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 (find the list of OCRE services in the EOSC Marketplace). 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).
