
The EOSC-hub project creates the integration and management system of the future European Open Science Cloud that delivers a catalogue of services, software and data from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and major research e-infrastructures. This integration and management system (the Hub) builds on mature processes, policies and tools from the leading European federated e-Infrastructures to cover the whole life-cycle of services, from planning to delivery. The Hub aggregates services from local, regional and national e-Infrastructures in Europe, Africa, Asia, Canada and South America. The Hub acts as a single contact point for researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research. Through the virtual access mechanism, more scientific communities and users have access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. The project also improves skills and knowledge among researchers and service operators by delivering specialised trainings and by establishing competence centres to co-create solutions with the users. In the area of engagement with the private sector, the project creates a Joint Digital Innovation Hub that stimulates an ecosystem of industry/SMEs, service providers and researchers to support business pilots, market take-up and commercial boost strategies. EOSC-hub builds on existing technology already at TRL 8 and addresses the need for interoperability by promoting the adoption of open standards and protocols. By mobilizing e-Infrastructures comprising more than 300 data centres worldwide and 18 pan-European infrastructures, this project is a ground-breaking milestone for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud.
Collaboration and sharing of resources is critical for research. Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAIs) play a key role in enabling federated interoperable access to resources. The AARC Technical Revision to Enhance Effectiveness (AARC TREE) project takes the successful and globally recognised “Authentication and Authorisation for Research Collaboration” (AARC) model and its flagship outcome, the AARC Blueprint Architecture (BPA), as the basis to drive the next phase of integration for research infrastructures: expand federated access management to integrate user-centring technologies, expand access to federated data and services (authorisation), consolidating existing capacities and avoiding fragmentation and unnecessary duplication. The main objectives of the AARC TREE project are to: (i) Capture and analyse new Authentication and Authorisation interoperability requirements (as emerging that support integration use-cases across the thematic area) and provide a landscape analysis of AAIs services (including gaps) in the RIs represented in AARC TREE (ii) Define and validate new technical and policy guidelines for the AARC BPA that address RIs use-cases. This will improve the integration of RIs across thematic areas and increase the ability of RIs to support emerging needs (iii) Expand the number of research communities that can implement the AARC BPA and/or the AARC guidelines, by providing a validation environment and toolkits. At the same time support existing AARC communities in adopting new guidelines (iv) Bring RIs, e-Infrastructures and relevant stakeholders together to align strategies to integrate new technologies, better interoperate and share resources across thematic areas and produce a compendium and recommendations for different stakeholders
ENVRIPLUS is a cluster of research infrastructures (RIs) for Environmental and Earth System sciences, built around ESFRI roadmap and associating leading e-infrastructures and Integrating Activities together with technical specialist partners. ENVRIPLUS is driven by 3 overarching goals: 1) favoring cross-fertilization between infrastructures, 2) implementing innovative concepts and devices across RIs, and 3) facilitating research and innovation in the field of environment to an increasing number of users outside the RIs. ENVRIPLUS organizes its activities along a main strategic plan where sharing multi-disciplinary expertise will be most effective. It aims to improve Earth observation monitoring systems and strategies, including actions towards harmonization and innovation, to generate common solutions to many shared information technology and data related challenges, to harmonize policies for access and provide strategies for knowledge transfer amongst RIs. ENVRIPLUS develops guidelines to enhance trans-disciplinary use of data and data-products supported by applied use-cases involving RIs from different domains. ENVRIPLUS coordinates actions to improve communication and cooperation, addressing Environmental RIs at all levels, from management to end-users, implementing RI-staff exchange programs, generating material for RI personnel, and proposing common strategic developments and actions for enhancing services to users and evaluating the socio-economic impacts. ENVRIPLUS is expected to facilitate structuration and improve quality of services offered both within single RIs and at pan-RI level. It promotes efficient and multi-disciplinary research offering new opportunities to users, new tools to RI managers and new communication strategies for environmental RI communities. The produced solutions, services and other project results are made available to all environmental RI initiatives, thus contributing to the development of a consistent European RI ecosystem.
EGI-ACE empowers researchers from all disciplines to collaborate in data- and compute-intensive research across borders through free at point of use services. Building on the distributed computing integration in EOSC-hub, it delivers the EOSC Compute Platform and contributes to the EOSC Data Commons through a federation of Cloud compute and storage facilities, PaaS services and data spaces with analytics tools and federated access services. The Platform is built on the EGI Federation, the largest distributed computing infrastructure for research. The EGI Federation delivers over 1 Exabyte of research data and 1 Million CPU cores which supported the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the first observation of gravitational waves, while remaining open to new members. The Platform pools the capacity of some of Europe’s largest research data centres, leveraging ISO compliant federated service management. Over 30 months, it will provide more than 82 M CPU hours and 250 K GPU hours for data processing and analytics, and 45 PB/month to host and exploit research data. Its services address the needs of major research infrastructures and communities of practice engaged through the EOSC-hub project. The Platform advances beyond the state of the art through a data-centric approach, where data, tools and compute and storage facilities form a fully integrated environment accessible across borders thanks to Virtual Access. The Platform offers heterogeneous systems to meet different needs, including state of the art GPGPUs and accelerators supporting AI and ML, making the Platform an ideal innovation space for AI applications. The data spaces and analytics tools are delivered in collaboration with tens of research infrastructures and projects, to support use cases for Health, the Green Deal, and fundamental sciences. The consortium builds on the expertise and assets of the EGI federation members, key research communities and data providers, and collaborating initiatives.