Isabel Campos and Jorge Gomes tell us how the project will add value to the European Open Science Cloud
The EOSC-synergy project started this September 2019. The main objective is to extend EOSC coordination in the project’s nine participating countries by harmonizing policies and federating national research e-Infrastructures, scientific data and thematic services, bridging the gap between national initiatives and EOSC.
The team is composed of experts from leading research organizations, infrastructure providers, NRENs and user communities from Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Netherlands, United Kingdom and France.
The consortium is fully committed to the EOSC vision and already involved in related activities at national and international level. And, equally important, the team has a track-record of joint work in previous initiatives, dating back to pioneer reference e-Infrastructure distributed computing projects, that consolidated as EGI Foundation.
What will we do?
EOSC-synergy will add new capabilities to EOSC by opening national thematic services to European access, expanding the EOSC offer in the Environment, Climate Change, Earth Observation and Life Sciences. This will be supported by an expansion of the capacity through the federation of compute, storage and data resources aligned with the EOSC and FAIR policies and practices.
Examples include services for:
- the detection of the coastlines changes, coastal inundation areas and inland waterbodies
- modelling dust transport in the environment
- for analysis of water network distribution for on-line analysis of toxics in drinking water supply
- new analysis tools that access Climate Data Archives
And also, more data repositories, such as:
- the repository of the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO)
- the United States Geological Survey (USGS) LANDSAT data repository
- the Polish AMU Nature Collections with 2 million records on animals, plants and fungi
- datasets about seismic activity in the Iberian Peninsula
EOSC-synergy will also actively build the EOSC compute and storage capacity with the integration of national resources from the participating countries to the scale of:
- thousands of cloud compute cores, and
- dozens of petabytes for storage
Software Quality and Training
The consortium has as solid background in software development, built over many years of development, deployment and support to a wide range of scientific communities. The core consortium partners is part of the INDIGO-Datacloud Software Collaboration Agreement, and thus share a long history of cooperation in developing production-level software to support advanced science needs.
EOSC-synergy will also increase the quality standards of the scientific applications integrated in EOSC. This will be done by implementing a quality-driven approach to service integration that will promote the convergence and alignment towards EOSC standards and best practices. This will be complemented by the expansion of the EOSC training and education capabilities through the introduction of an on-line platform aimed at boosting the development of EOSC skills and competences.
EOSC-synergy complements on-going activities in EOSC-hub and other related projects liaising national bodies and infrastructures with other upcoming governance, data and national coordination projects.
