EGI - ACONET Austrian community workshop

Thursday 27 Apr 2023, 09:00 → 17:00 Europe/Amsterdam

A02006 (Faistauer Saal) (Mozarteum University, Salzburg)

This workshop is organised by ACONET and EGI about distributed computing and related technologies for Austrian scientists and scientific projects. The purpose of the event is to bring together relevant service providers and scientists to exchange information and needs relating to big data processing and big analytics in science. The workshop will demonstrate relevant capabilities offered by Austrian and European cloud platforms to scale up scientific processes, workflows, data analysis, and it provides time to discuss the needs and future demands of Austrian scientific users in this area. 

The outcomes of the workshop can help ACONET and EGI establish a holistic infrastructure federation of local and international data and compute infrastructures, combining relevant capabilities that matches end user needs. 

PRE-WORKSHOP DINNER:

A dinner table is reserved for registered participants that chose this option. It will be in the restaurant Sternbräu (Griesgasse 23, 5020 Salzburg) on April 26 from 18.30h onwards.

Further Informations on EGI:

Detailled information on diverse technical aspects can be found at the EGI's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@EGI_eInfra/videos.

09:00 → 09:30 Welcome and framing the workshop

This workshop is about showing practical ways to collaborate with other research organisations – national and international – by jointly using central infrastructure clusters. The first talk will give an overview on Austrian research infrastructures and on strategies to access them. The presenter will show on a practical example, how Austrian research institutes in Graz and Vienna were cooperating to jointly face an increased need of data storage and how this cooperation led to the Austrian EGI membership.

Speaker: Matthias Schramm (TU Wien)

20230427_ACONET – EGI user workshop.pdf

09:30 → 10:15 EGI e-infrastructure - Advanced computing services for science

The EGI Federation is an international e-Infrastructure that was established in 2010, based on the results of several European projects, to provide advanced computing and data analytics services for research and innovation. EGI federates compute, storage resources, scientific datasets and various digital platforms and data analysis and simulation environments from over 300 international institutes, and makes these available for researchers, public authorities, companies and educators in Europe and worldwide. EGI is an open federation and the ACONET Association, representing a consortium of Austrian universities and research organisations, is an EGI member since 2022.
This presentation will introduce the EGI federation as an aggregator of national capabilities, and will explain the several ways in which Austrian scientists, scientific projects, IT service providers and other stakeholders can benefit from the EGI technical and support services. The presentation will cover scenarios in cluster, cloud and HPC computing, distributed computing, containers, big data applications, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, disciplinary science web gateways, data federations and spaces, scientific reproducibility with Notebooks and Binder.

Speaker: Giuseppe La Rocca (EGI.eu)

EGI101_ACONet_2023.pptx

10:15 → 10:55 Coffee break

10:55 → 11:25 ACONET services and activities

ACOnet is the Austrian National Research and Education Network (NREN) for science, research, education, and culture. It is operated by the Vienna University Computer Center, in co-operation with other universities in Austria.
ACOnet provides a nation-wide fibre optic backbone with high-performance access to international academic networks via GÉANT, as well as to the Internet. Furthermore, ACOnet offers its members – among others all Austrian universities – various target-group-specific services to support research projects and communities.
This talk describes the current infrastructure of the Austrian NREN, advantages for its members to use it and planned next steps.

Speaker: Michael Redinger (ACONET, UIBK)

11:25 → 11:55 Distributed Deep Learning with Horovod on EGI and on other cloud resources (REMOTE)

This presentation and demo will focus on the Horovod distributed deep learning (DL) framework and the reference architecture and service(s) built by SZTAKI in Hungary to support the setup of Horovod on cloud infrastructures. The presenter will briefly introduce the theoretics behind distributed DL, then will show ways to efficiently setup Horovod on EGI clouds and other cloud infrastructures to train DL models.
The content will be relevant for those who research or apply (distributed) DL at any level, who want to support DL users within their organisations/projects.

This is an hybrid session. Remote access is possible via: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/68727616350?pwd=YW9mam1mZlRrakFyeUx1TUdvdllTZz09

Speakers: Attila Farkas (SZTAKI), Krisztián Póra (SZTAKI)

Horovod service in EOSC

Horovod_EGI-ACONET_Farkas_v1.pdf

11:55 → 12:55 Distributed cloud computing - Hands-on with EGI services

Attendees will be granted with access to EGI cloud resources, and will run scientific applications in the cloud to perform data transformation and analysis steps.

Speaker: Giuseppe La Rocca (EGI.eu)

Distributed cloud computing - Hands-on.pptx

12:55 → 13:45 Lunch break

13:45 → 14:30 Reproducible research with TUW and EGI services - Presentation and hands-on exercises

This presentation and related hands-on exercises will introduce the concept of 'reproducible science' with Jupyter, Binder and DBRepo technologies, and will show real-life scientific examples on how a scientific dataset and data analysis pipeline can be shared and reproduced with the use of EGI cloud resources.

Speaker: Josef Taha (TUW)

14:30 → 14:45 Q&A

14:45 → 15:15 Earth Observation Data Centre: Austrian cloud infrastructure in the EGI federation (REMOTE)

The EODC Earth Observation Data Centre GmbH, a public-private partnership is operating joint IT infrastructure of several Austrian universities and other partners with the goal of more effective collaborations, data sharing, and filling the gap between scientific results and operational services. Thus, the EODC is one of several examples of successful collaborations in Austria. This presentation gives an introduction in the background, existing services and infrastructure, available at the EODC as example for other cloud platforms in Austria. Furthermore, several research projects illustrate the development of services together with the EGI and international EGI partners.

This is a hybrid session. Remote access is possible via https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/63422844447?pwd=MVo0bHFPWDhIN0FnOXhvSDcrSFI1Zz09

Speakers: Charis Chatzikyriakou (EODC GmbH), Christian Briese (EODC GmbH)

20230427_ACONET - EGI user workshop_EODC_Charis_Chatzikyriakou.pdf

20230427_EODC_overview_short_incl_projects.pdf

15:15 → 15:30 Break

15:30 → 16:30 Discussion - How to benefit from the presented solutions in Austria and way forward for EGI and ACONET