Interoperable geographically distributed astronomical infrastructures: technical solutions

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of a federated astronomical data and computing infrastructure that integrates international cloud resources and IVOA standards to efficiently distribute data and computation.

Contribution

It presents technical solutions for interoperable, geographically distributed astronomical infrastructures, including architectural design and authentication mechanisms.

Findings

Successful integration of international cloud and federated resources

Implementation of IVOA standards for data sharing and authentication

Proposed open discussion points on authentication and authorization

Abstract

The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing infrastructure involving an international cloud facility, EGI federated, and a set of services implementing IVOA standards and recommendations for authentication, data sharing and resource access. In this paper we describe technical problems faced, specifically we show the designing, technological and architectural solutions adopted. We depict our technological overall solution to bring data close to computation resources. Besides the adopted solutions, we propose some points for an open discussion on authentication and authorization mechanisms.