# OpenDreamKit: Cloud needs and uses
Dima Pasechnik
27 September 2016
-- [EGI](https://www.egi.eu/) workshop [Design your e-infrastructure](https://indico.egi.eu/indico/event/3025/), co-located with [DI4R](http://digitalinfrastructures.eu/)
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## OpenDreamKit - background
***Open Digital Research Environment Toolkit***
***for the Advancement of Mathematics*** :
[OpenDreamKit.org](OpenDreamKit.org)
- [Horizon 2020](https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/)
**Work Programme**: [European Research Infrastructures](https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/european-research-infrastructures-including-e-infrastructures)
**Call**: Virtual Research Environments (VREs)
- **Budget**: 7.6 M€, 2015-2019 (and beyond?)
- **Consortium**: [15 sites, 50 participants](http://opendreamkit.org/partners)
Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, UK (mostly university and government labs)
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## OpenDreamKit - background
- Objective: build a VRE for pure and applied mathematics from an ecosystem of **open source** mathematical software systems (cf. Matlab/Mathematica/Maple...)
- In particular:
- technical aspects (distribution, HPC, testing ...)
- interactive environments based on **Python** (**Jupyter** notebook, [SageMathCloud (SMC)](http://cloud.sagemath.com) ...)
- mostly based around [SageMath](http://sagemath.org), a Python library and computer algebra system, several hundred active devs, 500Mb codebase - Python, Cython, C/C++, Fortran, Lisp,...
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## OpenDreamKit - background
- timeline: development started in 2006, ongoing
- continuous testing using a network of patch/build-bots (in-house design)
- some use of cloud resources (Google Compute Engine used by SMC, some use of Microsoft Azure), no (real) experience with EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, etc...
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## OpenDreamKit - users
- interactive maths/CS books (about 10 published), online courses, maths databases
- used in research (pure and applied maths, CS), tens of thousands active users, running local installs, part small (10-100) mult-user systems, SMC (20000+ users), SageCell
- most current users are undergraduate students taking courses
- research users - line between users and devs is blurred (and this is good!)
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## OpenDreamKit - current status
- existing components:
- web(browser)-based frontends (Jupyter notebooks (and kernels), SageMath
notebooks, SMC notebooks, )
- backends: SageMath and other systems (e.g. Anaconda); distributed as source, binary installs (wheels)
- online databases, such as [LMFDB](http://www.lmfdb.org/) (number-theoretic objects),...
- SMC service (run by a commercial company on Google Compute Engine, although completely with GPL software)
- development and testing frameworks
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## OpenDreamKit - current status
- under development
- docker (and other?) containers for backends
- SMC installs made user-friendly
- semantic-aware interfaces between systems
- how e-infrastructures can help
- more integration, better testing/development plaforms?
- running SMC and similar services on federated clouds?
See our [Proposed use cases](https://github.com/OpenDreamKit/OpenDreamKit/blob/master/WP3/2016-09-27-DesignYourInfrastructureWorkshop-UseCase.md)
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## OpenDreamKit - workshop plans
- to get an idea how federated clouds may be useful for us
- start on using some of it?
- social nets, can they help us?
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# More reading
- [On OpenDreamKit's open and collaborative proposal writing](http://opendreamkit.org/2015/01/31/open-proposal-writing/)
- The [developer's perspective](/about-developers) on OpenDreamKit.
- [About OpenDreamKit](/about)