Inspired - EGI · EGI Inspired Newsletter // September 2019 // 4 TheHigh-PerformanceComputing Center of the University of Lille, registered in the EGI GOCDB as UNIV-LILLE, provides

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news from the EGI communityISSUE 35SEPTEMBER 2019

TOP STORIES

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MORE

www.egi.eu

Inspired

How EGI contributes to the EOSC

The EOSC-synergy project startedpage 3

UNIV-LILLE joined the EGI Federated Cloud

07 How EGI and the HNSciCloud project collaborate for science

08 The new AARC Blueprint Architecture

The pay-for-use model within EGIpage 5

09 EGI signs MoU with Shanghai Science and Technology InnovationResources Center

Serverless computing for data-processingapplications in EGI

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09 The second call for the EOSC Early Adopter Programme is open!

This edition of the newsletter is focused on news about projects, use cases and collaborations.

Your feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

Send an email to the EGI communications team at: [email protected]

Welcome to issue 35! #backtoschool

The idea of a European OpenScience Cloud (EOSC) took shapein 2015, when the EuropeanCommission announced theirvision for a “trusted environmentfor hosting & processing researchdata to support EU science in itsglobal leading role.”

The EOSC is now becoming areality as Europe’s virtualenvironment for all researchersto store, analyse and re-usedata for research, innovationand educational purposes.

A brief history of EGI & EOSCThe notion of a distributedinfrastructure offering advancedresources and services for data-intensive processing in researchand innovation has been part ofthe EGI mission & vision sincethe EGI design and implementationthat started with the DataGridproject back in 2000 under theleadership of CERN.

Distributed processing of datasupported by a pan-Europeanbroadband network infrastructure,solutions for trust and identitymanagement&theGridmiddleware,have been the enablers of twoNobel prizes in Physics (2013 &2017), and many more data-driven scientific discoveries in

high energy physics, astronomyand astrophysics, health andmedicine, and earth sciencesresulting in over 3,000 openaccess scientific publicationsenabled each year.

After 15 years of operationalactivities and more than 71,000users, the EGI Federation is fa-cing a growing demand of data-centric distributed computingsolutions for exabyte scale dataanalytics. Utilisation is growingat the annual rate of +20%,with more than 5 Billion CPUhours consumed in the last 12months. Bioinformatics, neuro-informatics, and computationalstructural biology account for34% of the EGI users.

The Photon & Neutron communitywith the support of the PaNOSCproject, is piloting Jupyter Note-books integrated with federatedCloud and data managementservices. Earth sciences is themost active scientific communityin the EGI Federated Cloud,benefiting from the co-locationof large data holdings and IaaS,PaaS and SaaS Cloud servicesaccessible through Check-in.

LifeWatch, EMSO & the Agrifoodcommunities are examples of

initiatives that are embracing thedistributed Cloud paradigm.

EGI has been supporting openscience by enabling sharing ofdata, by federating peer digitalinfrastructures in North & SouthAmerica, Africa and Arabia, andthe Asia Pacific regions withEurope, and by supporting openaccess to a rich portfolio ofscientific date analytics tools.

With this legacy, EGI contributedto the position paper EuropeanOpen Science Cloud for Researchwith EUDAT, LIBER, OpenAIREand GÉANT, making the case forthe eight critical elements ofEOSC success: open, publiclyfunded & governed, research-centric, comprehensive, diverse& distributed, interoperable,service-oriented and social.

In 2017, EGI endorsed the EOSCDeclaration and signed up to theprinciples of openness andFAIRness that underline theEOSC vision. Specifically, the EGIparticipants committed to supportthe EOSC implementation, contri-buting to best practices & offeringadvanced compute services forresearch & innovation.

In 2018, the EOSC-hub projecttook off the ground as a joint

1EGI Inspired Newsletter // September 2019 // www.egi.eu

How EGI contributes to the European Open Science Cloud

Tiziana Ferrari gives an overview of EGI’s participation to EOSC

effort of EGI, EUDAT, Indigo-DataCloud and major Europeanresearch infrastructures tocreate the Hub: the federatinginfrastructure, processes & po-licies to integrate data, researchoutputs and services in EOSC.That same year, the EOSC wasofficially launched and the EOSCPortal was inaugurated, with theEOSC-hub Marketplace as a corefunctionality offering Europeanresearchers & innovators todiscover, access, use and reuse abroad spectrum of resources foradvanced data-driven research.

