The Human Brain Project (HBP) (https://humanbrainproject.eu/) is a large-scale flagship project funded by the European Commission with the goal of establishing a research infrastructure for brain science. This research infrastructure is currently being realised and will be called EBRAINS (https://ebrains.eu/). The wide ranging EBRAINS services for the brain research communities require diverse access, processing and storage capabilities. As a result, it will strongly rely on e-infrastructure services. The HBP led to the creation of Fenix (https://fenix-ri.eu/), a collaboration of five European supercomputing centres, who are providing a set of federated e-infrastructure services to EBRAINS. The Fenix architecture has been designed to uniquely address the need for a wide spectrum of services, from high performance computing (HPC) to on-demand cloud technologies to identity and access federation, for facilitating ease of access and usage of distributed e-infrastructure resources. In this article we describe the underlying concepts for an audience of computational science end-users and developers of domain-specific applications, workflows and platforms services. To exemplify the use of Fenix, we will discuss selected use cases demonstrating how brain researchers can use the offered infrastructure services and describe how access to these resources can be obtained.

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In this paper, an open and generic storage simulator is proposed. It simulates with accuracy multi-tiered storage systems based on heterogeneous devices including HDDs, SSDs and the connecting buses. The target simulated system is constructed from the hardware configuration input, then sent to the simulator modules along with the trace file and the appropriate simulator functions are selected and executed. Each module of the simulator is executed by a thread, and communicates with the others via ZeroMQ, a message transmission API using sockets for the information transfer. The result is an accurate behavior of the simulated system submitted to a specific workload and represented by performance and reliability metrics. No restriction is put on the input hardware configuration which can handle different levels of details and makes this simulator generic. The diversity of the supported devices, regardless to their nature: disks, buses, ..etc and organisation: JBOD, RAID, ..etc makes the simulator open to many technologies. The modularity of its design and the independence of its execution functions, makes it open to handle any additional mapping, access, maintenance or reconstruction strategies. The conducted tests using OLTP and scientific workloads show accurate results, obtained in a competitive runtime.