de.NBI Cloud federation through ELIXIR AAI

Peter Belmann; Björn Fischer; Jan Krüger; Michal Procházka; Helena Rasche; Manuel Prinz; Maximilian Hanussek; Martin Lang; Felix Bartusch; Benjamin Gläßle; Jens Krüger; Alfred Pühler; Alexander Sczyrba

doi:10.12688/f1000research.19013.1

de.NBI Cloud federation through ELIXIR AAI

F1000Res. 2019 Jun 10:8:842. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.19013.1. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, 33104, Germany.
² Institute of Computer Science, Masaryk University, Brno, 602 00, Czech Republic.
³ Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, 79110, Germany.
⁴ Omics IT and Data Management Core Facility (ODCF), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, 69120, Germany.
⁵ Center for Bioinformatics (Applied Bioinformatics Group), University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, 72076, Germany.
⁶ High Performance and Cloud Computing group (ZDV), University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, 72074, Germany.

Abstract

The academic de.NBI Cloud offers compute resources for life science research in Germany. At the beginning of 2017, de.NBI Cloud started to implement a federated cloud consisting of five compute centers, with the aim of acting as one resource to their users. A federated cloud introduces multiple challenges, such as a central access and project management point, a unified account across all cloud sites and an interchangeable project setup across the federation. In order to implement the federation concept, de.NBI Cloud integrated with the ELIXIR authentication and authorization infrastructure system (ELIXIR AAI) and in particular Perun, the identity and access management system of ELIXIR. The integration solves the mentioned challenges and represents a backbone, connecting five compute centers which are based on OpenStack and a web portal for accessing the federation.This article explains the steps taken and software components implemented for setting up a federated cloud based on the collaboration between de.NBI Cloud and ELIXIR AAI. Furthermore, the setup and components that are described are generic and can therefore be used for other upcoming or existing federated OpenStack clouds in Europe.

Keywords: Authentication; Authorization; Cloud Computing; ELIXIR; Life Sciences; OpenID Connect; de.NBI; de.NBI Cloud.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Biological Science Disciplines*
Germany
Software*

Grants and funding

This work receives funding from Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany (BMBF)[031A537B,031A533A,031A538A,031A533B,031A535A, 031A537C, 031A534A, 031A532B]. We acknowledge support for the Article Processing Charge by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Open Access Publication Fund of Bielefeld University.