Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET is one of the leading computer research centres in Poland, offering a variety of computer and storage resources to scientists. The research unit of the Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET AGH focuses on scalable distributed systems, cross-domain computations in loosely coupled environments, knowledge management and support for life sciences. Currently, CYFRONET is involved in many national and EU projects and initiatives, distributed storage delivery (leading ONEDATA development) and the provision of solution for research communities.
ARCTIK is a Brussels-based PR, communications and evaluation consultancy, which specialises in European affairs and sustainability. ARCTIK provides strategic and innovative communication solutions to European institutions and other actors, enabling them to communicate messages, stimulate constructive dialogues and help them evaluate their impact. ARCTIK offers a wide variety of services to meet all communications needs. The company boasts specialist expertise in a range of areas, including networking activities; designing and producing communication tools; as well as the logistical management and coordination of conferences and events. It has a proven track record of delivering tangible results for actors across the European Union. ARCTIK is part of Technopolis Group.
Founded in 2001, the Athena Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies is committed to building knowledge and technological solutions for a digital society. In collaboration with the Greek public administration, ATHENA provides knowledge management and information systems technologies for large-scale knowledge management, data-intensive applications and for a wide range of digital resources. The key personnel of ATHENA have significant experience participating in and leading EU projects, with an emphasis on topics such as Open Data, Big Data management, Cloud technologies and e-Infrastructures.
BBMRI-ERIC is a European research infrastructure for biobanking, bringing together the main players from the biobanking field – researchers, biobankers, industry, patients – to boost biomedical research. To this end, BBMRI-ERIC offers quality management services, support with ethical, legal and societal issues, and a number of online tools and software solutions for biobankers and researchers. Ultimately, their goal is to make new treatments possible. BBMRI-ERIC currently includes 20 countries and one international organisation, making it one of the largest European research infrastructures.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful accelerator providing research facilities for High Energy Physics researchers across the globe. In the first run of the accelerator, resulting in the Nobel prize-winning discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC experiments generated up to 27 PB of data per year, a rate which has increased to over 50PB after 2016. In processing and analysing this data the experiments run more than 2 million jobs per day on the global distributed computing infrastructure federating around 170 computer centres worldwide.
The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) provides large-scale, integrated and sustainable data services to the social sciences. It brings together social science data archives across Europe, with the aim of promoting the results of social science research and supporting national and international research and cooperation. CESSDA builds trust in social science research by ensuring its quality and that it is available for future research. By acquiring the status of a trust repository, CESSDA Service Providers demonstrate their reliability to researchers as well as national and international research funders.CESSDA supports continuous learning and training of its Service Provider staff and the social science user community. The areas covered include research data management, data discovery and reuse, digital preservation and data archiving, as well as CESSDA tools and services.
The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) is responsible for providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities, the social sciences and beyond. CLARIN offers simple and sustainable access to digital language data (in written, spoken, video or multimodal form) and advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine them, wherever they are located. For this purpose, CLARIN has set up a distributed network of trusted data and service centres, among which 24 data centres with CTS certification. The access service is offered through a single sign-on environment. CLARIN also serves a network of technical services as an ecosystem for knowledge sharing.
The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research) is a government-funded research organisation, under the administrative authority of France’s Ministry of Research. CNRS’s annual budget represents a quarter of French public spending on civilian research. As the largest fundamental research organisation in Europe, CNRS carried out research in almost all fields of knowledge, through its eight research institutes: Mathematics (INSMI), Physics (INP), Chemistry (INC); Biological Sciences (INSB); Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS); Ecology and Environment (INEE); Engineering and Systems (INSIS); Information Sciences (INS2I); and its two national institutes: The National Institute of Earth Sciences and Astronomy (INSU); and the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3).
The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) aims to enhance and support digitally enabled research and teaching across the arts and humanities. DARIAH is a network of people, expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and technologies from its member countries. It develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources. By working with communities of practice, DARIAH brings together individual state-of-the-art digital arts and humanities activities and scales their results to a European level. It preserves, provides access to and disseminates research that stems from these collaborations and ensures that best practices, methodological and technical standards are followed.
