PaaS – Swedish Science Cloud

Upgrading the WEST-1 region of Swedish Science Cloud in September

In Semptember we will begin upgrading the WEST-1 region hosted by Chalmers e-Commons to the latest version of OpenStack and also add some new hardware.

This will improve the capacity and funktionality of the WEST-1 region.

Unfortunately, it also means that the WEST-1 region will be down and unavialable for some time this fall and eveyting that any data currently stored there will be removed.

If you are currently using WEST-1 you must make sure to:

Backup your data.
Move your workloads and data from WEST-1 to either EAST-1 or NORTH-1.

If you have any questions or if you need assistance, do not hesitate to contact support@cloud.snic.se and we will help you.

Mini-workshop on microservice platforms

The Spjuth group is organizing a mini-workshop on microservice platforms on May 12 with talks 13:15-15:00 in ITC 2345, open to the public. SSC’s senior cloud architect Salman Toor will give a brief presentation about the cloud infrastructure. Agenda for the afternoon session is available here.

The type of microservice platforms presented offer higher-level functionality by abstracting away most of the IaaS layer, allowing users to focus more on deploying applications than directly managing VMs. This makes it easier to build and deploy robust and scalable cloud computing applications. In the next SSC training session at KTH, there will be more information about MANTL, including a hands-on tutorial.

Virtual Research Environments for Clinical Metabolomics

PhenoMeNal is a 3-year EU Horizon 2020 project (2015-2018) that will develop a standardised e-infrastructure for analysing medical metabolic phenotype data. This comprises development of standards for data exchange, pipelines, computational frameworks and resources for the processing, analysis and information-mining of the massive amount of medical molecular phenotyping and genotyping data that will be generated by metabolomics applications now entering research and clinic.

At the Spjuth research group we lead WP5; “Operation and maintenance of PhenoMeNal grid/cloud” and our aim is to provide PhenoMeNal and researchers with the capability to spawn secure Virtual Research Environments (VRE or VE) with easy access to scalable, interoperable data and tools for data analysis. These virtual environments should be able to run on most hardware architectures ranging from single laptops/workstations, to private and public cloud (IaaS) providers.

We use MANTL to set up, and to provide, a microservice-oriented virtual infrastructure. In PhenoMeNal, all partners provide tools as Docker images, , that are automatically built, tested, and pushed to DockerHub, by a continuous integration system (Jenkins ). Within MANTL we provide long-running services using Marathon, including Jupyter and Galaxy workflows systems, that can orchestrate microservices-based pipelines using e.g. Chronos or Kubernetes.

So far we have successfully provisioned PhenoMeNal VRE on Google Cloud Platform, EBI Embassy Cloud (OpenStack), and SNIC Science Cloud (OpenStack). We are currently experimenting with Packer for speeding up the provisioning of virtual machines within the VRE, and Consul for federating multiple VREs. Another ongoing project is to use Apache Spark for distributed data analysis within the VRE.

Links:

http://www.farmbio.uu.se/forskning/researchgroups/pb/PhenoMeNal/

http://www.farmbio.uu.se/forskning/researchgroups/pb/Data-intensive/

http://phenomenal-h2020.eu/