The Astronomy Open Science Competence Centre Pilot (Astro-CC) is an ESCAPE-cluster related project meant to enable the astronomy research communities to accelerate their use of Open Science by supporting the implementation of FAIR principles. The Astro-CC project aims at expanding the use of Virtual Observatory standards by astronomy-focused ESFRIs, RIs, and data-producing projects of all scales, enabling the astronomy research communities to accelerate their use of Open Science by supporting the implementation of FAIR principles. It will run community events engaging experts in astronomical data service interoperability to prepare and define the scope of a Community Competence Center. The project will support the community development of the Virtual Observatory interoperability framework and its integration into EOSC, building on the progress made in the ESCAPE Science Cluster project. It aims at contributing to the vision of EOSC as a federation, providing feedback on the practical implementation of Open Science to the EOSC governance.

The IBIS 2.0 project upgrades the Interferometric BIdimensional Spectrometer, which was operated at the Dunn Solar Telescope of the National Solar Observatory from 2003 to 2019, for installation at a new telescope at the Teide Observatory. The instrument combines two tunable Fabry-Perot interferometers, narrowband interference filters, a polarimetric unit, fast cameras, and a suitable control for the acquisition of high-resolution spectropolarimetric data of the solar atmosphere in the 580-860 nm spectral range with short exposures at high cadence under a remote control. The project underwent several phases. We provide an update on the design progress of the instrument and the status of the project, with special emphasis on the challenges arising from the vertical setup required by the new installation. IBIS 2.0 is expected to contribute to a better knowledge of plasma properties at different heights in the solar atmosphere.

The EU ESCAPE project is developing ESAP, ESFRI 1 Scientific Analysis Platform, as an API gateway that enables the seamless integration of independent services accessing distributed data and computing resources. In ESCAPE we are exploring the possibility of exploiting EGI's OpenStack cloud computing services through ESAP. In our contribution we briefly describe ESCAPE and ESAP, the the use cases, the work done to automate a virtual machine creation in EGI's OpenStack cloud computing, drawbacks and possible solutions.

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has developed and built, in the last two decades, an ecosystem of distributed resources, interoperable and based upon open shared technological standards. In doing so the IVOA has anticipated, putting into practice for the astrophysical domain, the ideas of FAIR-ness of data and service resources and the Open-ness of sharing scientific results, leveraging on the underlying open standards required to fill the above. In Europe, efforts in supporting and developing the ecosystem proposed by the IVOA specifications has been provided by a continuous set of EU funded projects up to current H2020 ESCAPE ESFRI cluster. In the meantime, in the last years, Europe has realised the importance of promoting the Open Science approach for the research communities and started the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) project to create a distributed environment for research data, services and communities. In this framework the European VO community, had to face the move from the interoperability scenario in the astrophysics domain into a larger audience perspective that includes a cross-domain FAIR approach. Within the ESCAPE project the CEVO Work Package (Connecting ESFRI to EOSC through the VO) has one task to deal with this integration challenge: a challenge where an existing, mature, distributed e-infrastructure has to be matched to a forming, more general architecture. CEVO started its works in the first months of 2019 and has already worked on the integration of the VO Registry into the EOSC e-infrastructure. This contribution reports on the first year and a half of integration activities, that involve applications, services and resources being aware of the VO scenario and compatible with the EOSC architecture.

The aim of this work is to quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on the energy consumption on ARM MPSoC platforms, exploiting CPUs, embedded GPUs and FPGAs. One of them possibly represents the future of High Performance Computing systems: a prototype of an Exascale supercomputer. Performance and energy measurements are made using a state-of-the-art direct N-body code from the astrophysical domain. We provide a comparison of the time-to-solution and energy delay product metrics, for different software configurations. We have shown that FPGA technologies can be used for application kernel acceleration and are emerging as a promising alternative to "traditional" technologies for HPC, which purely focus on peak-performance than on power-efficiency.