EATRIS is the European infrastructure for translational medicine. It brings together resources and services for research communities to translate scientific discoveries into benefits for patients. It provides access to a vast array of pre-clinical and clinical expertise and facilities that are available within over 110 top-tier academic centres across Europe. It focuses on improving and optimising preclinical and early clinical development of drugs, vaccines and diagnostics, and overcome barriers to health innovation. Its research infrastructure offers a broad range of research services for both academia and industry across various research fields. In addition, it works with public funding agencies, charities and policy makers with tailored actions to help improve the translational research and innovation ecosystem.
The EGI Federation is a non-profit international collaboration that federates the digital capabilities, resources and expertise of national and international research communities in Europe and worldwide. Its main goal is to empower researchers from all disciplines to collaborate and carry out data- and compute-intensive science and innovation. The EGI Federation is one of the largest distributed computing infrastructures for researchers. It leverages the local investments of national research funding agencies by bringing together hundreds of data centers worldwide. It also includes the largest research cloud federation in operations in Europe with tens of participating cloud providers across most of the European countries, offering IaaS cloud and storage services.
EMBL is a centre of excellence for basic research in molecular biology. It is a distributed international research organisation (25 member states) with its main laboratory in Heidelberg. Research at EMBL emphasises experimental analysis at multiple levels of biological organisation, from the molecule to the organism. One of EMBL’s five core missions is to develop and make available new technologies for the Life Sciences. Accordingly, EMBL has an extensive success record in developing new biology-driven technologies and providing service-oriented user infrastructures. Another core mission of EMBL is to provide advanced training to researchers. EMBL maintains strong interactive relationships to the major life science research institutions in Europe and has more than 40 years of experience in integrating European research.
EPOS, the European Plate Observing System, is a multidisciplinary, distributed research infrastructure that facilitates the integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from the solid Earth science community in Europe. EPOS brings together Earth scientists, national research infrastructures, ICT experts, decision makers, and public to develop new concepts and tools for accurate, durable, and sustainable answers to societal questions concerning geo-hazards and those geodynamic phenomena (including geo-resources) relevant to the environment and human welfare.
The EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure is one of the largest infrastructures of integrated data services and resources supporting research in Europe. It is sustained by a network of more than 20 European research organisations, data and computing centres that on September 2016 have signed an agreement to maintain the EUDAT CDI for the next 10 years and in 2018 have supported the establishment of the limited liability company EUDAT Ltd. This infrastructure and its services have been developed in close collaboration with over 50 research communities spanning across many different scientific disciplines and involved at all stage of the design process.
The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) is the most powerful synchrotron radiation source in Europe. ESRF was created by an International Convention, signed on 16 December 1988 and is a French Societé Civile subject to French law. ESRF is financed, supported and shared by 22 European countries, Israel and South Africa. ESRF has about 700 staff with the prime mission to operate a portfolio of 40 specialised world-class instruments covering a wide range of scientific areas such as physics, material sciences, lifesciences, geophysics, archaeology, cultural heritage and many other areas to its large user community of more than 6,000 researchers annually travelling to Grenoble.
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) is one of the largest universities in Germany. With its five faculties, FAU offers an almost unique scope of subjects ranging from the Humanities to Law and Economics as well as Sciences, Medicine and Engineering. The close collaboration between the single disciplines is reflected by the University’s Mission Statement ‘Advance through Networks’. FAU thus offers perfect conditions for interdisciplinary research and learning to students and scientists alike. Moreover, over the last decades, the University has established its reputation as a top-ranking institution in cutting-edge research. It is firmly anchored in a close network of interdisciplinary co-operations. These include partners from industry, specialised non-university research centres and a number of leading international universities.
