inspired - egi · inspired // issue #18 february 2015 1 the registration for the egi conference...

news from the EGI communityISSUE 18FEBRUARY 2015

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TOP STORIES

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European GridInfrastructure

www.egi.eu

France Grilles: turning papers into impactpage 3

EPOS: Architecture and requirementspage 7

Inspired

Long tail of science platform

09 Crowd computing at your finger tips

06 How to participate in the TNC15

01 Registration for the EGI Conference in Lisbon

EGI-ELIXIR integration

EGI FedCloud reaches 50 use case markpage 7

10 Cryptocoin miners: the CSIRT is watching you

In this issue...> Peter Solagna introduces a pilot project to develop a platform

for the long tail of science> Inspired talks to France Grilles to find out how a database of

publications can be deployed to demonstrate impactet> Fotis Psomopoulos and Rafael Jiménez write about the EGI-

ELIXIR integration project> Daniele Bailo writes about the EPOS' architecture,

requirements and areas of collaboration with EGI> Diego Scardaciwrites about the growing FedCloud user

community as the use cases reach the 50 mark> Robert Lovas invites researchers and NGIs to try a new type

of computing resource> And the EGI CSIRT team warns cryptocoin miners that eyes

are on themSend your feedback and suggestions to: [email protected]

Thanks!

This Issue

Our next event is in Lisbon!(Alain Gavillet / Wikimedia Commons)

1Inspired // Issue #18 February 2015

The registration for the EGI Conference 2015 is open!

The EGI Conference 2015 ishosted by EGI.eu and IBERGRID,a partnership between thePortuguese National DistributedComputing Infrastructure (INCD)and the Spanish National GridInitiative, with the theme ofEngaging the ResearchCommunity towards an OpenScience Commons.The Lisbon meeting will be thefirst opportunity for thecommunity to meet in the post-EGI-InSPIRE era and plan thework for the coming years. Theprogramme will be focused oncross-disciplinary services withthematic days, where researchcommunities and competencecentres of different disciplinescan join forces to discusscommon issues.The programme will also includethe public launch of the EGI-Engage project, which wasrecently favourably evaluatedand is expected to start inMarch.

Co-locationsThe following events will be heldin co-location with the EGIConference 2015:> EUBrazilCC workshop :Monday, 18 May> Globus community meeting :Wednesday, 20 May> Open Grid Forum (OGF44) :Thursday-Friday, 21-22 MayConference dinnerThe will take place at the Palácioda Rocha do Conde d’Óbidos onWednesday, 20th May in the oldLapa neighbourhood, facing theNational Museum of Ancient Art.The palace is the headquartersof the Portuguese Red Cross andwas built in the 17th century forthe Count of Óbidos. It's one ofthe few stately homes in Lisbonthat survived the 1755earthquake. The dinner will takeplace in the Red Cross Council,adjacent rooms and in theterrace with a spectacular viewover the river Tejo.

More information

Save the date!18-22 May 2015 - Lisbon,Portugal

EGI Conference 2015 websitehttp://conf.egi.eu

Registrationhttp://go.egi.eu/reg2015

Inspired // Issue #18 February 2015

The process of integrating newuser communities in EGI hasbeen successful many times,enabling access to EGI resourcesto hundreds of new users everyyear.However, bringing new usercommunities to EGI involvessome overhead effort from theEGI/NGIs side and the usercommunity side.The advantages of setting up aVirtual Organisation (VO) in EGIare multiple: best support,possibility to have dedicatedSLA, detailed accounting andmany more technical services,and it is the way to go for long-term collaborations or distribu-ted collaborative communities.But despite all this, in somecases the overhead of creating aVO and/or getting grid certificatediscouraged new users fromjoining EGI. This has affectedespecially small research groupsor individuals who need to getaccess to a limited amount ofresources for a limited amountof time.To support these use cases, thatare commonly identified as the'long tail of science', EGI isdeveloping a dedicated platformto make very easy and quick forindividual users to access EGIhigh throughput computing andcloud resources.The problemOne of the most commonbarriers to access is the processof requesting a X509 certificate.The EUGridPMA federation hasCertification Authorities (CA) inalmost every European countryto reach as many users aspossible. But even with this

Features of the long tail of science platform:

Zero-barrier access: any researcher can get a start-up resourceallocation100% coverage: anyone with internet access can become a userUser-centric: User support for platform users is availablethrough the NGIsRealistic: Reuse existing technology building blocks as much aspossible, requiring minimal new developmentsSecure: Provide acceptable level of tracking of users and useractivities (with no face to face id check)Scalable: Can scale up to support large number resourceproviders, technology providers, use cases and users

Long tail of science platform: researchers, be our guests!

