This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications.

In this paper we propose a distributed architecture to provide machine learning practitioners with a set of tools and cloud services that cover the whole machine learning development cycle: ranging from the models creation, training, validation and testing to the models serving as a service, sharing and publication. In such respect, the DEEP-Hybrid-DataCloud framework allows transparent access to existing e-Infrastructures, effectively exploiting distributed resources for the most compute-intensive tasks coming from the machine learning development cycle. Moreover, it provides scientists with a set of Cloud-oriented services to make their models publicly available, by adopting a serverless architecture and a DevOps approach, allowing an easy share, publish and deploy of the developed models. INDEX TERMS Cloud computing, computers and information processing, deep learning, distributed computing, machine learning, serverless architectures.

The application of deep learning techniques using convolutional neural networks for the classification of particle collisions in High Energy Physics is explored. An intuitive approach to transform physical variables, like momenta of particles and jets, into a single image that captures the relevant information, is proposed. The idea is tested using a well-known deep learning framework on a simulation dataset, including leptonic ttbar events and the corresponding background at 7 TeV from the CMS experiment at LHC, available as Open Data. This initial test shows competitive results when compared to more classical approaches, like those using feedforward neural networks.

SummaryCloud computing has permeated into the IT industry in the last few years, and it is nowadays emerging in scientific environments. Science user communities are demanding a broad range of computing power to satisfy high-performance applications needs, such as local clusters, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and computing grids. Different workloads need from different computational models, and the cloud is already considered as a promising paradigm.The scheduling and allocation of resources is always a challenging matter in any form of computation and clouds are not an exception. Science applications have unique features that differentiate their workloads, hence their requirements have to be taken into consideration to be fulfilled when building a Science Cloud. This paper will discuss what are the main scheduling and resource allocation challenges for any Infrastructure as a Service IaaS provider supporting scientific applications.

With the increasingly rapid growth of data in life sciences we are witnessing a major transition in the way research is conducted, from hypothesis-driven studies to data-driven simulations of whole systems. Such approaches necessitate the use of large-scale computational resources and e-infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI, one of key the enablers of the digital European Research Area, is a federation of resource providers set up to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners. Here we aim to provide the state of the art of Grid/Cloud computing in EU research as viewed from within the field of life sciences, focusing on key infrastructures and projects within the life sciences community. Rather than focusing purely on the technical aspects underlying the currently provided solutions, we outline the design aspects and key characteristics that can be identified across major research approaches. Overall, we aim to provide significant insights into the road ahead by establishing ever-strengthening connections between EGI as a whole and the life sciences community.