DAFNI Architecture

Following an extensive design phase with our community, DAFNI is being developed through these five individual components that will provide a novel tool kit for researchers to support large scale modelling and analysis.

National Infrastructure Database

The NID exists to provide centrally managed access to national infrastructure datasets and those required to support national infrastructure research. This, however, requires a number of functional capabilities on the platform to enable this datastore to be usable, efficient and reliable. The requirements for the NID identify a number of core features: a centrally managed datastore; an Extract Transform and Load (ETL) framework; a data catalogue; and a data access and publication service.

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National Infrastructure Modelling Service

The NIMS will provide the user community with the ability to improve performance of existing models, reduce the complexity of creating models and facilitate the creation of complex system-of-systems models. In order to provide this functionality, there are a number of logical components that will support this activity. They are as follows: a workflow framework and creator; a workflow engine; a model catalogue and a data transformation library.

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National Infrastructure Cloud Environment

The foundation of all of the capabilities that DAFNI will provide are based upon the existence of a high performance, flexible and scalable cloud environment. Fundamentally this will replicate the functionality available at other analogous cloud environments. The DAFNI project will however provide a series of adaptations to increase the suitability for the intended user community. The breakdown of this is as follows: a cloud environment; a cloud services user interface and command line interface; a number of PaaS offerings (e.g. data science notebooks and databases); and a centralised resource pool in support of PaaS and workflow manager (NIMS) activities.

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National Infrastructure Visualisation Suite

Visualisation is an often overlooked or underinvested area of a platform, but is often the primary means through which meaning from results is attained. This is the core role that visualisation will play for DAFNI. It will act as an enabler for facilitating understanding of data, models, outputs and translation of findings to decision makers. In order to achieve this means, the platform will provide the following core functions: traditional visualisation as a service (e.g. graph and tabular representations); and advanced visualisation as a service (e.g. virtual/augmented reality).

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Security Service

The DSS forms the crux of all the guarantees the platform will provide with regards to security. In order to ensure the robustness of the platform this aspect manages all security aspects internal to the platform. In order to achieve this it must allow users to seamlessly access and use services without being hindered by the platform whilst maintaining security. In order to achieve this the platform will provide the following functional components: an authentication service; an authorisation service; a monitoring service; and an accounts management service.