2. Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud with Grant Agreement 687614 is a Pre-Commercial Procurement Action funded by H2020 Framework
Programme
Overview
2 November 2016
Bob Jones
CERN
IT department
02/11/2016
3. 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 ATLAS
experiment
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
Adopters
Suppliers
Additional Users:
Updated
October 2016
The Helix Nebula Science Cloud
public-private partnership
4. 4
The Hybrid Cloud Model
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
5. PCP PPI
5
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
6. Helix Nebula Science Cloud Joint Pre-Commercial Procurement
Bob Jones, CERN 6
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 >5.3M€
7. HNSciCloud project phases
Preparation
•Analysis of requirements,
current market offers and
relevant standards
•Build stakeholder group
•Develop tender material
Implementation and sharing
Jan’16 Dec’18
Each step is competitive - only contractors that successfully
complete the previous step can bid in the next
4/5/2016 7
4 Designs
3 Prototypes
2 Pilots
Call-off
Feb’17
Call-off
Oct’17
Tender
Jul’16
8. What will be procured
A hybrid cloud platform for the European research community
11/2/2016 8
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
GEANT network
9. 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 including HPC working
with datasets in the petabyte range
Network Connectivity and Federated Identity Management
provide high-end network capacity via GEANT for the whole platform with common
identity and access management
Service Payment Models
explore a range of purchasing options to determine those most appropriate for the
scientific application workloads to be deployed
Bob Jones, CERN 9
10. The story so far . . .
Open Market
Consultation
17 March 2016
Tender
published
21 July
200+
downloads
Information Day
7 September
Response to 70+
questions about
the tender
material
Tender Deadline
19 September
Bids received from 28
international
companies, SMEs and
public organisations
Contract Award
Ceremony
2 November
Based on tender
evaluation against
published criteria
by experts from
the Buyers group
11/2/2016 10
