Interoperable e-Infrastructure Services in Arabia

Abstract

e-Infrastructures became critical platforms that integrate computational resources, facilities and repositories globally. The coordination and harmonization of advanced e-Infrastructure project developed with partners from Europe, Latin America, Arabia, Africa, China, and India contributed to developing interoperable platforms based on identity federation and science gateway technologies. This paper presents these technologies to support key services in the development of Arabia networking and services platform for research and education. The platform provides scientists, teachers, and students with seamless access to a variety of advanced resources, services, and applications available at regional e-Infrastructures in Europe and elsewhere. Users simply enter the credentials provided by their home institutions to get authenticated and do not need digital certificate-based mechanisms. Twenty applications from five scientific domains were deployed and integrated. Results showed that on average about 35,000 monthly jobs are running for a total of about 17,500 CPU wall-clock hours. Therefore, seamlessly integrated e-Infrastructures for regional e-Science activities are important resources that support scientists, students, and faculty with computational services and linkage to global research communities.