Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) & Grid - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) & Grid Activities in Australia

Prof Anthony Williams Executive Director

Supported by:

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ARCS Mission

“The ARCS Mission is to enable and enhance research through the provision of long-term eResearch support, services and tools.” Core roles of ARCS include:

• Agent for change and to promote uptake of eResearch

services and tools at national level;

• Key coordination role for national eResearch services

and service providers;

• Cooperative development & implementation of national

standards & services (including international context);

• Core activities in interoperability, collaboration and

authorisation infrastructure and more recently also data storage infrastructure;

• Development of discipline-specific tools & services.

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ARCS Mission (continued)

• Vehicle for federal government funding of eResearch

services in ARCS core areas of interest;

• ARCS is uniquely positioned as the entity which is the

cooperative aspect of the key nationally distributed eResearch Service Providers. Keys to a future successful ARCS:

• deliver well and strongly into these core roles as

required by the federal goverment;

• development, deployment and operation of highly-

valued, robust, reliable & easy-to-use tools and services.

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Australian eResearch Landscape

ARCS AARNet, AAF ANDS, ARCS NCI & other HPC

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Summary of ARCS Services

• Video collaboration (desktop and room based)
• Web-based collaboration (workspaces, applications &

services);

• ARCS Data Fabric: Data movement, federation,

databases & digital repositories - able to share data with anyone anywhere;

• ARCS Grid & Compute Cloud: Seamless resource

sharing;

• Security & authorisation (expertise, exemplars, tools

and services);

• Virtual environments & scientific instruments - remote

access and operation;

• Data Storage Infrastructure.

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ARCS Collaboration Structure

ARCS - Collaboration Structure [a] Current Lead Agent for ARCS Intersect (NSW) ANU (ACT) CSIRO iVEC (WA) QCIF (Qld) eRSA (SA) TPAC (Tas) VPAC (Vic) [a] Possible NT member ... ARCS Governance Australian Access Fed (AAF) Aust Nat Data Serv (ANDS) National Comput Infra (NCI) AARNet Other Infrastructure Providers VeRSI eRes Service Provider B Other eRes Serv Providers ... NCRIS Capability A NCRIS Capability B Other NCRIS Capabilities ... Discipine Area A Discipline Area B Other Discipline Areas ... ARCS Related Organisations AeRIC & DIISR

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Members of ARCS Resources

Total MARCS annual revenue = approx $35m Total MARCS EFTs = approx 170 Note: Figures exclude ANU and CSIRO (as difficult to count)

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ARCS Collaboration Services

• Video Collaboration: ARCS provides support for EVO

(in collaboration with AARNET) and Access Grid technologies - including High Definition;

• Instant Messaging (IM): Jabber is flexible IM system

like MSN, ICQ etc (ARCS runs an ARCS Jabber server);

• Research Oriented Web Tools: Research web-based

workspaces and tools - Sakai, Drupal, Plone, Wiki, Twiki, Google Calendar, Google Apps,…;

• Customer Service: End-user support is provided via

telephone 1800 TOARCS (answered all business hours) & email request tracker system customer.service@arcs.org.au.

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ARCS Data Fabric

• Access to Data Fabric uses the AAF;
• Is a system to store, manage and share data

currently based on iRODS (previously SRB);

• Is available to every Australian researcher;
• Has distributed storage and access nodes;
• Provides some free storage to every

researcher (can be extended typically at hardware cost only to arbitrary size);

• Can be accessed with web interface (with

Shibboleth) and webDAV and CLI tools (with SLCS); and

• Will soon be unified with Grid/Cloud compute.

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Current ARCS Data Fabric

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ARCS Systems Services

• Major role is to manage the ARCS National Grid and to

develop the ARCS Compute Cloud as its successor

• A number of HPC, data and other facilities available to

Australian researchers

• Standard interface provided by “ARCS Grid/Cloud”
• Develop and support easy to use tools for grid

submission, and data staging, e.g., “Grisu” interface;

• Publish information about the resources available -

Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS)‏

• Deploy other services as required by Data, Collaboration
• r Security Services teams
• Sakai, SRB (ARCS Data Fabric)‏, IdP, SLCS

certificates etc

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Systems - ARCS National Grid

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ARCS Security Services

• Provides ARCS authentication and authorisation

infrastructure, services, tools, exemplars, expertise and best practice advice;

• Assists with interfacing to Australian Access

Federation (AAF) and other Identity Providers (IdPs) - run ARCS IdP & Pilot AAF instance;

• Develop suggested template usage policies for

eResearch Service Providers (SPs) including ARCS, ANDS and discipline-based services;

• Pro-actively work with other SPs teams to allow their

services to make effective use of Security Services;

• Provide broad support for any research-oriented
• rganisations that wants to access these services.

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Activities for next 3 years

2008 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure - identified significant gaps in infrastructure provision, particularly electronic storage

• f research data.

Result was government funded enhanced eResearch infrastructure via a Super Science investment of $312 million for 2009-2013, with $97 million to ARCS for Data Storage and Collaboration Tools made up as:

 $35 million for ARCS Managed Core Services;  $12 million for Research Community Projects;  $50 million for Data Storage Infrastructure.

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Activities for Next 3 Years

ARCS Managed Core Services ($35m):

 Continuous development, deployment and operation

• f ARCS managed core services

Research Community Projects ($12m):

 Open competitive process involving national research

communities to identify discipline specific services to be developed - typically ongoing operation by the research community themselves, perhaps building on core services. Data Storage Infrastructure ($50m):

 Consultation underway to identify data storage co-

investors and to decide on how many/which sites and how to achieve seamless interoperability.

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Researcher Survey re Core Services

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Key ARCS Contacts

• Executive Director: Prof Anthony (Tony) Williams,

anthony.williams@arcs.org.au, Office: 08 8303 3546, Mobile: 0414 687 264;

• ARCS Customer Service: customer.services@arcs.org.au,Toll-free

phone 1800 862727 (1800 TOARCS);

• Associate Director: Dr Nick Tate, nick.tate@arcs.org.au, Mobile: 0412

674 010;

• ARCS Admin Staff: admin@arcs.org.au;
• Data Services Manager: Florian Goessmann,

florian.goessmann@arcs.org.au, Office: 08 6436 8835;

• Systems Services Manager: Jim McGovern, jim.mcgovern@arcs.org.au,

Phone: 03 9925 4387;

• Collaboration Services Manager: Andrew Alexandar,

andrew.alexander@arcs.org.au, Phone: 07 3138 9236;

• Security Services Manager: Neil Witheridge,

neil.witheridge@arcs.org.au, Phone: 02 9850 6537;

• Projects Manager: Dr Paul Coddington, paul.coddington@arcs.org.au,

Phone: 08 8303 8262.

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