Abstract
Science ecosystems are being built by federating computing systems and instruments located at geographically distributed sites over wide-area networks. These computing-instrument ecosystems are expected to support complex workflows that incorporate remote, automated AI-driven science experiments. Their realization, however, requires various designs to be explored and software components to be developed, in order to support the orchestration of distributed computations and experiments. It is often too expensive, infeasible, or disruptive for the entire ecosystem to be available during the typically long software development and testing periods. We propose a Virtual Infrastructure Twin (VIT) of the ecosystem that emulates its network and computing components, and incorporates its instrument software simulators. It provides a software environment nearly identical to the ecosystem to support early development and testing, and design space exploration. We present a brief overview of previous digital infrastructure twins that culminated in the VIT concept, including (i) the virtual science network environment for developing software-defined networking solutions, and (ii) the virtual federated science instrument environment for testing the federation software stack and remote instrument control software. We briefly describe VITs for Nion microscope steering and access to GPU systems.
This research is sponsored in part by the INTERSECT Initiative as part of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program and in part by RAMSES project of Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, and is performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed by UT-Battelle, LLC for U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
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Rao, N.S.V. et al. (2022). Virtual Infrastructure Twins: Software Testing Platforms for Computing-Instrument Ecosystems. In: Doug, K., Al, G., Pophale, S., Liu, H., Parete-Koon, S. (eds) Accelerating Science and Engineering Discoveries Through Integrated Research Infrastructure for Experiment, Big Data, Modeling and Simulation. SMC 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1690. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23606-8_10
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