August 05, 2021

The Second ESCAPE WP5 Workshop took place on 5 August 2021. This workshop brought together members of the ESCAPE ESFRI community, contributors to other ESCAPE work packages, and members of the WP5 team, to evaluate the progress being made on the development of ESAP, the ESCAPE ESFRI Science Analysis Platform. The twin goals of the workshop were to ensure that ESAP capabilities remain closely matched to the ESFRI's needs, while also being well integrated with the work being carried out in other work packages. This workshop was intended to satisfy ESCAPE project milestone MS31.

Due to ongoing restrictions on travel, the workshop took place virtually, using Zoom. While total participation varied slightly through the event, a peak of 47 participants was recorded. The INDICO platform was used for organizing the agenda and collecting presentation materials; these materials remain online and accessible for future reference at http://indico.in2p3.fr/e/SecondWP5Workshop. The majority of the meeting was not recorded, but two “live demos” were captured for posterity and are also available through INDICO.

The first part of the workshop presented an overview of the ESAP system. This included discussion of the overall vision for ESAP, accompanied by a demonstration of its current capabilities. A prototype version of the ESAP system was made available to participants, and they were invited to experiment with it. This was followed by an explanation of how service and infrastructure providers can integrate their offerings with ESAP, and then a discussion of future development plans, including integration with batch processing systems and a “managed database” capability.

The second part of the workshop focused on cross-work package activities. This included an impressive demonstration of integration of a Jupyter-based interactive data analysis system with the “data lake” being developed in ESCAPE WP2, together with an explanation of how software and services can be registered with the Open-source Scientific Software and Service Repository (OSSR) developed by WP3, and then made available through ESAP and an illuminating discussion of how ESAP capabilities can best integrate with the ongoing Virtual Observatory developments that WP4 is contributing to.

Throughout, the meeting provoked lively and insightful discussion, and suggested a number of promising avenues for future development and collaboration. At the end of the meeting, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire, reflecting on their experiences at the meeting and their goals for ESAP. The results of the discussion and questionnaire will be summarized in ESCAPE deliverable D5.3, which will be forthcoming.