Award Abstract # 1724821
CIF21 DIBBs: EI: SLATE and the Mobility of Capability

NSF Org: OAC
Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Initial Amendment Date: June 12, 2017
Latest Amendment Date: July 31, 2020
Award Number: 1724821
Award Instrument: Continuing Grant
Program Manager: Alejandro Suarez
alsuarez@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7092
OAC
 Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: July 1, 2017
End Date: June 30, 2023 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $3,998,494.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $3,998,494.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2017 = $3,248,494.00
FY 2018 = $250,000.00

FY 2019 = $250,000.00

FY 2020 = $250,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Robert Gardner (Principal Investigator)
    rwg@hep.uchicago.edu
  • Shawn McKee (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Joseph Breen (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Chicago
5801 S ELLIS AVE
CHICAGO
IL  US  60637-5418
(773)702-8669
Sponsor Congressional District: 01
Primary Place of Performance: University of Chicago
5735 S Ellis Ave., Ste 200
Chicago
IL  US  60637-5418
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): ZUE9HKT2CLC9
Parent UEI: ZUE9HKT2CLC9
NSF Program(s): COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS,
Data Cyberinfrastructure
Primary Program Source: 01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7433, 7569, 8048, 8084
Program Element Code(s): 724400, 772600
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Much of science today is propelled by multi-institutional research collaborations that require computing environments that connect instrumentation, data, and computational resources.  These resources are distributed among university research computing centers, national-scale high performance computing facilities, and commercial cloud service providers. The scale of the data and complexity of the science drive this diversity, and the need to aggregate resources from many sources into scalable computing systems.  The heterogeneity of resources causes scientists to spend more time on the technical aspects of computation and data management than on discoveries and knowledge creation, while computing support staff are required to invest more effort integrating domain specific software stacks with limited applicability beyond the community served.  Services Layer At The Edge (SLATE) provides technology that simplifies connecting university and laboratory data center capabilities to the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem and thus expands the reach of domain-specific science gateways and multi-site research platforms.

SLATE implements 'cyberinfrastructure as code' by augmenting the canonical Science DMZ pattern with a generic, programmable, secure and trusted underlayment platform. This platform hosts advanced container-centric services needed for higher-level capabilities such as data transfer nodes, software and data caches, workflow services and science gateway components.  SLATE uses best-of-breed data center virtualization components, and where available, software defined networking, to enable distributed automation of deployment and service lifecycle management tasks by domain experts. As such it simplifies creation of scalable platforms that connect research teams, institutions and resources to accelerate science while reducing operational costs and development cycle times. Since SLATE needs only commodity components for its functional layers, it is used in building distributed systems across all data center types and scales thus enabling creation of ubiquitous, science-driven cyberinfrastructure.

This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Computational Physics within the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Breen, Joe and Bryant, Lincoln and Chen, Jiahui and Ford, Emerson and Gardner, Robert W. and Glupker, Gage and Griffith, Skyler and Kulbertis, Ben and McKee, Shawn and Pierce, Rose and Riedel, Benedikt and Steinman, Mitchell and Stidd, Jason and Truong, L "Managing Privilege and Access on Federated Edge Platforms" Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (learning) , 2019 10.1145/3332186.3332234 Citation Details
Breen, Joe and Bryant, Lincoln and Chen, Jiahui and Ford, Emerson and Gardner, Robert W. and Glupker, Gage and Griffith, Skyler and Kulbertis, Ben and McKee, Shawn and Pierce, Rose and Riedle, Benedikt and Steinman, Mitchell and Stidd, Jason and Truong, L "Developing Edge Services for Federated Infrastructure Using MiniSLATE" Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (Learning) , 2019 https://doi.org/10.1145/3332186.3332236 Citation Details
Breen, Joe and McKee, Shawn and Riedel, Benedikt and Stidd, Jason and Truong, Luan and Vukotic, Ilija and Bryant, Lincoln and Carcassi, Gabriele and Chen, Jiahui and Gardner, Robert W. and Harden, Ryan and Izdimirski, Martin and Killen, Robert and Kulbert "Building the SLATE Platform" Proceedings of the Practice and Experience on Advanced Research Computing , 2018 10.1145/3219104.3219144 Citation Details
Gardner, R and Breen, J and Bryant, L and McKee, S "SLATE and the Mobility of Capability" Science Gateways 2017 , 2017 Citation Details
Gardner, Robert and Bryant, Lincoln and Stephen, Judith and Vukotic, Ilija and Weaver, Christopher and Wu, Wenjing "Towards a NoOps Model for WLCG" 24th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2019) , v.245 , 2020 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202024507024 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

 

SLATE (Services Layer at the Edge)

The SLATE project represented a pioneering effort to simplify the process of connecting university and laboratory data center resources to the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.  It provided a service that empowered the development of multi-institution and multi-site computation and data delivery platforms, enabling science organizations to efficiently utilize shared resources. SLATE leveraged Kubernetes, a leading container orchestration platform, along with components from the cloud-native ecosystem, while also exploring software-defined networking for optimization. A crucial aspect of SLATE's mission was to lead community efforts in developing new federated edge security and trust delegation models.

The SLATE project achieved several key outcomes and accomplishments, each contributing to the project's success and impact: Continuous Operation: Once deployed, the central SLATE services operated continuously with negligible downtime throughout the entire project period, ensuring uninterrupted access to resources.  Cloud-Based Infrastructure: The migration of central SLATE services to cloud-based infrastructure increased robustness and high availability, enhancing the platform's stability.  Support for Data Caches: SLATE supported data caches of various types deployed on edge servers in production, improving data access and distribution.  Production Clusters: The project successfully supported 15 SLATE edge clusters in production operation across as many institutions, expanding the platform's reach.  Federated operation: SLATE supported a network of caching servers in federated operation mode, optimizing data delivery with minimal operations effort. A novel trust framework and security model was developed to provide assurances to resource providers while limiting operator priviledges to a well-defined scope. SLATE demonstrated the use of deployed applications on a FABRIC network testbed node at CERN.


Last Modified: 10/27/2023
Modified by: Robert Gardner

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