Abstract
In many countries around the world, the development of national infrastructures for science either has been implemented or are under serious consideration by governments and funding bodies. Current examples include ARDC in Australia, CANARIE in Canada and MTA Cloud in Hungary. These infrastructures provide access to compute and storage to a wide swathe of user communities and represent a collaboration between users, providers and, in some cases, industry to maximise the impact of the investments made. The UK has embarked on a project called IRIS to develop a sustainable e-infrastructure based on the needs of a diverse set of communities. Building on the success of the UK component of the WLCG and the innovations made, a number of research institutes and universities are working with several research groups to co-design an infrastructure, including support services, which take this to a level applicable to a wider use base. We present the preparatory work leading to the definition of this infrastructure, showing the wide variety of use cases which require to be supported. This leads us to a definition of the hardware and interface requirements needed to meet this diverse set of criteria, and the support posts identified in order to make best use of this facility and sustain it into the future.
Highlights
In this paper we describe e-Infrastructure for Research and Innovation for Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) (IRIS) [3], an initiative to bring STFC computing interests and the needs of research communities together
An example of a digital asset funded through the Ada Lovelace Centre (ALC) includes Data Analysis as a Service (DAaaS), which aims to improve the scientific output of the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Central Laser Facility and Diamond Light Source
Examples of other funded digital assets include deploying an instance of the INDIGO Identity and Access Management (IAM) [16] service to be used as the IRIS identity proxy, extending the Rucio data management system [17] to support multiple VOs and development of an OpenStack reference platform optimised for scientific computing
Summary
In 2014-2015 STFC conducted a strategic review of its current computing capability and future requirements of its scientific and industrial user communities [2]. Amongst the recommendations was the goal that the different science disciplines should find ways of sharing computing infrastructure and that new projects should be encouraged to make use of existing expertise and infrastructure. This approach would help to ensure resources, both in terms of hardware and staff effort, are used more efficiently. The DB is responsible for making decisions relating to IRIS-funded hardware and allocating funds to the provider entities
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