces walidacji oraz porównanie wydajności z istniejącymi mechanizmami uwierzytelnienia dostępnymi dla protokołu SSH wykazał, że opisywane narzędzia spełniają postawione przed nimi wymagania. SŁOWA KLUCZOWE: klastry, bezpieczeństwo, mechanizm jednokrotnego uwierzytelnienia, federacje, moduły PAM, SSH, Shibboleth, SAML ABSTRACT: The investigation presented in this paper was prompted by the need to provide a manageable solution for secure access to computing clusters with a federated authentication framework. This requirement is especially important for scientists who need direct access to computing nodes in order to run their applications (e.g. chemical or medical simulations) with proprietary, open-source or custom-developed software packages. Our existing software, which enables non-Web clients to use Shibboleth-secured services, has been extended to provide direct SSH access to cluster nodes using the Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules mechanism. This allows Shibboleth users to run the required software on clusters. Validation and performance comparison with existing SSH authentication mechanisms confirm that the presented tools satisfy the stated requirements. KEYWORDS: clusters, security, single sign-on, federations, PAM modules, SSH, Shibboleth, SAML

Component Approach to Computational Applications on Clouds

AbstractRunning computational science applications on the emerging cloud infrastructures requires appropriate programming models and tools. In this paper we investigate the applicability of the component model to developing such applications. The component model we propose takes advantages of the features of the IaaS infrastructure and offers a high-level application composition API. We describe experiments on a scientific application from the bioinformatics domain, using a hybrid cloud infrastructure which consists of a private cloud running Eucalyptus and the Amazon EC2 public cloud. The measured performance of virtual machine startup time and virtualization overhead indicate promising prospects for exploiting such infrastructures along with the proposed component-based approach

The Collage Authoring Environment: From Proof-of-Concept Prototype to Pilot Service

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to present the pilot service of the Collage Authoring Environment enabling executable scientific publications that is based on the GridSpace2 distributed computing platform and integrated with the online publisher platform ScienceDirect, provided under the auspices of Elsevier. The scope of this paper includes the work carried out when adapting Collage from a proof-of-concept prototype that was awarded the Grand Prize in the Elsevier Executable Paper Grand Challenge into a robust pilot service deployment supporting real-life use cases