New challenges in Astronomy and Astrophysics (AA) are urging the need for many exceptionally computationally intensive simulations. “Exascale” (and beyond) computational facilities are mandatory to address the size of theoretical problems and data coming from the new generation of observational facilities in AA. Currently, the High-Performance Computing (HPC) sector is undergoing a profound phase of innovation, in which the primary challenge to the achievement of the “Exascale” is the power consumption. The goal of this work is to give some insights about performance and energy footprint of contemporary architectures for a real astrophysical application in an HPC context. We use a state-of-the-art N-body application that we re-engineered and optimized to exploit the heterogeneous underlying hardware fully. We quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on energy consumption when running on four different platforms. Two of them represent the current HPC systems (Intel-based and equipped with NVIDIA GPUs), one is a micro-cluster based on ARM-MPSoC, and one is a “prototype towards Exascale” equipped with ARM-MPSoCs tightly coupled with FPGAs. We investigate the behavior of the different devices where the high-end GPUs excel in terms of time-to-solution while MPSoC-FPGA systems outperform GPUs in power consumption. Our experience reveals that considering FPGAs for computationally intensive application seems very promising, as their performance is improving to meet the requirements of scientific applications. This work can be a reference for future platform development for astrophysics applications where computationally intensive calculations are required.

The increasing amount of data produced in Astronomy by observational studies and the size of theoretical problems to be tackled in the next future pushes the need of HPC (High Performance Computing) resources towards the "Exascale". The HPC sector is undergoing a profound phase of transition, in which one of the toughest challenges to cope with is the energy efficiency that is one of the main blocking factors to the achievement of "Exascale". Since ideal peak-performance is unlikely to be achieved in realistic scenarios, the aim of this work is to give some insights about the energy consumption of contemporary architectures with real scientific applications in a HPC context. We use two state-of-the-art applications from the astrophysical domain, that we optimized in order to fully exploit the underlying hardware: a direct N-body code and a semi-analytical code for Cosmic Structure formation simulations. For these two applications, we quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on the energy consumption when running on three different systems: one that represents the present of current HPC systems (an Intel-based cluster), one that (possibly) represents the future of HPC systems (a prototype of an Exascale supercomputer) and a micro-cluster based on Arm MPSoC. We provide a comparison of the time-to-solution, energy-to-solution and energy delay product (EDP) metrics, for different software configurations. ARM-based HPC systems have lower energy consumption albeit running ≈10 times slower.

This work arises on the environment of the ExaNeSt project aiming at design and development of an exascale ready supercomputer with low energy consumption profile but able to support the most demanding scientific and technical applications. The ExaNeSt compute unit consists of densely-packed low-power 64-bit ARM processors, embedded within Xilinx FPGA SoCs. SoC boards are heterogeneous architecture where computing power is supplied both by CPUs and GPUs, and are emerging as a possible low-power and low-cost alternative to clusters based on traditional CPUs. A state-of-the-art direct N-body code suitable for astrophysical simulations has been re-engineered in order to exploit SoC heterogeneous platforms based on ARM CPUs and embedded GPUs. Performance tests show that embedded GPUs can be effectively used to accelerate real-life scientific calculations, and that are promising also because of their energy efficiency, which is a crucial design in future exascale platforms.

Many astronomy projects today are executed by distributed science teams with access to different computation and storage resources. As we move into the era of petabyte and exabyte datasets, it is recognized that moving the code to the data becomes necessary as the alternative becomes infeasible. The question becomes how can resource infrastructures support these large projects such that a team has integrated access to the different distributed resources available to a project. Examples of resources that could be integrated are files and directories, storage allocations, processing allocations, containers and virtual machine images, databases and tables, etc. A first step in this direction is the interoperability of authorization services. The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has developed many standards to support access and interoperability of infrastructure such as Single-Sign On (SSO), Credential Delegation Protocol (CDP) and VOSpace. Both Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) operated by the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre) and INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste (INAF-OAT) use these standards for provision of user storage to support projects. In the VOSpace implementation, users assign read-only and read/write permissions to groups that are defined in their respective home institution Group Management Services. In 2015, the EGI-Engage project in Europe partially funded an exploration of interoperability of authorization services in a joint project between the CANFAR and INAF-OAT. This has also led to the inclusion of this work in the Advanced European Network of E-infrastructures for Astronomy with the SKA (Aeneas) proposal. The joint CANFAR/ INAF-OAT project has added support to interoperate its VOSpace services by adding the capability of granting authorization to access a resource to groups defined in an external Group Management Service and to allow for the dynamic creation of internal user IDs that are associated with an external identify provider.

