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Funding opportunities & Commercial services

A total of € 4.8 million was allotted to bring ready-to-use, state-of-the-art commercial services to EOSC users. The adoption funding is spread across 3 calls, each on a different theme, in order to:

  • boost supplier engagement
  • build on experience gained through the GÉANT-led OCRE project
  • offer guidance on governance and compliance
  • ensure funding reaches across different domains and scientific communities.

What did we learn from this?

  • There is a clear demand for commercial cloud services within the EOSC community
  • There is a proven value of researcher/industry partnerships in driving innovative research solutions (i.e. development of RI services)

Read more about the selected projects that applied through the EOSC Future procurement framework…

RESULTS: Digital aggregators

A second call for European research e-infrastructures – Distribution of commercial cloud services

Two proposals were awarded up to €600,000 (VAT excluded) in pre-procured IaaS/PaaS/SaaS (including professional services) from OCRE cloud providers. Discover the chosen projects below

After the careful review of 12 compelling proposals, the following 2 proposals have been selected. Here are their profiles, and the solutions they will bring to EOSC users across all research domains:

1. D4science – Eu Virtual Research Environments On Cloud (Italy), from TI-Sparkle And The Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche (CNR)

The National Research Council (CNR) is the largest public research institution in Italy, the only one under the Research Ministry performing multidisciplinary activities. D4Science aggregates “science domain agnostic” service providers, as well as science community-specific ones, to build a unifying space where the aggregated resources can be exploited via Virtual Research Environments and their services. These inlcude core services supporting VRE management, resource management, authentication, and authorisation; Data space management services; Data analytics services; and Collaborative services.

The major advantage for researchers of working with a VRE is that they find in the front-end a pre-configured environment with the research tools they need for their research (i.e., RStudio) and these tools run on IT resources (VMs, CPUs), scientific software packages and settings allocated by D4Science to the specific VRE according to the needs of the researcher’s group/community.

During the project, Sparkle will also present cloud-native solutions from Google, such as serverless databases with integrated analytics that are not available in the existing portfolio of D4Science to evaluate if new EOSC services can be packaged around these solutions.

The project expects to leverage the large existing research communities already served by D4Science to quickly spread the promotion of the cloud-based services in several countries and institutions and make this project sustainable by having hundreds and potentially thousands of users adopting the services. The project will focus on these 3 communities (including global collaboration) – The marine science community; The social sciences and the humanities communities; The Open Research community.

2. Quantum Compute Services On Cloud (Ireland), by Rackspace and the Munster Technical University

Quantum computing is a disruptive technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems outside the scope of our current classical computers. Quantum computers will be a core component of future networks, offering capabilities in cryptography, networking, data analysis and optimization.

AWS provides access to multiple varieties of quantum computing hardware including the Gate-based superconducting processors, Gate-based ion-trap processors and Neutral atom-based quantum processors. Researchers can run experiments on a variety of quantum hardware, comparing and contrasting their results. This would not be possible without cloud-based quantum computing access, which significantly strengthens the results of experiments and proof of concepts.

MTU will manage and oversee the deployment of the TRE platform with the objective of enabling research organisations to rapidly create multiple innovative and secure environments in which scientists from collaborating research centres can perform their analysis, while providing governance and compliance respecting jurisdictions, including an extra focus on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

For the second procurement call, we invited anyone with innovative ideas on how to incorporate commercial and/or public sector data into the EOSC context to offer their contribution. This could involve making data available through specific methods, or incorporating data from various sources for a research use case. Crucially, the proposal was to promote the procurement of data, data-related services, or consultancy for integration with the EOSC.

The vision of the proposals, and its demonstration, was to help us shape our call for funding proposals to showcase data connectivity/data compatibility between EOSC and the burgeoning common European Data Space.

5 grants, each of up to €400 000, have been awarded to projects to adapt a concrete approach to distributing state-of-the-art digital services available in the EOSC Marketplace.

Find out more about the selected projects and their solutions for driving the uptake of cloud services…

After the careful review of 9 compelling proposals, the following 5 proposals have been selected. Here are their profiles, and the solutions they will bring to EOSC users across all research domains:

1. OpenScienceLabs for HPC (Austria), from Sparkle and the Vienna Scientific Cluster

The HPC Development-OpenScienceLab is an online tool that senior researchers can use to simulate and create a HPC (high-performance computing) workflow, a feat usually out of their reach, due to limited computing power and resources. It is easy to use and includes sample data. Researchers can also use the tool to create HPC Analysis-OpenScienceLabs, which can be used to review scientific papers interactively, with real data and the researcher’s own analysis tools. Every OpenScienceLab runs on a specific Google Project that is the smallest logical “container” of cloud resources for Google.  The proposed solution offers a user-friendly and secure environment for researchers to carry out HPC workflows and share their scientific findings in a transparent and reproducible manner.