GÉANT is a fundamental element of Europe’s e-infrastructure, delivering the pan-European GÉANT network for scientific excellence, research, education and innovation. Through its integrated catalogue of connectivity, collaboration and identity services, GÉANT provides users with highly reliable, unconstrained access to computing, analysis, storage, applications and other resources, to ensure that Europe remains at the forefront of research. Through interconnections with its 39 national research and education network (NREN) partners, the GÉANT network is the largest and most advanced R&E network in the world, connecting over 50 million users at 10,000 institutions across Europe and supporting all scientific disciplines. The backbone network operates at speeds of up to 500Gbps and reaches over 100 national networks worldwide.
Göttingen State and University Library (UGOE) is one of the largest libraries in Germany and a leader in the development of digital libraries. UGOE is one of the leading open science institutions and e-infrastructure innovators in Germany and internationally.It is actively involved in the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER). UGOE establishes dedicated research environments for the humanities in national, European and ESFRI activities. It addresses organisational and technical aspects such as virtual research environments and research infrastructures for scientific data (e-Research), research data management, data curation and quality.
GRNET is one of the largest public sector technology companies in Greece. It provides networking and cloud computing e-Infrastructures and services to academic and research institutions, to educational bodies at all levels, and to all agencies of the public, broader public and private sectors. It is responsible for promoting and disseminating network and computing technologies and applications, as well as for promoting and implementing Greece’s Digital Transformation goals and policy. GRNET leverages the national educational and research activity, striving towards the development of applied and technological research in the fields of telecommunication networks and computing services.
The Integrated Carbon Observation System, ICOS, provides standardised and open data from more than 140 measurement stations across 13 European countries. The stations observe greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere as well as carbon fluxes between the atmosphere, the land surface and the oceans. The ICOS community consists of more than 500 scientists in both its current Member and Observer countries and beyond. More than 80 renowned universities or institutes are a part of the ICOS community. The ICOS community has strong connections to colleagues and operators outside ICOS. ICOS-based knowledge supports policy- and decision-making to combat climate change and its impacts.
The Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) is an international research organisation world leader in neutron science. Since its foundation in 1967, the Institut is an example of scientific cooperation. The research conducted at the ILL is dedicated to both fundamental science (60%) and the modern societal challenges (40%). It covers topics in biology, (green) chemistry and materials science, as well as condensed matter, nuclear and particle physics.
JNP Strategy and Management Consulting (JNP) is an innovation consultancy firm based in Athens, Greece. JNP has a track record of providing professional services for a spectrum of research and innovation projects at national, pan-European and international level. The consultancy offers a range of services in the ICT sector, including Digital Transformation, Technology Transfer, Product Development and Innovation Management. JNP has established connections with industrial leaders, research organisations and state institutions, making it a key player in the global innovation ecosystem.
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a member of the Helmholtz Association of Germany Researchers and is funded, respectively, by the Federal Republic of Germany and the state of Baden- Württemberg. With over 9,500 staff and 25,000 students, KIT is leading in innovation, research and teaching in the fields of energy, mobility and information. The Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCCC), KIT’s computing centre, is involved in national and EU-wide data infrastructure projects.
LifeWatch ERIC is the e-Science European infrastructure for biodiversity & ecosystem research, investing in its three essential components: open access data, reproducible analytics and mobilised communities. It equips scientists with distributed computational and storage capacity, tools and web-services for data integration and interoperability, as well as with Virtual Research Environments. This makes it possible to test scenarios of change in biodiversity, ecosystems and their services, and to formulate nature-based solutions which are made available to decision makers and citizens. In addition, LifeWatch ERIC provides training for a range of users, ensuring access to all the resources available within the infrastructure.
MARIS originates from a governmental initiative in the Netherlands to improve the overview and access of data, information and knowledge about the sea. Founded in 1989, the MARIS foundation develops and manages projects and internet systems for management and provision of marine and ocean data. MARIS develops and operates infrastructures, dynamic web portals and mobile apps, while incorporating databases, content management systems, mapping services, sensor web enablement, responsive design and crowdsourcing techniques. MARIS has been involved involved in the strategic development and technical implementation of the pan-European infrastructure for ocean and marine data through several EU Research and Innovation projects.