Peter Solagna introduces a pilot designed to make it easier for researchers withinthe long tail of science to access EGI's resources

widespread distribution ofcertification entities, some usersdo not have access to themwhen their home institution hasno connection with EUGridPMAat all. Additional effort is neededto register VOs in the EGIOperations Portal, manage theVO on a VOMS server and beenabled at site level.How can we make thiseasier?A dedicated User ManagementPortal for the long tail of scienceresearchers is currently underdevelopment. The users will beable to register in the portal injust a few minutes with theireduGAIN credentials or an EGISSO login.Every user request will beassessed by the EGI/NGIs usersupport teams, to check that it isacceptable and that theinformation is correct. Theverification will involve a phonecall or an email from EGI. Thetarget is to process requestswithin four weeks.All our guest users enabled inthe User Management Portal,will be assigned to a catch-all VO,enabled in pre-selected resource

centres. The users can accessEGI resources through dedicatedscience gateways deployedspecifically for this use case andintegrated with the UserManagement Portal.The development of theplatform is progressing and ourtarget is to present it at the EGIConference in Lisbon, and toopen the platform for a trialperiod during that week.If you are part of a researchgroup, with no need for long-term agreements and dedicatedresources, or if you are worriedabout the overhead of becomingan EGI user, we will havesomething for you very soon!

What is the long tail ofscience?

It refers to individuals orsmall groups of researchers,with limited resourcesand/or expertise, that finddifficult to exploit moderncomputational methods, orshare valuable data.

More informationhttp://go.egi.eu/LToSpilot

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France Grilles: creating a publications' database toshow the infrastructure's impact

The French NGI has an online database of +1,500 scientific papers, publishedthanks to the computing resources and services they provide. Inspired talked toGeneviève Romier to find how they created the database and how they deploy it todemonstrate the scientific impact of the French e-Infrastructure.

Inspired: How did this start? Whydid you decided to startcollecting the publications in asystematic way?

Geneviève Romier: In May 2011,when I started working with theuser communities at withFrance Grilles, one of my firstactions was to set up adatabase of publications.

This was a response to a requestby the France Grilles funders toassess the scientific activitybased on grid resources and tomeasure its impact. Thedatabase allowed us toestablish statistics to evaluatethe use of grids across time.The scope of the database wasthen extended to include cloudand France Grilles’ resources ingeneral.

I: How does it work? What's thesystem you use?

GR: The main effort was to setup the framework. We neededa simple and the most possibleautomated way to set up andmaintain the database.

The technical part was almosteasy. The obvious choice wasHAL (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/), which was set upmore than 10 years ago as anopen archive where authorscan deposit scholarlydocuments from all academicfields. HAL allows us to buildcollections with specificstamps. We created a FranceGrilles stamp to manage thenew database.

The organizational part wastrickier. Legally, the deposit ofa publication in an archivemust be made in agreementwith the co-authors and in therespect for the policy of thepublishers. Depositing papersin HAL is part of the policies ofseveral organisations andlaboratories. But unfortunatelythis is not always the case.

I: What are the challenges?GR: The first issue is to convince

scientists to deposit theirarticles in HAL or at least toreference them. I use allpossible means ofdissemination: advertisementsand also presentation of thestatistics of the collection

during the France Grillesscientific days, specificmessages on our website andemail lists, personal emails,personal discussions, presen-tation of the collection innational workgroups and EGIVTs… and it works even if it isnot enough from my point ofview.

The second issue is to identifythe relevant publicationsalready in HAL. I often need toread the text or theacknowledgements of anarticle to find if a paper isrelevant. The 'AcknowledgmentStatements’ provided by theEGI Scientific PublicationsRepository ImplementationVirtual Team is very helpful.


I: How much effort did youspend?

GR: The technical effort to setupthe collection took two or threemeetings with HAL team andseveral days to customize awebsite for the database andto understand how to findrelevant publications.

For dissemination, I take everyopportunity to ask forpublications and to show thestatistics. Populating thedatabase is a question ofregular work and it takes a fewhours per month. Personally Ithink that the return ofinvestment is great.

I also want to acknowledge thehelp of the HAL team, all thecommunities that disseminatemy numerous emails in theirown circles, and all researchersand the laboratories librarianswho reference theirpublications in HAL.

I: What is the involvement of thescientists?

