A data infrastructure reference model with applications: towards realization of a ScienceTube vision with a data replication service

Abstract

The wide variety of scientific user communities work with data since many years and thus have already a wide variety of data infrastructures in production today. The aim of this paper is thus not to create one new general data architecture that would fail to be adopted by each and any individual user community. Instead this contribution aims to design a reference model with abstract entities that is able to federate existing concrete infrastructures under one umbrella. A reference model is an abstract framework for understanding significant entities and relationships between them and thus helps to understand existing data infrastructures when comparing them in terms of functionality, services, and boundary conditions. A derived architecture from such a reference model then can be used to create a federated architecture that builds on the existing infrastructures that could align to a major common vision. This common vision is named as 'ScienceTube' as part of this contribution that determines the high-level goal that the reference model aims to support. This paper will describe how a well-focused use case around data replication and its related activities in the EUDAT project aim to provide a first step towards this vision. Concrete stakeholder requirements arising from scientific end users such as those of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) projects underpin this contribution with clear evidence that the EUDAT activities are bottom-up thus providing real solutions towards the so often only described 'high-level big data challenges'. The followed federated approach taking advantage of community and data centers (with large computational resources) further describes how data replication services enable data-intensive computing of terabytes or even petabytes of data emerging from ESFRI projects.

An Innovative Science Gateway for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

“…On the other hand a number of generic frameworks have been established recently for implementing science gateways, e.g. GENIUS [1], and the outcomes of the EU-DAT EU FP7 project [4]. As a result of these developments, some domain specific gateways based on such technologies have been developed, e.g.…”

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“…1 , MAGIC 2 and VERI-TAS 3 , has in recent years opened the realm of groundbased gamma ray astronomy in the energy range above a few tens of GeV. The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) 4 will explore our Universe in depth in very high energy ( > 10 GeV) gamma-rays and will investigate cosmic non-thermal processes, in close cooperation with observatories operating at other wavelength ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, and those using other messenger particles such as cosmic rays and neutrinos.…”

“…This framework supports operation and maintenance of a generic-purpose science gateway that cat be highly customized and can access HTC infrastructures, data and networking infrastructures and services e.g. grids, desktop grids, clusters, supercomputers, [4] but also academic and commercial clouds.…”

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