Given the significant interest in the scientific and academic community for this topic, GARR has been involved since the beginning with the developments in high throughput distributed computing under the GRID paradigm, and has contributed to numerous GRID projects in the years from 2004 to 2012, such as EGEE, EGI, EUChinaGRID, EUMedGRID, performing research activities as well as support actions for numerous user communities in the domains of physics, astronomy, bioinformatics and medical research.
Subsequently, the success in recent years of the cloud paradigm had a strong impact with the education and research community, thus making it necessary to create a Distributed Computing and Storage (CSD) Department to manage these technologies for the benefit of GARR user community, in terms of services as well as research.
The GARR-X Progress Project gave a decisive boost to cloud research and development work, with the implementation of an OpenStack testing platform distributed over the 5 sites of the infrastructure. On this infrastructure, GARR CSD team designed and implemented a federated OpenStack platform model, and tested object storage federation scenarios, mutual synchronization of datasets from external user groups and the replication of large datasets (Google n-grams, collaboration with SWITCH, the Swiss research network). Different authentication mechanisms were also integrated, with successful results in the investigation of user authentication and authorisation strategies based on SAML and OIDC protocols.