Workshop on Provisioning of Virtual Research Environments and Data Management

(from https://www.rz.uni-freiburg.de/rz/aktuell/vice-ws)

The ViCE project team organized together with the CiTAR and the deNBI project a two day workshop and hackathon on Virtual Research Environments and Data Management at the computer center of the university. One of the workshop goals was to produce an overview over (competing) strategies, approaches and tools for provisioning Virtualized Research Environments for different disciplinary use cases of the project partners.

The first day of the workshop started with presentations and live demos by Jonathan Bauer on "Current developements in bwLehrpool" and the convergence of VM building and PXE booting in bwLehrpool context as well as the provisioning of the major container technologies Docker and Singularity (Beta) on that platform. Björn Grüning of the Prof. Backofen group and major driver of the Galaxy developments in Freiburg demonstrated practical computational reproducibility in the life sciences. The session was followed by Oleg Stobbe from the CiTAR project on current developments in VRE frameworks. The first session got closed by Christopher Hauser from Ulm University by a presentation of ViCE Registry project.

The afternoon session was dedicated to a hacking sessions on ViCE Registry, ways of VRE building (Container/VM) and the access to research data (Research Data Management). The second day clarified the distinction between provisioning of VRE (ViCE) and re-usability of VRE (CiTAR) as well as defined some (lightweight) guidelines for the creation of VRE and VRE workflows. Several existing usecases (HEP, computational chemistry, bioinformatics, bioconda for HPC) in different disciplines got discussed and evaluated for further uptake. Additionally, external dependencies (services, hardware, data sources and sinks, ...) of VREs were summarized. The workshop produced a good overview on the current state of developments in that field.