GR: The scientists have toreference or deposit theirpublications in HAL. Dependingon where they work, this maybe done by librarians.

"We can now present statistics that arevery helpful to show our funders that

the our infrastructure and our servicesare a real tool for research."

I: Do you ask scientists toacknowledge France Grilles?

GR: France Grilles set up anacknowledgement that is partof the Acceptable Use Policy ofour national VO and that isadvertised on our website.

I: What are the advantages ofcollecting publications?

GR: France Grilles knows now alot more about its users andthe different communities. Wecan present statistics that arevery helpful to show ourfunders that the infrastructureand our services are a real toolfor research. This complementsvery well the accountinginformation we have on CPUhours consumed. It shows thediversity of the disciplines andwe can see the futuregeneration of researchersemerging through the PhDthesis. The database gives aliving image of France Grilles.

I: What is there to be improved?GR: In my wish list the European

one is the interconnection ofHAL with OpenAire and allnational repositories tomutually share at least thepublications references. Thisinterconnection could help allof us to mutualize our workand to better know who ourusers are and how to bettersupport them.

More information

Geneviève Romier is NGIInternational Liaison (NIL) ofFrance Grilles.

France Grilles' archive ofpublications:https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/FRANCE-GRILLES

France Grilles - http://www.france-grilles.fr/

France Grilles, the French NGI, was created in 2010 as a Scientific Interest Group by eightorganizations including the French ministry of Research and Higher Education. It aims at buildingand operating a multidisciplinary national Distributed Computing Infrastructure open to allsciences and to developing countries. France Grilles provides an open space for collaborationswithin and across disciplines and organizations.

France Grilles is operated by CNRS' Institut des Grilles et du Cloud and has three main objectives:> establish and operate a national production grid and cloud infrastructure> contribute with the other countries involved to the EGI European e-infrastructure> strengthen synergies and collaborations between teams using grids and clouds for scientificproduction and doing research on the grid and cloud


EGI–ELIXIR project: Integrating datasets for bioinformatics

Fotis Psomopoulos and Rafael Jiménez write about a joint project that will opennew door for life science research

The complexity of datasetsBioinformatics is an interdis-ciplinary domain, combiningcomputational methods andstatistical approaches to advanceresearch in life sciences. As afield, bioinformatics reliesheavily on public referencedatasets and benefits fromincreasing compute capabilitiesto run algorithms. But the waysto turn all the available capacityand data into knowledge havenot grown as fast and usersstruggle to discover, downloadand compute with the constantlyexpanding volume of data.Take the areas of epigeneticsand metagenomics, for example.For both, the bottlenecks in theanalysis workflow are compari-sons against reference datasetsor computing with multipledatasets. Given the amount ofdata involved, users tend to optfor local datasets, often withinthe home institution. This meansthat researchers end up prefer-ring limited studies, missing out

in the process significant datapatterns and motifs that couldemerge from the inclusion of BigData techniques and methods.The bottom line is that we havean increasing demand tocompute the data where thedatasets are. Some EGI membersalready host some biologicalreference datasets across theinfrastructure. EGI, however,does not yet provide discoverycapabilities, nor guidelines toreplicate additional datasetsonto EGI sites.

A combined EGI-ELIXIRsolutionEGI will join forces with ELIXIR tosolve this problem through a 9-month project to develop waysto facilitate discovery of existingreference datasets in EGI. Theproject will also develop anddeploy new services to allowreplication of life sciencereference datasets by dataproviders, resource providersand researchers.The joint project will involveELIXIR, the NGIs from Greece,Italy, Poland and Slovenia andthe EGI.eu team in Amsterdam.The project will:> Identify key datasets suitablefor replication in EGI, includingdatasets already existing in theinfrastructure, and set out thecorresponding standards andprocedures;> Develop a dataset registry forthe Applications Database;> Evaluate and propose analysis

About ELIXIR

ELIXIR is a pan-European research infrastructure for biologicalinformation, uniting life science organisations in managing andsafeguarding the massive amounts of data being generatedevery day by publicly funded research. One of its early servicesis the ELIXIR Registry, which lists all its available sciencedatabases and analytics tools.

url: http://www.elixir-europe.org/

Image: ELIXIR-Europe

How to participate in the TNC15

Karim Mostafi

6

tools to work with data replicas;> Promote integration with theELIXIR Registry.BenefitsThe project will benefitindividual researchers the most.By combining the computationalinfrastructure with the mostfrequently-accessed referencedatasets, the project will enableusers to execute highly detailedanalysis workflows on a muchgreater scale than previouslypossible, and at a reasonabletime frame.For ELIXIR’s members and NGIs,the project will provide:> A set of tools to allow for morebalanced load on storageresources across their sites;> A pilot infrastructure with key

