The Virtual Research Environment: A multi-science analysis platform

Abstract

One of the objectives of the ESCAPE collaboration, within the context of the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud, is integrating analysis workflows from Cosmology, Astrophysics and High Energy Physics into a common framework, making it easier for researchers to share data, software and analysis code. The development of the ESCAPE Science Projects (Dark Matter and Extreme Universe) relies on the implementation of the Virtual Research Environment, a prototype analysis platform deployed in the respect of FAIR data principles. The Virtual Research Environment’s main components are (1) an Authentication and Authorization layer, (2) a federated distributed storage solution, providing functionalities for data injection and replication through a Data Management and Orchestration software, (3) an interactive notebook interface that hides the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and facilitates browsing data catalogues and (4) computing processing power to run full end-to-end analyses through workflow schedulers and resource managers that also allow for pipelines’ preservation. This contribution will depict the collection of services and technologies that compose the Virtual Research Environment, hosted on a cloud infrastructure and managed by an open source, publicly available repository.