SLATE blog

This is the first in our series of roughly quarterly release notes for activities in the SLATE project. We have a whole slew of changes across all aspects of SLATE, including a revamped web experience, client/server improvements, better tooling, more applications, and new sites added to the Federation.

Kubernetes supports multiple container runtimes through its Container Runtime Interface (CRI). As a result, besides the typical default choice of Docker (containerd) one can also use a variety of other drop-in replacements, such as cri-o. This article will discuss another option, namely Singularity.

Network testing is hugely important to diagnose problems within and between sites. We’re trying to make network diagnostics dead simple with SLATE, and to do that we’ve SLATE-ified pieces of the excellent perfSONAR software stack. This application has recently landed into the SLATE stable catalog, and so we thought we would give you a little tour of this handy tool!

Jason Stidd and Chris Weaver of the SLATE team both presented papers at PEARC19. The talks were on July 30 and July 31:

Developing and Operating Edge Services on Federated Infrastructure Using MiniSLATE (presentation)

Managing Privilege and Access on Federated Edge Platforms (presentation)

This whitepaper how applications are managed on a federated research platform. The intended end result is that an application administrator can deploy an application to an edge cluster in a trusted manner.

We describe progress on building the SLATE (Services Layer at the Edge) platform.

An important principle in the management of edge services in research computing centers, and their ScienceDMZs, is autonomy.

SLATE (Services Layer at the Edge) is a new project that, when complete, will implement “cyberinfrastructure as code” by augmenting the canonical Science DMZ pattern with a generic, programmable, secure and trusted underlayment platform.