What is SLATE?
A SLATE edge platform within a campus Science DMZ hosts trusted services operated by a central team which might be operating a network of such services across several campuses. Science “app” developers interact with the SLATE platform service factory to define and launch elements of a science gateway, data cache, or local workflow service.
“Services Layer At The Edge (SLATE) and the Mobility of Capability”, a project funded by the National Science Foundation in 2017, aims to address these challenges. A team from the Enrico Fermi and Computation Institutes at University of Chicago, the Center for Network and Storage-Enabled Collaborative Computational Science at the University of Michigan, and the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah, working with the national advanced cyberinfrastructure community will foster technology that simplifies connecting university and laboratory data center capabilities to the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.
Why SLATE?
Deploying science services across national and international distributed infrastructures is hard! Rolling out hardware, Operating Systems, science applications, and science tools at every geographically discrete site requires a significant IT presence at each site. The IT personnel have to deal with the hardware, the IT software, AND the science software in order to make a science service function. This fact requires a lot of knowledge and time on the order of days, weeks, and months. SLATE aims to make the job easier for the local IT support person and to minimize the time to deployment for the science services.
Once installed, SLATE connects local research groups with their far-flung collaborators, allowing central research teams to automate the exchange of data, software and computing tasks among institutions without burdening local system administrators with installation and operation of highly customized scientific computing services. By stitching together these resources, SLATE will also expand the reach of domain-specific “science gateways” and multi-site research platforms.
SLATE will implement “cyberinfrastructure as code”, augmenting high bandwidth science networks with a programmable “underlayment” edge platform. This platform hosts advanced services needed for higher-level capabilities such as data and software delivery, workflow services and science gateway components.
SLATE will use best-of-breed data center virtualization components, and where available, software defined networking, to enable automation of lifecycle management tasks by domain experts. As such, it simplifies the creation of scalable platforms that connect research teams, institutions and resources, accelerating science while reducing operational costs and development time. Since SLATE needs only commodity components, it can be used for distributed systems across all data center types and scales, thus enabling creation of ubiquitous, science-driven cyberinfrastructure.
