The Virtual Research Environment

• Enrique Garcia Garcia (CERN)
• Elena Gazzarrini (CERN)
• Domenic Frencky Gosein (Mannheim University of Applied Sciences (DE))

Room: 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an analysis platform developed at CERN serving the needs of scientific communities involved in European Projects. Its scope is to facilitate the development and the sharing of end-to-end workflows, providing researchers with access to an infrastructure and to the digital content necessary to produce a scientific result in compliance with FAIR principles. The platform is being developed under the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) Future Project, aimed at demonstrating how sciences spanning from High Energy Physics to Astrophysics could benefit from the usage of common technologies, initially born to satisfy CERN’s exabyte-scale data management needs. The Virtual Research Environment’s main components are (1) a federated distributed storage solution (the Data Lake), providing functionalities for data injection and replication through a Data Management framework developed at CERN (Rucio), (2) a computing cluster supplying the processing power to run the analyses through Reana, a re-analysis software supporting various computing back-ends (Kubernetes, HTCondor, Slurm), (3) a federated and reliable Authentication and Authorization layer and (4) a JupyterHub interface with customizable containerised environments to hide the infrastructure’s complexity from the user. The deployment of the Virtual Research Environment is kept as open-source and modular as possible, with the aim of making it easily reproducible by other partner institutions; it is publicly accessible and is kept up to date by taking advantage of state of the art IT-infrastructure technologies.