Inspired // Issue #18 February 2015

More information

TNC 2015 website:https://tnc15.terena.org

TNC is the largest networkingconference for research andeducation, attracting moredecision makers, managers,network and collaborationspecialists, and identity andaccess management expertsfrom research organisations,universities and industry everyyear.Today, national research andeducation networks are at anexciting crossroads in society.They provide the basicinfrastructure on which bigscience and big data is build, butthey also address the needs ofincreasingly diverse usercommunities. Many questionsaround cloud computing,software defined networking ormobility remain a challenge. Allof this in a time when privacy

and security are not a given.This year’s TNC will addressthese topics through keynotespeeches, technical sessions,lightning talks and demos.You can participate in theTNC2015 by:> submitting a proposal for a 5-minute lightning talk or a posterpresentation (deadline 15 April);> sending demonstrationproposals until 15 April to:[email protected] ;> registering to the event;> following live streams online;> following #TNC15 on socialmedia.TNC15 will be held in Porto,Portugal from 15-18 June.The conference programme isnow available and the keynotespeakers confirmed:

> John Day – The missing layer> Manfred Laubichler –Detecting innovation innetworks of collaboration: agraph theoretical approach> Sarah Kenderdine – DigitisingUNESCO heritage / data analysis> Timo Lüge – Disaster Responsein a Connected World> Avis Yates Rivers – Evolution ofdiversity in informationtechnology> João Paulo Cunha – Smartcities

More information

EGI-ELIXIR project:https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Integrating_Reference_Datasets

Fotis Psomopoulos is aresearcher in bioinformaticsat the Aristotle University ofThessaloniki and an EGIChampion.

Rafael Jiménez is ELIXIR’sChief Technical Officer.

datasets for life science analysisworkflows and a registry withinformation for users about theavailable reference datasets andtools, and> The technical knowledge toguide the setup of productioninfrastructures based on thepilot infrastructure.For the EGI community as awhole, the project will:> Increase what we know abouttools, methods and solutions toreplicate large datasets onto thee-infrastructures (grid, cloud);> Develop tools and best practi-ces that are reusable by otherscientific domains, and> Will broaden EGI's scope froma compute infrastructure to adata infrastructure.


EPOS: an e-Infrastructure to integrate Solid EarthScience data

Daniele Bailo writes about requirements and possible areas of collaboration with EGI

The European Plate ObservingSystem (EPOS) is an ambitiouslong-term integration planaddressing the major solid earthresearch infrastructures inEurope. For its large scale andextent, EPOS is a uniqueinitiative which will foster newscientific discoveries and enablescientists to investigate the solidearth system in unprecedentedways.EPOS ended its PreparatoryPhase in October 2014 and,being included in the top threeinfrastructures in theprioritization list byCompetitiveness Council, is – atthe moment of writing thisarticle – in the process ofsubmitting the proposal forImplementation Phase.EPOS architectureA key goal of EPOS is to provideend-users with homogeneousaccess to services andmultidisciplinary data collectedby monitoring infrastructuresand experimental facilities, aswell as access to software,processing and visualizationtools. Such a complex system

requires a solid, scalable andreliable architecture in order toaccommodate innovativefeatures and to meet theevolving expectations of theheterogeneous communitiesinvolved.The overarching technicalobjective is to design andimplement an Integrated CoreService (ICS) platform,supporting the standardised andtransparent access to data, dataproducts and services.The EPOS community isorganised in Thematic CoreServices (TCS) - e-Infrastructures(often distributed) directlyconnected with nationalresearch infrastructures anddata centres and providing data,data products, metadata andservices related to one disciplineonly (e.g. seismology). TCS,therefore, are involved both asusers and data/servicesproviders.One of the main components ofthe ICS system is the metadatacatalogue based on the CERIFmodel, used to manage accessand exploitation of users,software, data and resources.Because one of the aims of EPOSis the integration andoptimization of resources atEuropean level, the project relieson IT initiatives which canprovide computational servicesto users and implementfundamental modules, forinstance AAAI software tomanage secure access to

resources. Such services arecalled Computational EarthSciences (CES).In this framework, organisationssuch as EGI can stronglycontribute in the construction ofEPOS: this will enable EU tooptimise resources and to starttackling the challenging issue ofresources procurementmanagement, and EPOS to buildon the basis of well tested andreliable technologies, thuscreating a new, robust andinnovative solid earth science e-Infrastructure.

