1. Pre-Commercial Procurement proposal - HNSciCloud
13 May 2015
Bob Jones, CERN

2. Pre-Commercial Procurement proposal
A Pre-Commercial Procurement proposal was submitted to the H2020 ICT 8a call in April 2015 for innovative IaaS cloud services
The proposal is currently under evaluation by the EC
Official feedback expected in September
These slides give an overview of the proposal

3. The Helix Nebula Initiative
Strategic Plan
Establish multi-tenant, multi-provider cloud infrastructure
Identify and adopt policies for trust, security and privacy
Create governance structure
Define funding schemes
To support the computing capacity needs for the LHC experiments
Setting up a new service to simplify analysis of large genomes, for a deeper insight into evolution and biodiversity
To create an Earth Observation platform, focusing on earthquake and volcano research
To improve the speed and quality of research for finding surrogate biomarkers based on brain images
Additional Users:
Adopters
Suppliers
Helix Nebula was formed in 2011 by leading research organisations in collaboration with Europe’s commercial cloud suppliers to develop such a platform.
It has grown over time with more research organisations joining (demand-side) and more service suppliers (supply-side) both commercial and publicly funded.
Note the high proportion of SMEs that are members (30% of members in 2014)
Bob Jones, CERN

4. H2020 Coordination and Support Action Total budget: 500 K€
Duration: 18 months
Start date: 1 Oct. 2014
Partners:
Public research organisations have well established procurement processes that are tailored to buying and operating computing H/W and S/W but not the ‘rental’ of cloud services.

5. Example HNX procurement
CERN price enquiry for a small fraction of the resources necessary to run the ATLAS experiment simulation software
Several valid responses were received and Atos (data centre in Tenerife, Spain) was awarded the contract accessed via the SlipStream broker and provisioning engine (from SixSq SME) and delivered over the GÉANT network
1.2 million CPU hours over 6 weeks producing 11.5 million GEANT4 tt̅ events with a high level of efficiency for CPU intensive workload that confirmed
the use of commercial IaaS is technically feasible for simulation workloads
variations in RESTful APIs can be overcome with reasonable technical effort
independent monitoring of the quality of service and resources consumed is essential
Limited scale procurements are being made via this platform demonstrating the feasibility of the approach.
The SlipStream broker is an open source solution developed with the aid of the EC funding via the StratusLab FP7 project.
Bob Jones, CERN

6. Towards the European Open Science Cloud
Hybrid – link public research organisations, e-Infrastructures & commercial cloud services
Use GEANT network to link Research Infrastructures, repositories (EUDAT, OpenAIRE), EGI, PRACE etc. to commodity commercial cloud services (multiple providers)
A cornerstone of the Open Science Commons*
Trust - Researchers keep control of the cloud and their data
Guarantee a copy of all the data is kept on public resources
Ensure long-term preservation of the data
Insulate users from changes of service supplier and technology
Economy - Must be cheaper than the ‘build our own’ approach
Avoid separate ‘silos’ for each Research Infrastructure/Community
Profit from the economies of scale in commercial data centres *
So clearly there is a need to have a platform on which this data can be managed.
Sharing of data is necessary, increasing and must be encouraged by the platform but it has to respect the cultures and investments made by the research communities.
Researchers have fears, some of them irrational, about using commercial cloud services.
But telling someone who is afraid of flying that their fear is irrational does not mean they will get on the plane.
We have to make them feel secure. Here the hybrid cloud model can help by ensuring that a copy of their precious data is kept safe on publicly managed resources.
Economy – the price comparison must take into account all costs, not just the purchase price of h/w.

7. PCP
PPI
Why PCP?
Commercial IaaS exists but not certified, integrated with public e-infrastructures, offering std interfaces with suitable SLA and contractual terms & conditions.
PPI
Potential follow-on project if this PCP project is successful

8. Proposed Joint Pre-Commercial Procurement
The group of buyers have committed
>1.6M€ of funds
Manpower
Applications & Data
In-house IT resources
To procure innovative cloud services
Integrated into a hybrid cloud model:
Commercial cloud services
e-Infrastructures
GEANT network
eduGAIN Fed. Id mgmt.
EGI Fed Cloud
Potentially host data services from EUDAT, INDIGO-Datacloud, etc.
Made available to end-users including BBMI, DARIAH, ELIXIR, EISCAT_3D, EPOS, INSTRUCT, LifeWatch, LHC, etc.
Research organisations from 7 countries have proposed to work together to develop a cross-border joint procurement of innovative cloud services. This is an important change: never before have research organisations across Europe pooled their funds and resources to procure cloud services to support their scientific programmes.
eduGAIN federated identity mgmt. should include commercial identity providers taking into account multiple levels of assurance.
Bob Jones, CERN

9. Pilots tested & assessed
PCP project phases
Preparation
Analysis of requirements, current market offers and relevant standards
Build stakeholder group
Develop tender material
Implementation
Sharing
Best practises
Recommendations
Training
6 months
18 months
Design
Prototype
Pilot
Launch of tender
Pilots tested & assessed
Jan’16
Oct’16
Jan’18
Jun’18
All procuring organisations must sign letter to re-confirm commitment of funds

10. PCP project implementation phase
Design
Prototype
Pilot
Bidders have 3 months to respond to bid
Bidders provide written design report including architecture and technical design of components together with unit costs
Contractors build prototypes including all components and make it accessible to experts from buyers group that perform functionality and security tests
select ≥3 designs taking into account tender criteria
Evaluation committee includes representatives from all buyers
Multiple iterations with feedback to suppliers in prototype and pilot phases
Contractors deploy expanded prototypes that are made available firstly to experts who perform scalability tests and then to end-users
select ≥2 prototypes taking into account feedback from experts

11. PCP project implementation phase
3 phases:
Solution design
≥3 designs
3 months
15% tender budget
Prototype development
≥3 prototypes
6 months
25% tender budget
Deployment of limited scale prototypes
≥2 pilot deployments
60% tender budget
Total procurement funds available: ~5M€
Each phase is competitive. Bids evaluated/tested against published criteria

12. Project organisation CERN CERN CNRS DESY INFN EGI.eu TRUST-IT
The EC funding covers the procurement costs, project and procurement process administration as well as work package leadership
All the buyers provide technical effort to evaluate designs/prototypes/pilots

13. User Groups
The cloud resources procured will be made available to user groups during the pilot phase
LHC experiments via WLCG
Procured resources will count against the buyers’ pledges (during pilot phase)
CERN will provide the interface via Tier-0 (OpenStack in tender spec.)
ELIXIR
Managed by EMBL-EBI via the ELIXIR Compute platform
Other research communities via EGI Fed Cloud
Request OCCI interface in tender spec.
Local users at each buyers site
Each buyer is responsible for integration
Request web GUI interface in tender spec.
Sites can also use OpenStack or OCCI interface as well
Each buyer decides what fraction of their procured resources is made available to each user group but cannot assign only to their local users
Collectively the users will form a user group with a role in the project to define requirements and provide feedback on pilot deployments
BBMRI DARIAH EISCAT_3D EPOS INSTRUCT LifeWatch Long-tail

14. Next Steps
CERN will perform another limited scale procurement in preparation for the PCP
More details at the 6th Helix Nebula General CERN
24-25 June restricted to NDA signatories
26 June open day
Assuming the PCP proposal is funded
September-December 2015:
Approval of changes to CERN procurement rules to support EC co-funded PCP
Prepare EC contract and consortium agreement
Make more detailed planning of tasks
Start work on tender material
Investigate to support data-intensive workloads
Project start January 2016