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Persistent URL http://purl.org/net/epubs/work/32978428
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Record Id 32978428
Title Virtual Large Facility for Experiment-based Structural Biologists
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Abstract CCP4-DaaS is a research infrastructure project undertaken by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to provide centralised computational facilities targeting the Science and Technology Facilities Council community of researchers in macromolecular crystallography. The project implements a Data Analysis as a Service (DaaS) framework, building on the Science and Technology Facilities Council stable of software tools for managing Large Facility experimental data by linking all aspects of the research chain from proposal through to publication. DaaS is a response to the evolving landscape of Large Facility-oriented research whereby advances in technologies and research methodologies continue to push up the volume of data being generated and consumed in analyses (Science and Technology Facilities Council). Conceptually, DaaS is a virtual Large Facility in the cloud that connects distributed data and compute resources to enable users to perform compute- as well as data-intensive analyses both during and post visit to STFC Large Facilities. In the CCP4-DaaS implementation, we adopted the OpenNebula cloud managed by STFC’s OpenNebula Data Centre as the cloud platform. Registered CCP4-DaaS users can access CCP4 virtual machines via a remote desktop or a browser client. The CCP4 VMs are configured at the contextualisation stage which mounts the user’s persistent file share and provides a set of standard software tools including the CCP4 integrated suite of programs. The latter has been enhanced to permit submission of compute jobs to remote clusters, with the STFC-based OpenNebula resource as a pre-configured option. CCP4-DaaS represents a specific implementation of DaaS by STFC to deliver a centralised data analysis service on the cloud to the CCP4 user community. This project is part of STFC Scientific Computing Department’s larger facilities development programme which is building similar DaaS platforms for users of Scientific Computing Department, Scientific Computing Department and other Large Facilities as a continuous improvement to STFC research facilities. Beyond STFC, linking these DaaS platforms with the new Scientific Computing Department virtual research environment for structural biology is also under consideration.
Organisation STFC , SCI-COMP , SCI-COMP-SE
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Language English (EN)
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Presentation Presented at 11th New Opportunities for Better User Group Software Conference (NOBUGS11), Copenhagen, Denmark, 17-19 Oct 2016. 2016