More information

EPOS websitehttp://www.epos-eu.org/

EPOS is numbers

25 countries256 national researchinfrastructures+140 Institutions+120 Experimental Labs+170 Monitoring Networks+7000 seismic and GNSSstations

EPOS architecture


EGI Federated Cloud: 26 communities, 50 use cases

Diego Scardaci writes about the growing usage of cloud resources among the EGIuser community

The EGI Federated Cloud wasofficially launched a year ago inHelsinki at the EGI CommunityForum 2014.Since then, EGI has devoted abig effort to setup a strategy tosupport the many communitiesinterested to exploit this newcapability.The first task was to producedocumentation and tutorials toallow scientists to understandthe cloud paradigm and try theservices. We then created acatchall VO to speed-up the timebetween the first contact with acommunity interested to use theFedCloud and their first realtests on the e-Infrastructure. Thecatchall VO, fedcloud.egi.eu, hasbeen enabled in all FedCloudsites and can be used forapplication prototyping andvalidation for up to six months.This hugely reduced the effort toaccess the infrastructure,allowing user communities toquickly check if theinfrastructure can be useful forthem in the long-term.Thanks to the VO and a clearprocess to bring the use casesfrom the initial tests to a fullproduction status, we arecurrently supporting 26communities and 50 use casescoming from different scientificdisciplines. Nine of these arenow in production and ninehave pre-production status.

FedCloud use casesA third of the FedCloud use casescome from the biological sciences.The Swedish (BILS) and Finnish(CSC) ELIXIR nodes are working tointegrate some of their serviceson the FedCloud and the BioVelproject is running four applicationsin production. The READemptionuse case, a next generationsequencing applicationdeveloped by the WürzburgUniversity in Germany, recentlymoved to production too.Physical sciences representabout a fifth of the use casesincluding CERN’s ATLAS, CMSand LHCb communities evaluaterunning their jobs in theFedCloud.Earth sciences use cases includelarge communities as DRIHMand VERCE running, respectively,hydrology and hydraulic modelsand seismology applications.The well-known WRF climateprediction application has beenintegrated by the CHAIN-REDSproject and Jena University

successfully tested the FedCloudto run JAMS, a framework tobuild up complex hydrologicalmodels.In addition, some private com-panies are showed interest tothe EGI Federated Cloud servicestoo. For example, Engineering,an Italian SME, is currentlytesting the FedCloud to run theHAPPI toolkit, a platform fordata preservation developed inthe context of SCIDEP-ES project,and the backend services ofINERTIA, an application toretrieve energetic data of final-occupant of tertiary building.The user base of the FedCloud isnot yet complete. We arecurrently supporting use casescoming from basic medicine,arts, language and architecture,mathematics and computersciences.

Federated Cloud use cases per scientific fields (according to the EGIclassification of scientific disciplines)

More information

http://go.egi.eu/fcc


Crowd computing resources at your fingertips

Robert Lovas invites EGI scientists and operators to try a new technology

In September, the Amsterdamregion hosted a number ofevents related to Big Data andscientific computing, includingthe open meeting of ResearchData Alliance and the EGIconference on Big Data andClouds. The Crowd Computing2014 meeting in Almere was apart of these events, with afocus on crowd computing,citizen science and desktop gridtechnology integrated in themainstream of distributed e-Infrastructures.The International Desktop GridFederation (IDGF) hosted theevent and invited David Wallom,from the Oxford e-Science Centre,to give a keynote talk addressingthe integrated use of differenttypes of computing resources.Their Climate Predictionprogramme, for example,involves citizens, crowdcomputing platforms and theEGI Federated Cloud.The HADDOCK portal of WeNMRcommunity is another instanceof complementary use of crowdcomputing resources. HADDOCKis now sending a significantfraction of its compute-intensivejobs to IDGF’s volunteerresources at production level.According to the EGI AccountingPortal, nearly 10,000 jobs havebeen processed in a few monthsperiod through IDGF.IDGF supports local crowdcomputing initiatives as well. TheUniversity of Westminster LocalDesktop Grid connects about1,500 laboratory PCs into aprivate infrastructure with ahigh-level science gateway.

Application areas includemolecular docking simulationsand 3D-rendering for computeranimations.

