GARR

About us

Consortium GARR (GARR) is a non-profit association founded under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, University and Research. The founding members are CNR, ENEA, INFN and CRUI Foundation, representing all Italian universities. GARR is the ultra-broadband network dedicated to the Italian research and education community. Its main objective is to provide high-performance connectivity and to develop innovative services for the daily activities of researchers, professors and students as well as for international collaboration.

GARR provides high-capacity (from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps) connectivity to about 4 million research and education users and connects more than 1.000 sites, including research institutes, universities, research hospitals, cultural institutes, libraries, museums and schools. The GARR network covers the whole Italian territory and connects directly with cross border optical fibres to nearby countries and to the pan-European GÉANT network. Moreover, GARR provisions to its users a virtualization infrastructure based on five data centres located in five different sites contributing to a resource pool of 9000 virtual cores, 66 TB of RAM and more than 10 PB of storage space.

GARR activities cover not only the provision of network connectivity and computing facilities, but a rich portfolio of advanced ICT services, specifically developed and tailored on users' needs; to date, GARR service portfolio includes digital identity management, advanced videoconferencing, cybersecurity, cloud services, educational and teaching tools and services.

Know more about us at https://www.garr.it/.

Main role in the project

GARR involvement will focus on the setup of the community-driven and transversal cloud services, deployment and maintenance of related cloud resources and services (WP6 - Core Services Foundation and Implementation and WP7 - Services Delivery and Operation), and contribute to the integration of the services into the EOSC (WP8 – EOSC integration).

In particular, generic Cloud services will include:

• allocation of a quota of computing resources for each of the services to be ported to the EOSC-portal, for an initial total of at least 300 virtual cores, 2 TB RAM, 10 TB disk space: this quota may be increased as needed, and the relevant resources will be provided on the OpenStack and/or the Kubernetes platforms, as the relevant communities will see fit.
• advanced user-community oriented identity services supporting the integration of AAI infrastructure with EOSC; This services portfolio ranges from Identity Federation services, like SAML Identity Providers or SAML Service Providers, to community proxies, capable of integrating SAML and OIDC/OAuth2 based authentication and bridging towards social identities if required. An additional set of services which might be optionally provided is Attribute Authority and Group Management services, if required to integrate the project cloud services to EOSC. Those services might be provided according to the requirements of the designed architecture for the project AAI infrastructure and the integration of the project services in EOSC.
• proactive monitoring of the computing resources (to prevent and/or quickly react to technical issues which may affect operations and to accumulate usage statistics) and access to the GARR-CSD ticketing system as the channel to interact with the technical staff in order to provide assistance and guidance or to report problems.

In addition to deploying the services, GARR will also document and maintain procedures to deploy them on generic (Openstack- and, possibly, Kubernetes-based) infrastructures.