EGI, EOSC-hub & the EOSC PortalThe services provided by the EGIFederation are at the heart ofthe EOSC-hub project.

EGI’s providers contribute to thedelivery of the compute & dataanalytics tiers of EOSC whichprovide the hosting environmentfor a portfolio of data analyticsservices that address the specificneeds of scientific communities.For example, EGI’s Cloud Compute,High-Throughput Compute andData Transfer services supportthe EPOS-ORFEOS CC in theirmission to facilitate Earth Sciencein Europe. The Radio-AstronomyCC uses EGI’s Cloud Computeand Check-in services to supportLOFAR, a large radio telescopenetwork. The Marine CompetenceCentre and ICOS RI both useCloud Compute and Notebooksservices in their activities.

EGI also supports thematic servi-ces in EOSC-hub - the DARIAHScience Gateway, ENES ClimateAnalytics & OPENCoastS Portal.

The EOSC Digital Innovation Hub(DIH) in its mission to bring pri-vate companies & SMEs into theEOSC has been boosting the EGIbusiness programme demons-

trating how innovative companiescan benefit from EOSC and e-Infrastructure technical support& services. Six DIH businesspilots stand as success stories &use EGI Cloud Compute services.The EGI service catalogue is fullyavailable through the EOSC Mar-ketplace, serving an even wideruser base.

The EOSC federating core willleverage the experience andknowhow of EGI's partners inproviding solutions and activitieslike federated AAI, accounting &monitoring, security policies &coordinated cross-infrastructureincident management.

EGI is also contributing to theRules of Participation & technicalinteroperability guidelines withharmonized cross-infrastructuresecurity policies & interoperabilityguidelines for federated Compute,Data Management and AAI.

More EOSC-related projects andcollaborationsIn 2018, EOSC-hub signed colla-boration agreements with GÉANTand OpenAIRE-Advance to reinforcecommon ambitions for Europeas a leader in digital & openscience via its e-Infrastructures.

EGI is actively supporting thePANOSC and the ExPaNDSprojects aiming to contribute tothe realisation of a data commonsfor neutron & photon science inthe EOSC landscape, offeringtechnical support and serviceprovisioning via the EGI Federa-ted Cloud, the Notebooks andthe Data Transfer services, aswell as coordinated user support.EOSC-Synergy successfullykicked off its activities – underthe coordination of IBERGRIDand the active participation ofthe NGIs from Czech Republic,

Germany, Poland, Slovakia, theNetherlands and UK. The EOSC-Nordic, EOSC-Pillar, NI4OS-Europe and ExPaNDS projectsrepresent other national oppor-tunities for consolidation in theEOSC landscape.

What's in store for the future?In the last 15 years, EGI demon-strated the key role of scientificcomputing & its role as necessaryinstrument of scientific excellenceand open science in Europe.

EOSC will push the evolution ofEGI from a HTC infrastructure, toexabyte scale hybrid HTC & HPCinfrastructure supporting cloudIaaS, PaaS, SaaS access, increasinglyintegrated with the capabilities ofEUDAT, GEANT and OpenAIRE,and the data and applicationsfrom research infrastructures ofpan-European relevance.

The provisioning of increasinglyintegrated and interoperableservices will be a key milestonefor the implementation of EOSCand the support of Europeanexcellence in science.


More information

Tiziana Ferrari is theTechnical Director of the EGIFoundation and the ProjectCoordinator of EOSC-hub.

The EOSC-synergy project wasselected for funding on theHorizon 2020 EINFRA-EOSC-5(b)call. The main objective is toextend the EOSC coordination inthe project’s nine participatingcountries by harmonising policiesand federating national researche-Infrastructures, scientific dataand thematic services, bridgingthe gap between nationalinitiatives and the EOSC.

The team is composed of expertsfrom leading research organi-sations, infrastructure providers,NRENs and user communitiesfrom Spain, Portugal, Germany,Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia,Netherlands, United Kingdomand France.

The consortium is fully committedto the EOSC vision and alreadyinvolved in related activities atnational and international level.And, equally important, the teamhas a track-record of joint workin previous initiatives, datingback to pioneer reference e-Infrastructure distributed com-puting projects, that consolidatedas the EGI Foundation.