In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on the energy consumption on Arm MPSoC platforms, exploiting both CPUs and embedded GPUs. Performance and energy measures are made on a direct N-body code, a real scientific application from the astrophysical domain. The time-to-solutions, energy-to-solutions and energy delay product using different software configurations are compared with those obtained on a general purpose x86 desktop and PCIe GPGPU. With this work, we investigate the possibility of using commodity single boards based on Arm MPSoC as an HPC computational resource for real Astrophysical production runs. Our results show to which extent those boards can be used and which modification are necessary to a production code to profit of them. A crucial finding of this work is the effect of the emulated double precision on the GPU performances that allow to use embedded and gaming GPUs as excellent HPC resources.

The Virtual Observatory (VO) simulation standards, Simulation Data Model (SimDM) and Simulation Data Access Layer (SimDAL), establish a framework for the discoverability and dissemination of data created in simulation projects. These standards address the complexity of having a standard access and facade for data which is expected to be multifaceted and, of a diverse range. In this paper, we detail the realisation of an application exposing the theoretical products of one such scientific project via the simulation facades proposed by the VO. The scientific project in question, is a study of the evolution of young clusters in dense molecular clumps. The theoretical products arising from this study include a grid of 20 million SED (Spectral Energy Distribution) models for synthetic young clusters and related data products. Details on the implementation of SimDAL components in the application as well as the ways in which the data structures of SimDM are incorporated onto the existing data products are provided.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is in its early stages, but already some aspects of the EOSC vision are starting to become reality, for example the EOSC portal and the development of metadata catalogues. In the astrophysical domain already exists an open approach to science data: the Virtual Observatory view put in place by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) architecture of standards. The ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures) project has, among its tasks, to demonstrate that the VO architecture can be integrated within the EOSC building one and to provide guidelines to ESFRI partners (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) in doing this. This contribution reports on the progress of this integration after the first months of work inside ESCAPE.

Access Control is a client and server authentication and authorization implementation for user and group management. It has LDAP as default persistence layer built-in and it provides a RESTful interface to authentication, authorization and user and group management. This technical report provides an administrators guide to install, configure and manage the service known as Group Management Service, based on software APIs open source released by CADC (Canadian Astronomy Data Center). The guide includes instructions on how to install and configure the ldap server 389-Directory Server and the Web Server Tomcat.

The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing infrastructure involving an international cloud facility, EGI federated, and a set of services implementing IVOA standards and recommendations for authentication, data sharing and resource access. In this paper we describe technical problems faced, specifically we show the designing, technological and architectural solutions adopted. We depict our technological overall solution to bring data close to computation resources. Besides the adopted solutions, we propose some points for an open discussion on authentication and authorization mechanisms.

Aim: We evaluate the potential relationships between sea food dietary consumption and plasma phospholipid fatty acid composition, lipid profile, lipid oxidation and inflammatory parameters in a group of fishermen living in Chioggia, in the Northern Adriatic.

Aim of the study: Chest pain is one of the main reasons of admission to the Emergency Department. The aim of the study is to analyse the short-medium term diagnostic and predictive value of the cycle ergometer stress test for major adverse cardiac events in the evaluation of chest pain in subjects with low-intermediate risk of ACS that were admitted in Clinica Medica 1 (CM1). Moreover, to identify clinical features in this population in order to find cardiovascular risk factors that may affect test's sensibility and specificity.

Background: Familial Hypercholesterolaemia (FH) is a common genetic cause of premature coronary heart disease (CHD) due to lifelong elevated plasma low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. Aims of our study was to define the genotypic features of FH in relation to the clinical phenotype and the severity of the cardiovascular risk profile; assess the potential impact of genotypic characterization on response to drug therapy.