INFIN, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, is the Italian research agency dedicated to the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the laws that govern them, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR). For over two decades, INFN has been developing open innovative solutions for advanced distributed computing and software applications, which have been adopted by several international organisations and initiatives. INFIN has extensive expertise on Grid and Cloud technologies, having fostered and participated, with leadership roles, in several large EU-funded projects. In Italy, INFN was a founding member of the Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure (ICDI) and, at present, participates in several nation-wide initiatives involving science, industry and the public sector.
OpenAIRE is a European e-Infrastructure with the mission to establish, maintain and operate an open scholarly communication infrastructure. It provides services, resources and network to support a common European e-science environment. Maintaining a network of 37 National Open Access Desks (NOADs), OpenAIRE provides a forum for the alignment of policies and best practices on Open Access to publications, interoperability of repositories, Research Data Management and training to researchers, content providers, research managers and policymakers.
OpenNode is a company specialised in designing and supporting cloud marketplace solutions. Established in 2011, OpenNode is behind the first government cloud in the world based fully on the open-source technologies (in the Sultanate of Oman) and is currently a part of the public-private partnership for delivering Estonian Government Cloud.
The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is the largest research centre for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland, conducting cutting-edge research in three main fields: matter and materials, energy and environment, and human health. PSI develops, builds and operates complex large-scale research facilities. Primarily financed by the Swiss Confederation, PSI is part of the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology , along with the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne, as well as Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science & Technology) and WSL (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research).
Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), affiliated with the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), is an active research and development centre specialised in a new generation of networking, media, cloud, digital libraries and cyber security as well as technologies, applications and services for the Information Society. Its team of around 300 highly skilled personnel includes over 240 professionals working on R&D projects at national and EU level. PSNC has been involved in a number of projects requiring both strong technical expertise and innovative approach including, among others, the Partnership of Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is an international organisation focused on developing infrastructure and community activities in order to reduce barriers to data sharing and exchange and promote the acceleration of data-driven innovation worldwide. The RDA is an independent forum, gathering participants from different countries and profiles, and tackles a wide range of data challenges through its Working Groups and exploratory Interest Groups. It envisions researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines and countries to address grand societal challenges. The RDA community is currently made up of over 11,000 individual members from 145 countries, with over 50% from the European RDA community.
The Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) is an internationally ranked university, based in Pisa and Florence, which currently hosts around 600 undergraduate and graduate students. Despite its small size, the SNS hosts a large number of highly competitive grants, including six active ERC grants and an ITN network. Currently, the Astrophysics and Cosmology group hosts two active European Research Council grants. Research in the group focuses on astrophysical cosmology, cosmic dawn, the first galaxies and more.
Technopolis Group is an independent consulting company with more than 30 years of experience in project management at European and international level. The company has offices in eight European countries (Austria, Belgium, Estonia France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and in Colombia, and works assignments in over 50 countries across the world. Its highly qualified staff of over 150 people works in the fields of governance, research and business. Technopolis Group delivers its activities and services with the goal to tackle the widest range possible of environmental and societal challenges, thus enhancing economic growth and supporting the development of science, technology, innovation and education.
Established in 2002, Trust-IT is specialised in ICT research analysis and communication, providing web-based solutions, digital marketing services, custom software and mobile applications in Europe and internationally. The company’s 30 project managers, principal investigators, deputies and senior project managers have experience interfacing with high-level decision makers, from large and small organisations, on both a technical and policy level. Trust-IT has established itself on the market as a key driver of pan-European Research and Development projects.
The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the largest university in the Netherlands as well as one of the largest research universities in Europe. Today, it has more than 31,000 students, over 5,000 staff, more than 100 nationalities and an annual budget of more than 600 million euros. The university is also a core member of the League of EU Research Universities. It currently hosts the center of excellence ‘Gravitation and AstroParticle Physics Amsterdam’, or GRAPPA, a joint initiative of the Institute of Physics and the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy.