What will we do?EOSC-synergy will add newcapabilities to EOSC by openingnational thematic services toEuropean access, expanding theEOSC offer in the Environment,Climate Change, Earth Observationand Life Sciences. This will besupported by an expansion ofthe capacity through the fede-ration of compute, storage anddata resources aligned with theEOSC and FAIR practices.

Examples include services for:

• the detection of the coastlineschanges, coastal inundationareas and inland waterbodies.

• modelling dust transport inthe environment.

• for analysis of water networkdistribution for on-line analysisof toxics in drinking water supply.

• new analysis tools that accessClimate Data Archives.

And also, more data repositories,such as:

• the repository of the LatinAmerican Giant Observatory(LAGO).

• the United States GeologicalSurvey (USGS) LANDSAT datarepository.

• the Polish AMU Nature Collectionswith two million records onanimals, plants and fungi.

• datasets about seismic activityin the Iberian Peninsula.

EOSC-synergy will also activelybuild the EOSC compute andstorage capacity with the inte-gration of national resourcesfrom the participating countriesto the scale of:

• thousands of cloud computecores, and -

• dozens of petabytes for storage.

Software Quality and TrainingThe consortium has as solidbackground in software develop-ment, built over many years ofdevelopment, deployment andsupport to a wide range ofscientific communities.

EGI Inspired Newsletter // September 2019 // www.egi.eu

The core consortium partnersare part of the INDIGO-DatacloudSoftware Collaboration Agreement,and thus share a long history ofcooperation in developingproduction-level software tosupport science needs.

EOSC-synergy will also increasethe quality standards of thescientific applications integratedin EOSC. This will be done byimplementing a quality-drivenapproach to service integrationthat will promote the convergenceand alignment towards EOSCstandards and best practices.This will be complemented bythe expansion of the EOSCtraining and education capabilitiesthrough the introduction of anon-line platform aimed atboosting the development ofEOSC skills and competences.

EOSC-synergy complements on-going activities in EOSC-hub andother related projects liaisingnational bodies and infrastructureswith other upcoming governance,data and national projects.

Isabel Campos and JorgeGomes are the projectcoordinators of EOSC-synergy.

www.eosc-synergy.eu

EOSC-synergy: expanding capacities and building capabilities

Isabel Campos and Jorge Gomes explain how the projectwill add value to the European Open Science Cloud

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The High-Performance ComputingCenter of the University of Lille,registered in the EGI GOCDB asUNIV-LILLE, provides researchersseveral services, such as a cloudcomputing facility based onOpenStack. UNIV-LILLE is a mem-ber of the FG-Cloud, the fede-rated cloud operated by FranceGrilles (French NGI), togetherwith the several other sites suchas CC-IN2P3, GRIF or IN2P3-IRES.

We have recently completed theintegration of UNIV-LILLE resour-ces into the EGI Federated Cloud,becoming the second French siteto join this federation.

From 2010 to 2014, the UNIV-LILLE site was certified as a gridresource provider and memberof the EGI High-ThroughputComputing service. Those nodeswere decommissioned followingthe departure of the engineer incharge of operations. As aconsequence, the UNIV-LILLE sitewas decommissioned, and wewere required to restart thecertification process to integratethe EGI cloud federation.

The registration of the resourcecenter was an easy step, but thecertification of our EGI-enabledservices was more complicated.

The process started in October2018 and took about 5 months.

The main barriers that we facedduring the integration process were:

- some losses in new documen-tation (we had to search backinto the history of the EGI wiki tofind the missing parts)

- broken synchronization proce-dures between EGI core serviceslike GOCDB and ARGO-MON

- prohibited access to the imagelist service (AppDB)

- monitoring probes versionmismatch between differentARGO-MON instances.

From this experience, we canrecommend the following toanyone considering integration:

- Contact your NGI at the firstday to discuss about integrationprocedure and get help orfeedback from other certifiedresource centers. Even if theirintegration is a little outdated,their experience can get you outof several blocking situations.

- Participate in a training on thebasics of EGI Operations inorder to fully understand all thesteps of integration. Having anoverview of how the services arelinked will allow you to solve anyconfiguration problems.

- Follow the manual integrationprocedure at least one timeinstead of directly use theFederated Cloud Appliance.Installing and configuring eachservice manually will allow youmaintain these services.

