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The Virtual Research Environment

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:

1. A federated and reliable Authentication and Authorization layer
2. A federated distributed storage solution (the Data Lake), providing functionalities for data injection and replication through a Data Management framework (Rucio)
3. A computing cluster supplying the processing power to run full analyses with Reana, a re-analysis software
4. 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.

The Science Projects which are using the VRE are described here.

If you are a scientist or a new user curious to use the above resources, please refer to the following documentation:

1. AAI
2. Rucio Data Lake
3. Reana cluster
4. Notebook service

If you want to deploy the VRE on your own infrastructure, of you want to submit an issue to help us improve the platform, please follow the developer documentation.

Contact

To contact the CERN VRE team with questions, doubts, problems accessing the meetings Indico category or the monitoring dashboards, please join the Slack channel. For more formal requests, i.e. conferences, webinars and events presentations, please email us at escape-cern-ops@cern.ch.

Join the community

There are two recurrent meetings open to all scientists/researchers/developers interested in the VRE.

• The VRE working-group monthly meetings are intended for developers and system administrators who are supporting scientific infrastructures. They constitute an informal space to stimulate discussion and keep all the members up to date with the latest news and hot topics on the development and deployment of tools and services within the broad field of scientific analysis platforms. Join here.
• The VRE users bi-weekly meetings on Tuesdays at 14 CET are intended for users of the VRE who are experiencing technical issues, want to learn more about the VRE deployment, are in need of extra resources or want their software to be included in the VRE. Join here.

Resources

• Gazzarrini, E., Garcia, E., Gosein, D., Vendrell Moya, A., Kounelis, A., and Espinal, X., “The Virtual Research Environment: towards a comprehensive analysis platform”, arXiv e-prints, 2023. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2305.10166.
• plenary talk at 26th International Conference on Computing in High Energy & Nuclear Physics (CHEP2023)
• presentation at 21st International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research, Bari 2022
• presentation at ESCAPE to the Future, Brussels 2022