The Virtual Research Environment
Access the VRE platform at https://jhub-vre.cern.ch!
The Virtual Research Environment is an analysis platform developed at CERN serving the needs of scientific communities involved in European Projects. Its scope is to facilitate the development of end-to-end physics workflows, providing researchers with access to an infrastructure and to the digital content necessary to produce and preserve a scientific result in compliance with FAIR principles. The platform's development is aimed at demonstrating how sciences spanning from High Energy Physics to Astrophysics could benefit from the usage of common technologies, initially born to satisfy CERN’s exabyte-scale data management needs.
The Virtual Research Environment’s main components are:
- AAI: A federated and reliable Authentication and Authorization layer
- The Rucio Data Lake: A federated distributed storage solution (the ESCAPE Data Lake), providing functionalities for data injection and replication through a Data Management framework (Rucio)
- Reana: A computing cluster supplying the processing power to run full analyses with Reana, a re-analysis software
- JupyterHub: An enhanced notebook interface with containerised environments to hide the infrastructure’s complexity from the user.
The deployment of the Virtual Research Environment is open-source and modular, in order to make it easily reproducible by partner institutions; it is publicly accessible and kept up to date by taking advantage of state of the art IT-infrastructure technologies.
Contact
To contact the CERN VRE team with questions, doubts, problems accessing the meetings Indico category or the monitoring dashboards, please join the Mattermost channel.
For more formal requests, i.e. conferences, webinars and events presentations, please email us at escape-cern-ops 'at' cern.ch.
Join the community
The ESCAPE Science projects repository
The Science Projects which are using the VRE are described here.
The VRE coordination meeting
We have a recurrent meeting open to all scientists/researchers/developers interested in the VRE or who are supporting scientific infrastructures.
What do we discuss:
- Latest news and updates on the VRE technical infrastructure and use cases
- Engagement with European projects and funding possibilities
- Design, support, and operation of VREs for communities involved in the ESCAPE Collaboration, and beyond!
See our meetings agenda.