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Rackspace/AWS selected as cloud resources’ provider for CERIC “mini-EOSC”

In January 2021, CERIC was selected among the few research infrastructures receiving funding for the adoption of commercial cloud solutions in the frame of the H2020 OCRE project. 

Thanks to the OCRE funding, CERIC will set up a “mini-EOSC” (European Open Science Cloud), supporting all Consortium members in developing their own FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) enabled workflow. 

One of the CERIC’s main challenges is to find ways to provide open access to data collected at their geographically (7 member states) and scientifically heterogeneous partner facilities. This will be done through the development and maintenance of a distributed IT infrastructure enabling open sharing and reusability of scientific results. This implies the set-up of a FAIR ecosystem for data management, data handling and analysis services. The first step will be the deployment of a common data catalogue with automatic ingestion pipelines (data uploaders, metadata harvesters) for heterogeneous (meta)data types and formats, as collected by the diverse techniques available at the CERIC partner facilities.

To this aim, and following the procurement procedure to identify and select a commercial cloud-based platform for the implementation of the CERIC mini-EOSC, Rackspace/AWS has been selected as provider of commercial cloud resources to the Consortium and its partners, for a period of 12 months. 

In the frame of the pilot, a set of scientific use cases for HPC (high-performance computing) cloud applications have been identified at different PFs, to be set up in the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. Their usage (number of users) and scientific output will be monitored throughout the grant duration. Experiences gained from the OCRE pilot grant will serve as a base for developing a novel data analysis user service, which will be of particular interest to highly interdisciplinary experiments (i.e. combining several of CERIC’s techniques in one proposal). Such service will further strengthen CERIC’s competence and visibility in the key areas of energy storage and life science research.

The Open Clouds for Research Environments – H2020 OCRE project, aims to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community, by bringing together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organisations and the research and education community, through ready-to-use service agreements and €9.5 million in adoption funding.