PhenoMeNal eInfrastructure Landscape

Overview The European e-Infrastructure landscape contains several key projects that are either, directly or indirectly, relevant to PhenoMeNal. In addition, commercial public cloud providers also offer e-infrastructure services that are of importance to the scientists. However, there is currently a gap between the researchers that want to analyze data and the current e-infrastructure providers. It is simply a technically too complex process for most scientists to take advantage of the e-infrastructure offerings. PhenoMeNal aims to bridge this gap by providing easily accessible scalable Virtual Research Environments that hide the complexity of e-infrastructure under user-friendly interfaces.

Relevant EU EINFRA projects

• INDIGO Datacloud is developing a platform-as-a-service that can be provisioned over hybrid, private or public, e-infrastructures.

  • There is an opportunity to deploy PhenoMeNal CREs on INDIGO managed clusters. However, currently INDIGO only supports Mesos clusters. PhenoMeNal interacts with INDIGO and has provided feedback on the need for INDIGO to support Kubernetes clusters, which has been placed in the roadmap of INDIGO.
  • PhenoMeNal will evaluate and likely use the OneData component, developed in INDIGO, to support data federation.

• ELIXIR has a goal to bring together Europe’s laboratories and data centres to help coordinate the collection, quality control and storage of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments.

  • PhenoMeNal is working closely with the ELIXIR Compute Platform, which in turn is closely collaborating with e.g. EGI.

• EGI is a federated e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing services for research and innovation.

  • PhenoMeNal was selected as one of the highly prioritized Use Case providers for EGI, highlights the importance of EGI to support containers and container-orchestration
  • PhenoMeNal developers interact with EGI developers, and participate/present at workshops and conferences
  • EGI developers visit PhenoMeNal workshops

• The Helix Nebula Initiative is a partnership between industry, space and science to establish a dynamic ecosystem, benefiting from open cloud services for the seamless integration of science into a business environment.

  • So far Helix Nebula has focused on a limited set of initial use cases, but we see great opportunities to deploy PhenoMeNal CRE on Helix Nebula in the future.

An extensive updated mapping of (e-)infrastructures relevant to PhenoMeNal is available here.