Speaker
Francesco Giacomini
(INFN CNAF)
Description
The success of a scientific endeavor depends, often significantly, on
the ability to collect and later process large amounts of data in an
efficient and effective way. Despite the enormous technological
progress in areas such as electronics, networking and storage, the
cost of the computing factor remains high. Moreover the limits reached
by some historical directions of hardware development, such as the
saturation of the CPU clock speed with the consequent strong shift
towards hardware parallelization, has made the role of software more
and more important.
In order to support and facilitate the daily activities of software
developers within INFN, an integrated infrastructure has been
designed, comprising several tools, each providing a function: project
tracking, code repository, continuous integration, quality control,
knowledge base, dynamic provisioning of virtual machines, services, or
clusters thereof. When applicable, access to the services is based on
the INFN-wide Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure. The
system is being installed and progressively made available to INFN
users belonging to tens of INFN sites and laboratories and will
represent a solid foundation to the software development efforts of
the many experiments and projects that see the involvement of
INFN. The infrastructure will be beneficial especially for small- and
medium-size collaborations, which often cannot afford the resources,
in particular in terms of know-how, needed to set up such services.
This contribution describes the design of the infrastructure, the
components that implement it, how they integrate with each other, in
particular from the Authentication point of view, and how it is
expected to evolve in the future.
Primary authors
Francesco Giacomini
(INFN CNAF)
Marco Bencivenni
(INFN)
Matteo Manzali
(Istituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare (IT))
Riccardo Veraldi
(INFN)
Stefano Antonelli
(CNAF - INFN)
Stefano Longo
(INFN)