- Don’t wait too long beforeasking for help by submitting a

ticket to GGUS when youencounter an issue. Whetheryou are a beginner or anexperienced system adminis-trator, there may be technicalissues unrelated to your actions.So don’t spend too much time tofind for a fix on your site, thesolution may be elsewhere.

During the certification process,8 GGUS tickets have beenopened, all of them concerningdifferent issues. Thanks to theEGI team, most of them werequickly solved. Our integrationhelped to highlight some gaps indocumentation and improve theoverall process.

Despite these difficulties, theintegration to the FederatedCloud remains an easy and wellthought operation and we hopeto see more resource centersjoining the federation.

Feedback on the integration of the UNIV-LILLEresources into the EGI Federated Cloud

Cyrille Toulet shares his experiences

More information

Cyrille Toulet is the UNIV-LILLE System and NetworkAdministrator.

UNIV-LILLE website:

hpc.univ-lille.fr

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Back in 2013, the EGI Councilendorsed a thought experimenton how a pay-for-use modelcould be implemented and userscould be billed for their usage ofEGI resources.

Since then, evolution has gonefrom running a proof of conceptinvolving 30 providers from 12countries, investigating legal andpolicies issues & defining pricingto adapting tools such as theaccounting portal & draftingagreements and relevant docu-mentation. One of the biggestquestions at the time was that,even if we were able to defineand imple-ment such as system,were there use cases within theresearch community?

Over the last several years, therehas been a shift in the way thephysical resources are beingfunded that has presented somechallenges for the federation.

At the same time, this has led toopportunities from a pay-for-useperspective, as providers haveneeded to change what theyneed from the federation from“bringing users" to “bringingfunding”.

For the last two years, EGI hasbeen maturing its processes viaan EC H2020 project, NextGEOSS,where a dedicated budget wasallocated to the EGI Foundationto ensure support for a numberof pilots with yet unknowntechnical requirements. Thismeant that the EGI Foundationwould need to serve as a broker,identifying the relevant

The pay-for-use model within EGI

Sy Holsinger updates us on the process

providers during the project andmanaging all finance andadministration aspects. Thismodel also had a positive impacton the providers as they wouldneed to be able to associatecosts of those services (and beable to invoice EGI Foundation).

There are pros and cons to sucha model as from the providerperspective - being formallyincluded as a project consortiummember offers more visibilityand recognition from localauthorities, however, is notalways favoured by coordinatorsthat by needing the EGI Fede-ration services, it comes with alist of multiple providers thatincreases administration overhead.

By having a formal redistributionmethod of funding, providerscan be reimbursed for the ser-vices they offer, with the flexibi-lity for project coordination.

This approach has since beenreused with the EOSC-hubproject as a mechanism toreimburse service providers forsupporting additional use caserequests that come during theproject i.e. industry pilots via theEOSC Digital Innovation Hub.

What has not changed is thatany pay-for-use model will stillonly complement the currentpractice of researchersaccessing resources that are freeat point of use (sponsoredaccess), which were paid upfrontby funding agencies. Resourceproviders have the flexibility to‘opt-in’ for those who are able


More information

Sy Holsinger is SeniorStrategy and Policy Officer atthe EGI Foundation.

and willing to participate in thepay-for-use model.

Future activities are planned toexpand the provider poolbeyond only the handful ofproviders that are takingadvantage and better under-stand any blocking issues;reduce overhead between initialcontact and service delivery;increase transparency throughclear price listings, better de-fined procedures, guidelines andselection criteria; evolve accoun-ting systems; and conduct astudy on the potential of settingup a commercial arm of EGI.

If you are interested inparticipating in the EGI Pay-for-Use Working Group or have anyquestions, please contact:[email protected]

More information

Germán Moltó is AssociateProfessor at the UniversitatPolitècnica de València (UPV).

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The problem: event-drivenscientific computingServerless computing, in theshape of Functions as a Service(FaaS) platforms, has paved theway for event-driven computingas a computational mechanismto process short-lived functionsin response to events (such asHTTP requests or file uploads toa storage back-end).

Main open-source serverlessplatforms such as OpenFaaS,OpenWhisk and KNative arefocused on processing bursts ofshort-lived HTTP requests viafunctions coded in certain pro-gramming languages, providingelasticity in terms of the numberof containers started to simulta-neously process the requests.

