Digital Infrastructure

The Franklin develops state of the art digital infrastructure which allows us to do cutting edge research. Our interdisciplinary research provides a variety of data structures and sizes that all need to be stored, curated and process to give data driven insights.  

The digital infrastructure at the Franklin uses the Openstack Cloud project run by our partners STFC. This provides us powerful virtual machines for compute including the latest GPU cards and large scratch storage systems.  STFC provides data storage through Ceph Echo, a large object store, suitable for storing petabytes of scientific data.  

We are using Globus to provide fast transfer of multi-terabyte datasets from instruments to allow our cloud VMs and High Performance Computing clusters. This allows for rapid analysis of data and a quicker time to science. Globus is also used to easily share large datasets between research institutes. 

Using this cloud. we develop and maintain a Kubernetes cluster which is used to support our workloads, microservices and other deployments. We use Apache Airflow on this platform to provide automated pipelines for scientific data management. These pipelines include automatically capturing scientific metadata to improve the reproducibility of our data and to curate our data asset in line with OpenFAIR.