Infrastructure
Organisational
- Operator: Materials Cloud is operated by the Materials Cloud team, a group of developers working at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
- Host: Materials Cloud is hosted at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano. CSCS is an autonomous unit of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and closely collaborates with the local University of Lugano (USI).
- Funding: Materials Cloud started thanks to funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and EPFL through the MARVEL National Centre of Competence in Research (MARVEL NCCR). Today, it has become a partnership between many consortia.
Technical
- Virtual Hardware: Materials Cloud runs on the OpenStack installation at CSCS, which provides virtual machines, virtual disks and object storage. The entire technical infrastructure of Materials Cloud is physically located on CSCS premises.
- Server Management: Materials Cloud servers are managed via ansible for automation and transferability to other platforms in view of future federation of services. For all servers we maintain independent duplicates where changes are validated before they go into production.
- Frontend: The Materials Cloud frontend application is written in AngularJS and is served using apache.
- Backend: The individual Materials Cloud sections are powered by different backends, including slideshot (LEARN), docker/dokku (WORK/TOOLS, DISCOVER), JupyterHub (WORK/AiiDA lab), the AiiDA REST API (EXPLORE), and Invenio 3 (ARCHIVE).
- Data storage: Data uploaded to or generated in Materials Cloud is stored either in Cinder volumes or in the Swift object store.
- Backups: As of December 2017, the object store is backed up daily by CSCS for disaster recovery purposes. Efforts at CSCS are ongoing to provide more fine-grained backups and versioning for both the object store and Cinder volumes.
- DOIs: Materials Cloud partners with the ETH library, a founding DataCite member, to provide DOIs for Materials Cloud Archive records.
Architecture Diagram
Click on the figure to enlarge
Deployment Diagram