Crowd computing is GreenThe green policy introduced atthe University of Westminsterwas a good argument to convincedecision makers to adopt IDGF’scrowd computing resources. Thenew report from the IDGF mem-ber SONY CSL entitled “Evaluateenergy footprint of DesktopGrids" provides the evidence weneed to demonstrate the greencredentials of crowd computing.To estimate the energy needs,many factors come into play.The most important are theperformance/energy ratio of thecomputing nodes, whether thecomputation runs on a dedicatedmachine or as a backgroundtask, and whether the wasteenergy (heat) can be reused.Based on measurements withwatt meters, it has been proventhat the energy footprint can beextremely low if the infrastructuredesigner/operator follows thereport’s recommendations.Crowd Computing can contributeto the sustainability of e-Infra-structures, as acknowledged bythe EIROforum’s report on e-Infrastructure for the 21stCentury: “Volunteer computinginitiatives across Europe haveestablished production structures

[…] such as the InternationalDesktop Grid Federation that cansupport a growing range ofapplication types with very modestoperational and coordinationoverheads”.The report also emphasises theimportance of that “suchstructures become an integral partof the e-infrastructure commons”.The new IDGF Operations Centreserves this goal as an umbrellafor crowd computing (desktopgrid) resources. The operationscentre collects and makes suchresources available, visible andeasily accessible by the users ofthe EGI infrastructure. The IDGFOC welcomes both users withapplications and resourcecentres (even NGIs) lacking ofenough computationalresources. A Memorandum ofUnderstanding is to be signed inJanuary to maintain the goodrelation between thefoundations EGI and IDGF in thefuture.

More information

http://crowdcomputing.eu

http://desktopgridfederation.org/web/working-group-egi-collaboration

http://desktopgridfederation.org/road-map


Cryptocoin miners: the CSIRT is watching you

Leif Nixon and Sven Gabriel, from the EGI Security Team, explain why there is nopoint in trying to use EGI for mining cryptocoin

In a recent report to Congressfrom the Inspector General ofthe US National ScienceFoundation it was reported thata researcher had had his accessto all US government fundedcompute systems terminated.Why such a drastic measure?This researcher had abused hisaccess to NSF supercomputersby mining bitcoin currency.Bitcoin, along with other relatedcryptocoin systems, are virtualcurrencies that are generated or’mined’ through a computationallyexpensive process. This makeslarge scale computing infrastru-ctures very tempting for peoplelooking for a quick profit.This kind of incident is becomingcommon also in the EGI infra-structure. The EGI ComputerSecurity Incident ResponseTeam (CSIRT) has increased thelevels of alertness and hasalready handled cases wherelegitimate users submittedunauthorized cryptocoin miningjobs to EGI systems.In one especially serious case,substantial amounts of miningjobs were submitted over the2013 Christmas holidays beforebeing discovered in earlyJanuary. The user had attemptedto masquerade the miningactivities as legitimate productionjobs and also tried to hide histraces by planting false evidence

of external attacks on the jobsubmission machine. He failedand was caught.The EGI CSIRT takes unauthorizedaccess to the infrastructure veryseriously, and the incidentprompted an extensiveinvestigation. When it could beshown without reasonabledoubt that the mining jobs hadbeen submitted by an insider,rather than an external attacker,the investigation was handedover to the concerned universityfor further handling and led tofilling a complaint.While it may seem very temptingand harmless to use otherwiseidling systems to generatebitcoins, everyone mustunderstand that this is notacceptable behaviour.Cryptocoin mining violatesmultiple policies and causesdirect and significant costs forthe hosting institution in theform of increased use of power

and cooling capacity.Besides moral and legalobjections, it should also benoted that ordinary computeclusters are a bad choice forillicit mining activities. Clustersare architecturally unsuitable formining and they number amongthe few systems where peopleactually pay attention to the CPUload.Everyone tempted to dosomething stupid should alsoknow that cryptocoin miningcomputations have a verydifferent profile to legitimatescientific applications. Thismeans that they stand out veryobviously in the monitoringsystem. And because cryptocoinmining is a good indicator ofillicit activities, intrusiondetection systems such as Broexplicitly scan for miners.Abusing the EGI infrastructurefor cryptocoin mining is a low-yield activity with high risk ofdetection and, when they getcaught, with a very negativeimpact on the offender’s career.To put it simply: kids, if you wantto mine coins, don't try to do iton a supercomputer. It getsnoticed!

"Everyone tempted to do something stupidshould also know that cryptocoin mining

computations have a very different profile tolegitimate scientific applications."

inspired - egi · inspired // issue #18 february 2015 1 the registration for the egi conference...

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