Fenix: Distributed e-Infrastructure Services for EBRAINS

Abstract

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.

Data management strategy for a collaborative research center

“…Other neuroscience-focused data repositories with specific purposes include G-node GIN for datasets derived from both human and nonhuman organisms, BrainLife (human neuroimaging) [ 236 ], Distributed Archives for Neurophysiology Data Integration [ 237 ], and Fenix-backed EBRAINS [ 238 ]. The HBP EBRAINS data curation team may assist with data submission and integration, as well as to provide defined embargo durations to allow for progressive disclosure.…”

Integrating FTS in the Fenix HPC Infrastructure

“…This functionality is largely enabled by the HTTP library DaviX. 5 It is used as a plugin for GFAL2 and hence can be exploited by FTS. However, DaviX supported only Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.…”

“…Fenix [4,5] combines the services of 6 leading European supercomputing centres and offers unified access for research communities. It is a federated e-infrastructure that provides both computing and data services based on resources available at the involved European supercomputing centres.…”