SLATE

Services Layer at the Edge

Rob Gardner Shawn McKee Joe Breen

University of Chicago University of Michigan University of Utah

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Gateways 2017

University of Michigan�October 24, 2017

What is SLATE?

• New NSF DIBBs award, "SLATE and the Mobility of Capability"
• Equip the SciDMZ with a service orchestration platform, potentially federated to create scalable, multi-campus science platforms
• Underlayment-as-a-service (UaaS) for platform �builders & science gateway developers

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Enabling collaborative science

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XENON Collaboration

How we got to SLATE

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lessons

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Building distributed platforms

E.g. the Open Science Grid:

• Deployments of job gateways across ~100 institutions

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perfSONAR meshes & data federations

�Tools for optimizing data throughput & access

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xrootd data federation

Friction in deployment of distributed services

A broken DevOps cycle!

• Latency in updates across sites make it extremely difficult to rapidly innovate platform services

VO (domain & application) centric

• Requires distributed expertise in specialized software stacks across many institutions
• Resource providers need to become experts in a range of VO software services

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SLATE Vision

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Services layer at the edge

• A ubiquitous "underlayment" -- the missing shim
• A generic CI substrate optimized for hosting edge services
• Programmable
• Easy & natural for HPC and IT professionals
• Tool for creating "hybrid" platforms
• Potentially federate
• Centralized deployment & operations possible
• DevOps friendly (for platform and science gateway developers)
• quick patches, release iterations, fast track new capabilities

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Concepts & components

• Containerized services in managed clusters
• Standalone or federated
• Federated clusters support multi-site platform systems
• Widely used open source technologies for growth and sustainability

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WP2: Node Specification & Deployment (SPN)

• API for local and (potentially) remote admin
• Monitoring & analytics
• SLATE SciDMZ node -- to be compatible with emerging national specs
• "Big", "Small", "Central" types

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WP3: Federated Services

Example command line interface to service meshes

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Challenges are many!

Cybersecurity and policy

• On premise services, potentially managed by third parties, present additional risks that need to be understood
• Engagements with CISO from our campuses
• Engagement with Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure

Scientific outreach

• Underlayment to Science
• Embedded with science collaborations with multi-institution �cyberinfrastructure - distributed data services, software, job routing
• Developers associated with the Science Gateways Community Institute

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SLATE and national cyberinfrastructure

• A service for regional and national research platform builders
• We need partners & volunteers:
• to help inform technology choices
• to confront and solve policy & cybersecurity issues
• focus on usability & integration in HPC environments
• align with emergent national SciDMZ patterns
• usability for science gateway developers & distributed service deployment teams

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Timeline - first year

• Testbed spec and deployment
• Service orchestration technology evaluations
• Early multi-site pilot demonstrator with:
• stateless services
• stateful services
• non-trivial HPC resource integration
• Early federated platform tools
• Recruit volunteers and build community

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Summary

• Reduce barriers to supporting collaborative science
• Give science platform developers a ubiquitous "CI substrate"
• Change distributed cyberinfrastructure opertional practice by mobilizing capabilities in the edge
• Achieve scale through multi-site service meshes: ensembles of federated, orchestrated services

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Thank you!

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slateci.io

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