Fenix: Distributed e-Infrastructure Services for EBRAINS

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.