This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020

research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° 654237

Energising Scientific Endeavour through Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa

Bruce Becker, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)CHAIN-REDS conference, EGI Conference 2015, Lisbon

Outline● The need for Sci-GaIA

● The Sci-GaIA project: facts and figures

● Sci-GaIA objectives

● The legacy of other projects

– ei4Africa

– CHAIN-REDS

● The Sci-GaIA work programme

● Last word and summary

Why Sci-GaIA?

● Scientific and technical communities of practice in Africa have faced large barriers to e-Infrastructures (compute, data, network) and services.

● Investments in networking capacity and connectivity are reducing these barriers – bringing access to new communities and use cases.

● It has been shown in previous projects (ei4Africa and CHAIN/CHAIN-REDS) that by using the web and open standards, research output and quality is improved.

● However:

– communities of practice and collaborations may not be ready to exploit and adapt these technologies

– The technologies and tools which are in operation are not properly documented or refined, and need educational materials to stimulate uptake.

Sci-GaIA: Facts and Figures

● Project type: CSA

● Call: H2020-INFRASUPP-2014-2

● Topic: INFRASUPP-7-2014

● Duration: 24 months

● Start: May 2015

● Kickoff: London, 18 May 2015

● Budget: ~ 1 340 000 euros

Sci-GaIA: Facts and Figures

● Consortium: 5 european, 4 African

– Brunel University (UK) – coordinator

– Sigma Orionis (France)

– The Ubuntunet Alliance (Malawi)

– University of Catania (Italy)

– West & Central African Research and Education Network, WACREN (Ghana)

– Royal Institute of Technology, KTH (Sweden)

– Karolinksa Institutet, Sweden (Sweden)

– The Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology, DIT (Tanzania)

– CSIR Meraka Institute (South Africa)

Objectives

● To promote the uptake of Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa and Beyond

● To support new and already emerging CoPs

● To strengthen and expand e-Infrastructure and Science Gateway related services

● To train, disseminate, communicate and outreach

Topics addressed

● E-Infrastructure services:

– Standards-based access to computational and data resources

– Integration of gateways with standards-compliant open-access publication

● Teaching and Training:

– Updated training material

– Develop online and face-to-face user fora

● Communties of practice:

– Identify and train new communities of practice

– Provide relevant services to emerging and maturer communities of practice

Timeline

The legacy of ei4Africa

● Identified and developed communities of practice - http://ei4africa.eu/demonstrators/from-africa/

● Deployed and developed Science gateways

● Published several reccommendations - http://ei4africa.eu/about-e-infrastructures/recommendations/

The Legacy of CHAIN-REDS

● Infrastructure:

– Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre● http://aaroc.github.io● Coordination point for regional resources and initiatives● South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Senegal, Ghana,

Morocco, Algeria, Egypt

– Standards and Interoperability: ● Infrastructure interoperability MoU to provide transparent usage of African

and European infrastructures to scientific communities● Standards-based (SAGA) access to infrastructure via Science Gateways● Data Infrastructure and interoperability (persistent identifiers, etc)

● Recommendations: www.chain-project.eu/deliverables

Work Plan

● Sci-GaIA consists of 5 work packages:

– WP1: Promote the uptake of Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa and beyond.

– WP2: Support new and emerging communities of practice

– WP3: Strengthen and expand Science Gateway and e-Infrastructure related services

– WP4: Training, Dissemination, Communication and Outreach

– WP5: Coordination and management

WP1: Science Gateways

● Objectives:

– Create Science Gateway and e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for NRENs and CoPs as well as educational programmes;

– Monitor the successful implementation and uptake of e-Infrastructures in Africa;

– Ensure the interoperability and interoperation between the African, the EU and the global e-Infrastructures.

