DESIRA - Deliverable 5.1 - Virtual Research Environment: specification report

The DESIRA Virtual Research Environment specification consists of a hardware layer and a service layer. The former is made available by the D4Science Infrastructure 1 [1, 2] and it is organized as a dynamic pool of virtual machines, supporting computation and storage. The operations and management of those resources is performed via a set of enabling technologies selected to ensure availability and reliability of the infrastructure while e guaranteeing reduction of costs of ownership and a set of supporting technologies selected to ensure secure monitoring, alerting and provisioning. The service layer, illustrated in Figure 1, consists of three service frameworks, which can be summarized as a follows: o Enabling Framework: the enabling framework, framework , based on the gCube System [3], includes services required to support the operation of all services and the VREs supported by such services. As such it includes: a resource registry service, to which all e-infrastructure infrastructure resources (data sources, services, computational nodes, etc.) can be dynamically (de)registered and discovered by user and other services; Authentication and Authorization services, as well as Accounting Services, capable of both granting ing and tracking access and usage actions from users; and a VRE manager, capable of deploying in the collaborative framework VREs inclusive of a selected number of "applications", generally intended as sets of interacting services; o Storage Framework: the storage framework includes services for efficient, advanced, and on on-demand management of digital data, encoded as: files in a distributed file system, collection of metadata records, and time series in spatial databases; such services are used by all other services in the architecture, exception made for the enabling framework; o Collaborative framework : the collaborative framework includes all services deployed for the scientists and for each of them provides social networking services, user management services, shared workspace services. In addition, addition it comprises the part on the Web UI access to the Virtual Research Environment.