The High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Lille, registered in the EGI GOCDB as UNIV-LILLE, provides researchers several services, such as a cloud computing facility based on OpenStack. UNIV-LILLE is a member of the FG-Cloud, the federated cloud operated by France Grilles (French NGI), together with the several other sites such as CC-IN2P3, GRIF or IN2P3-IRES.
We have recently completed the integration of UNIV-LILLE resources into the EGI Federated Cloud, becoming the second French site to join this federation.
From 2010 to 2014, the UNIV-LILLE site was certified as a grid resource provider and member of the EGI High-Throughput Computing service. Those nodes were decommissioned following the departure of the engineer in charge of operations. As a consequence, the UNIV-LILLE site was decommissioned, and we were required to restart the certification process to integrate the EGI cloud federation.
The registration of the resource center was an easy step, but the certification of our EGI-enabled services was a little bit more complicated. The process started in October 2018 and took about 5 months.
The main barriers that we faced during the integration process were:
From this experience, we can recommend the following to anyone considering integration:
During the certification process, 8 GGUS tickets have been opened, all of them concerning different issues. Thanks to the EGI team, most of them were quickly solved. Our integration helped to highlight some gaps in documentation and improve the overall process.
Despite these difficulties, the integration to the Federated Cloud remains an easy and well thought operation and we hope to see more resource centers joining the federation.
Cyrille Toulet is the UNIV-LILLE System and Network Administrator.
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