2. Hate Classifier service (UK), by Quistor and the University of Sussex Applied Language Modelling Facility

This tool helps researchers who are working to analyse and classify hate speech – a difficult field to study because of the lack of clear definition of what hate speech is, creating unique challenges and specific needs for researchers. Hosted in a cloud-based environment and using high-performance OCI Nvidia GPUs for machine learning, the Hate Classifier service can be used by researchers to develop and train new models that could change the way we understand hate speech, setting a new standard for the use of machine learning.

3. European Environment for Scientific Software Installation (Netherlands), by Bechtle, Quistor as subcontractor and SURF

Based on the principle of infrastructure-as-code, this installation will help researchers to easily install and use scientific software by providing easy-to-read scripts that can generate the necessary research environment. These scripts can be updated over time and researchers can use different types of scripts to distribute their software more easily. Using this tool will make it easier for researchers to access public cloud infrastructure options while maintaining security through the SURF Research Access Management system.

4. INCD Cloud services (Portugal), from Sparkle and the Portuguese National Distributed Computing Infrastructure

This platform provides a single entry point for researchers to easily deploy and manage computationally demanding applications by allowing users to containerise workloads and create computing clusters that work across multiple clouds. GCP’s EC3 facilitates the multi-cloud deployments providing integration between the Google platform and the INCD infrastructure.

5. GWDG TRE (Germany), by Rackspace and the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen

TRE is a an open-source tool that helps research organisations create secure environments on the AWS Cloud for collaborating scientists from multiple research centres to perform their analysis, also providing a governance process to help researchers meet their compliance requirements across multiple jurisdictions. GWDG TRE aims to solve current issues that hinder the research community’s access to cloud-based agility, scalability, and cost efficiency by providing a common EOSC integrated infrastructure based on the Aggregator’s Landing Zone and the AWS TRE platform.

The Research Data Alliance and EOSC Future project collaborated to bring data initiatives and experts closer to EOSC, while providing the platform with tools and standards from the global research data community to ensure long-term interoperability, accessibility and engagement via domain ambassadors.

With a total budget of € 1 million, over 40 grants were awarded through the RDA/EOSC Future open calls scheme. Selected projects were given the chance to contribute to the development of research data tools, standards and expertise in the context of EOSC.

 

Visit the EOSC Future Grants Platform for more information on current RDA calls.

Meet the grantees here.

The EOSC Digital Innovation Hub (EOSC DIH), through EOSC Future, facilitated the co-development of solutions by the private sector, including start-ups and SMEs, addressing the real-life needs of research communities.

EOSC’s Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) is an international and multi-partner collaboration that stimulates innovation activities within private companies, especially start-ups and SMEs. It supports them to easily provide services to the EOSC community, making use of access to digital technologies, services and human capital provided by the EOSC as well as encourage them to become EOSC users themselves.

4 pillars

    1. piloting and co-design – where products or services are designed and/or tested.

    1. technical access – high-throughput, high-performance and cloud computing; machine learning; research data; data management services and several tools and applications available for re-use.

    1. training and support – technical consultancy, business coaching and funding search.

    1. visibility – inclusion of company solutions in EOSC, print and online material and exploitation of EOSC networking and ecosystem opportunities, such as online communities, event attendance and potential future projects .

EOSC DIH business pilots consisted of dedicated use cases with a 7- to 8-month duration, which were executed within the scope of pre- commercial testing, validation, experiments, or proof of concepts using the EOSC services. To broaden the consumer base, EOSC Future document the results of the DIH for business pilots and promoted them at industry events.

  • In 2022, EOSC DIH explored the needs and requirements of selected
    research communities and clusters
  • During 2023, a series of success stories were published
  • More information on contributions to the EOSC Future project can be found in the project deliverables under WP8

 

EOSC’s Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) is an international and multi-partner collaboration that stimulates innovation activities within private companies, especially start-ups and SMEs. It supports them to easily provide services to the EOSC community, making use of access to digital technologies, services and human capital provided by the EOSC as well as encourage them to become EOSC users themselves.

EOSC DIH supports companies through Business Pilots

EOSC DIH boosts the innovation of SMEs and startups, thanks to the use of EOSC resources and services. The EOSC DIH Business Pilots allow SMEs and startups to engage with EOSC, not only as users but also as providers, experimenting with the development of new/enhanced products and services integrating EOSC resources and services.

More info