General
(This text is useful for the invitation to the trainees; the figure further down should be provided too.)
EUDAT 2020 will run a coding event for its users in Barcelona on 22 and 23 June 2016. The event will not include introductory material on the EUDAT services and participants are expected to familiarise themselves with the technologies and services beforehand. To help participants with that we provide on-line training material.
Trainees can consult the user documentation on the services for a general introduction if needed, and then they should follow the online training material under GitHub. The online training material foresees two types of trainees: those who want to learn how to deploy and integrate the EUDAT B2SAFE and B2STAGE services; and those who prefer to only learn how to use such services. The choice will affect the attendees' understanding of the services, e.g. following the "use" part of the training will familiarise the attendees with the APIs of the services, but not with the underlying technology and its wiring, whereas following the full in-depth tutorial will allow trainees to understand how the components of a service are combined and thus enables the trainees to also extend the integration of services at the low-level (technology-level rather than API level).
The details are as follows:
Deploy: The tutorial takes trainees through the steps how to build an infrastructure and steer data flows in this infrastructure shown in the Figure below. It assumes that trainees have sufficient resources to build the setup. They will need to prepare: three distinct (potentially virtualised) computational resources; each with 2 vCPU, 8GB memory, 100GB disk; running a Linux operating system (Ubuntu preferred); in which they have sudo access rights. Then, they will need to follow the instructions on the EUDAT Training GitHub repository.
By following the B2SAFE-B2STAGE tutorials, they will become familiar with the installation, configuration and using scenarios for B2SAFE, B2STAGE and their underlying technologies, iRODS, gridFTP, the handle system and the EUDAT Data Storage Interface. The B2SHARE tutorials explore use of the service at API-level, not deployment, as B2SHARE is a service provided centrally by EUDAT. The tutorials also cover the areas under "Use" below. It is expected that attendees will train themselves across all tutorials, at least for the services that will be of interest to them in Barcelona.
Use: For users who do not have access to computational resources or only wish to follow the scenarios of using the above-mentioned services, we provide a virtual machine setup in which they can steer data flows and familiarise themselves with the underlying technologies. In this setup they will learn about client-commands and the defined APIs for certain components of B2SAFE and B2STAGE. We also provide the client tools to test B2SHARE via its API and the handle system via B2HANDLE, the epicclient and cURL interface.
Users will need to apply well in advance of the event so we can give them access to these virtual machines and so they have enough time to go through the training material. In order to apply, trainees should use the EUDAT contact pages; they can use a subject like: "Access to training VMs"; and a message like: "I am attending the User Meeting in Barcelona on 22-23 June 2016. I am a member of the [XYZ] User Community/Data Pilot." It is expected that attendees will train themselves across all tutorials that list "researchers", "data managers" or "Interested researchers" in the B2SAFE-B2STAGE training catalogue file on GitHub and all B2SHARE tutorials. Note that it will not be possible to learn how to deploy EUDAT services unless you have access to your own computational resources as per above.
