Strengthened computing capabilities for Europe’s researchers
This means that researchers, institutions and businesses can access the computer resources they need to run pilots, exchange expertise with the international community and tap into new technologies that can greatly facilitate their work. ‘EGI-Engage has supported key advances in many scientific fields from biomedical sciences to high energy physics, where international teams spearhead new discoveries,’ says project coordinator Tiziana Ferrari, from the EGI Foundation in the Netherlands. The LIGO-Virgo collaboration is a good example. A global team of some 1 250 scientists detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2016 and again in 2017, earning the Nobel Prize for Physics along the way. It was thanks to distributed computing that the LIGO/Virgo collaboration was able to turn a massive amount of observational data into a new way of understanding the Universe. Making sense of complexity The EGI Federation supports this growing demand for distributed computing grids dedicated to high energy physics research. ‘You can see this increasing demand for distributed computing at every scale, from the theoretical chemist using 5 million core hours (CPUs) a year, through to major collaborations like WeNMR in structural biology, or the Large Hadron Collider, which bring together thousands of scientists and routinely transfer something like 50 petabytes (one petabyte = one quadrillion bytes) of data per month,’ says Ferrari. ‘In all these situations, distributed computing is needed to run analyses, store the data and share it seamlessly across borders.’ Powering EU research Launched in March 2015, the EGI-Engage project sought to expand the backbone of these federated service capabilities in terms of storage, data, communication, knowledge and expertise. More specifically, EGI-Engage worked on ensuring the continued coordination within the EGI Federation and the evolution of EGI services and business models. Thanks to the project's effort, the EGI Foundation became the first public e-Infrastructure to be certified to ISO service management standards. To achieve its objectives, the project pioneered and piloted the idea of Competence Centres - distributed teams of experts where research groups and members of the EGI Federation co-develop new digital solutions for scientific challenges. The scheme delivered innovation in all fields, from a new web portal to study Bavarian dialects to a portfolio of digital tools to support structural biology. EGI also collaborated directly with SMEs through a dedicated business programme, with over 10 use cases. ‘The project has compiled a registry of over 80 impactful results,’ says Ferrari. ‘We are particularly proud of several key exploitable achievements, which include an improved service catalogue for researchers and businesses, the establishment of the first large scale federated cloud infrastructure and the creation of the DataHub, a service to federate distributed core research datasets for easy access in the cloud.’ There is also the EGI Marketplace, an online platform where EGI-related services can be discovered, purchased and accessed and an Applications-on-Demand service where researchers can access the scientific software they need. Though completed in 2017, the ground-breaking work of the EGI-Engage project is being continued through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which will become Europe’s virtual environment for all researchers to store, manage, analyse and re-use data for research, innovation and educational purposes. The EOSC is projected to become a reality by 2020.
Keywords
EOSC, cloud, computing, egi-engage, datahub, datasets, EGI, infrastructure, digital, data