WP1: Science Gateways

● T1.1: Create Science Gateway and e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for NRENs and Communities of Practice (Leader: UNICT / contributors: All apart from SIGMA, KTH and KI)

● T1.2: Create Science Gateways and e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for educational programmes (Leader: UBRUN / all apart from SIGMA)

● T1.3: Monitor the successful implementation and uptake of e-Infrastructures in Africa (Leader: WACREN / contributors all apart from SIGMA, UNICT)

● T1.4: Ensure the interoperability and interoperation between the African, the EU and the global e-Infrastructures (Leader: CSIR / contributor UNICT)

WP2: Support to Communities

● Objectives:

– Identify, promote and support cooperation between application facilities, service providers and end-user communities

– Identify innovations and experiences made in the supported user-communities and ensure that they are scientifically reviewed, selected and then communicated and disseminated to relevant stakeholder groups;

– Ensure models for sustainability in the operation of user-communities are developed and tested;

– Ensure the global interoperability and reach of the e-Infrastructures supported;

– Identify the need for planning, development and coordination of policies, programmes and contents of e-Infrastructures.

WP2: Support to Communities

● T2.1: User Forum Development (Leader: CSIR / contributors: KTH, SIGMA, UBUNTUNET, UNICT and WACREN)

● T2.2: Support to emerging communities of practice (Leader: KI / contributors: All except SIGMA)

● T2.3: Identify and support new communities of practice (Leader: DIT / contributors: All except SIGMA)

● T2.4: Support communities of practice by mobilizing universities as development resources (Leader: KTH / contributors: UBRUN and UNICT)

WP3: Science Gateway and Related Services

● Objectives

– Expand and extend activities of past projects in order to consolidate the African e-Infrastructure services.

● support of the creation of an African Open (and Linked) Data Infrastructure,

● interoperable with and federated to those emerging in EU and in other regions of the world.

– Combine Open Access repositories with Science Gateways ● discoverability, reproducibility and extensibility of

research

WP3: Science Gateway and Related Services

● T3.1: Support the creation of federated and interoperable Open Access Document and Data Repositories in Africa, compliant with EU and other international guidelines

● T3.2: Support the creation of an African Policy Management Authority and the establishment of Identity Federations to be connected to eduGAIN (overlap with TANDEM and MAGIC)

● T3.3: Support the operation and development of the Africa Grid Science Gateway

WP4: Training, dissemination, communication and outreach

● Implement Dissemination and Exploitation Plan

– Monitoring and ensuring the consistency of all external activities of the project;

– Organising the planned project events and ensuring maximum participation and impact;

– Running training workshops for Science Gateway and e-Infrastructure development;

– Showcasing key developments in these areas to communicate the benefits of these

● Technologies to CoPs;

– Delivering three Sci-GaIA workshops and a final conference;

– Regularly examining and updating the project exploitation perspectives.

Semantic Infrastructure, Automation and DevOps culture

● Modern IT infrastructure can be abstracted and instantiated based on code:

Software-Defined Infrastructure

● Infrastructure = Code can be tested, version controlled, reproduced and forked.

– https://github.com/AAROC/DevOps

● Cloud providers make it easy to transport entire infrastructures to different hosting environments

● Big questions arise -

– What use is a ”manual” ?

– Do we disseminate skills… or culture ?

– If we can automate almost everything, what human skills are really necessary ?

buildbuild passingpassing

Last word: Science and the Web

● Hypothesis 1: Everybody is on the web

● Hypothesis 2: The web is now the most powerful tool for research

● Hypothesis 3: The web is an Open Infrastructure;

● Corrollaries:

– Bring the project to the web !● http://aaroc.github.io/blog/2015/04/21/scigaia-what-is-success/

– Build an open infrastructure● http://aaroc.github.io/blog/2014/11/26/Terre-des-hackers/

– Design the infrastructure as a commons:● http://brucellino.github.io/blog/2015/02/24/ECommonsStrategy/

– Design the services to interoperate with the web

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Summary

● The time is right to fully exploit the work done by CHAIN, CHAIN-REDS, ei4Africa

● Sci-GaIA will provide much needed consolidation to e-Infrastructure services both for end-user communities and NRENs as service providers

● The project will develop a user-focussed, updated curriculum for developers and users of science gateways, data and compute infrastructures, for university courses

● The project is taking a modern, open approach in developing user communities and services

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What now ?

● Questions ? Ideas ? Talk about it… @brusisceddu

● Read more:

– Infrastructure and services: http://aaroc.github.com/

– Project website under construction: http://www.sci-gaia-eu

● Interested in collaborating ?

– Fork our code and service development repos; use them and improve them : https://github.com/AAROC

– Want to work directly with the team ? https://africa-arabia-roc.slack.com (ask for an invite)