In this presentation, delivered at the DI4R 2016 Conference, Bob Jones of CERN traced the cloud procurement trails performed within the context of the Helix Nebula Initiative and the on-going Pre-Commercial Procurement action undertaken by a group of 10 of Europe’s leading publicly funded research organisations.

1. Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud with Grant Agreement 687614 is a Pre-Commercial Procurement Action funded by H2020 Framework
Programme
Helix Nebula cloud procurement
activities
28 September 2016
Bob Jones
CERN IT department
Robert.Jones@cern.ch
27/09/2016

2. The Helix Nebula Science Cloud
public-private partnership

3. 3
The Helix Nebula Initiative
Brings together
• research organisations,
• data providers,
• publicly funded e-
infrastructures,
• commercial cloud service
providers
In a hybrid cloud with
procurement and governance
approaches suitable for the
dynamic cloud market In-house

4. D. Giordano HN GA8 21/09/2016
A “Crescendo” of Initiatives
Open Telekom Cloud
Series of short procurements
of increasing size and complexity
4

5. D. Giordano HN GA8 21/09/2016
CERN External Cloud Activities
• HN-1 Procurement (ATOS):
– Detector simulation, single Collaboration involved
– Single core VMs, up to 3,000 VMs for 5 weeks
• Microsoft Azure evaluation
– Multiple Collaborations & multiple Azure data centres involved
– Scale test: up 4.8k cores in 1.2k VMs for ~1 week, + few months of functional tests
• HN-2 Procurement (DBCE)
– Detector simulation for all 4 LHC Collaborations (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb)
– 4-core VMs, ~1000 instances for ~6 weeks
• IBM SoftLayer
– Bare metal servers & VMs
– HEP-SPEC06 benchmark and synthetic benchmarks
– connectivity over GEANT @ Amsterdam co-located PoPs of IBM and GEANT.
Performance measured via PerfSonar (~5Gbps)
5

6. D. Giordano HN GA8 21/09/2016
HN-3: Third CERN Cloud Procurement - ongoing
• CERN has awarded a contract of 4 months to T-Systems
Open Telekom Cloud IaaS for physics data processing
6
• 1’000 simultaneous VMs (4’000 cores)
• 500 TB of Central Storage Managed via Disk Pool Manager
(DPM) lightweight GRID solution for disk storage mgmt

7. HNSciCloud Joint Pre-Commercial Procurement
Bob Jones, CERN 7
Procurers: CERN, CNRS, DESY, EMBL-EBI,
ESRF, IFAE, INFN, KIT, STFC, SURFSara
Experts: Trust-IT & EGI.eu
The group of procurers have committed
• Procurement funds
• Manpower for testing/evaluation
• Use-cases with applications & data
• In-house IT resources
Resulting services will be made available
to end-users from many research
communities
Co-funded via H2020 Grant Agreement
687614
Total procurement budget >5M€

8. Pre-Commercial Procurement
Process and Timeline
9/27/2016 8

9. What will be procured
A hybrid cloud platform for the European research community
9/27/2016 9
HNSciCloud
PCP
Source:CloudComputingforGovies,DLTSolutions,
DavidBlankenhorn,VanRistauandCaronBeesley
Combining services at the IaaS level to support science workflows
The R&D services to be developed are to be integrated with
Resources in data centres operated by the buyers group
European-scale publicly funded e-Infrastructures

10. Challenges
Innovative IaaS level cloud services integrated with procurers in-house
resources and public e-infrastructure to support a range of scientific
workloads
Compute and Storage
support a range of virtual machine and container configurations
working with datasets in the petabyte range
Network Connectivity and Federated Identity Management
provide high-end network capacity for the whole platform with
common identity and access management
Service Payment Models
explore a range of purchasing options to determine the most
appropriate ones for the scientific application workloads that will be
deployed
Bob Jones, CERN 10

11. High Level Architecture of the Hybrid Cloud
Platform including the R&D challenges
Bob Jones, CERN 11

12. HNSciCloud status
Open Market
Consultation
17 March
2016
Tender published
21 July
200+ downloads
70+ requests for clarification
Tender
Deadline
19 September
Contract Awards
early October
9/27/2016 12

13. Competitive Deployment in 3 Phases