However, scientific applicationsare commonly more resourceintensive, require longerexecution times and can benefitfrom the auto-scaling of theunderlying computationalinfrastructure in order to bettercope with increased workloads.

The solution: OSCAR serverlesscomputing platformTo this aim we developedOSCAR, an open serverlesscomputing platform for data-processing applications. OSCARconsists of several services thatare deployed on an elasticKubernetes cluster.

The cluster is then deployed viaEC3, which uses the Infras-tructure Manager to provisionthe cluster on multi-clouds.

OSCAR uses MINIO as thestorage back-end so that filesuploaded trigger events that are

Serverless computing for data-processing applications in EGI

Germán Moltó introduces the new OSCAR platform

captured by the OpenFaaSserverless platform responsibleto execute the user-definedfunctions. Requests are trans-formed into Kubernetes jobs toaccommodate long-runningexecutions.This allows scientiststo easily couple their file-processing applications to astorage area so that wheneverfiles are uploaded, a function isinvoked to simultaneouslyprocess the files. Output dataresults automatically appear inthe same storage area.

OSCAR has been integrated withseveral EGI services. First, theEGI Applications on Demand, inparticular the EC3 portal, can beused to perform the provision ofthe elastic Kubernetes cluster onthe EGI Federated Cloud.Second, the EGI Data Hub can beemployed to use Onedata as thesource of events to trigger theexecution of the OSCARfunctions in response to fileuploads. This means that userswith an EGI account can self-deploy an elastic OSCAR clusterand create their file-processingapplications in response to fileuploads to their EGI DataHubOnedata space.


Use case: plants classificationA use case arising from the DEEPHybrid DataCloud project thatinvolves plants classificationusing deep learning techniqueshas been integrated with theOSCAR platform. This applicationuses a neural network optimisedfor plant identification usingimages. This use case can befollowed step-by-step (seevideo), – an OSCAR cluster isdeployed and a function iscreated to process the plantsimages whenever uploaded to aOneData space. Then, theKubernetes cluster is scaled inthe EGI Federated Cloud tosimultaneously execute multipleplants recognition. Additionaluse cases are available in theGitHub repository.

Components of the OSCAR serverless platform.

Benefits for scientists: integration with EGI

More information

Massimo Rizzi is a researcherof the Department ofNeuroscience at the MarioNegri Institute forPharmacological Research.

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Currently, there are no drugswhich can be used for preven-ting the development of epilepsyin patients exposed to riskfactors such as brain injuries orinfections of the central nervoussystem. In order to foster thedevelop-ment of newtreatments, it is important toidentify indicators (biomarkers)of the time window during whichuncovered mechanisms lead thebrain to develop epilepsy – aperiod called epileptogenesis.These biomarkers refer to one ormore measurable events that: 1)are early factors predictive of theemergence of epilepsy and 2)vary depending on the severityof the illness.

These biomarkers could beexploited for the development ofdisease-modifying therapies inindividuals exposed to riskfactors. The success of suchtherapies would reduce theincidence of epilepsy.

The main goal of our investi-gation is to identify a marker ofepileptogenesis in the brainelectrical activity, as measuredby the Electroncephalogram(EEG) – an assessment tool usedfor epilepsy investigations. Wehave recently shown that thebrain electrical activity followingthe exposure to a risk factor ischaracterised by the emergenceof specific patterns of behavior.This aspect may be exploited toidentify one or more markers ofepileptogenesis and we areinvestigating such possibilities.

To this aim, EEG tracings are

How EGI and the Helix Nebula Science Cloud projectcollaborate for science

Massimo Rizzi explains how EGI and the voucher scheme introduced by theHNSciCloud project supported his research work

analysed by the RecurrenceQuantification Analysis (RQA)tool – a mathematical toolsuitable for detecting andquantifying specific behaviors ofbrain electrical activityembedded in noisy time-series,such as the EEG. Several stepsare involved in the implemen-tation of the RQA, some of whichare computational intensive.

A contribution to support thisactivity is the recent integrationof the Elastic Cloud ComputingCluster (EC3), operated by thePolytechnic University ofValencia (UPV), with theHNSciCloud vouchers to accesscommercial cloud providersprovided by Exoscale. Thevoucher scheme was proposedby Exoscale, the IaaS computingresources for the RHEA Cloudplatform, as a result of thecollaboration with theHNSciCloud Pre-CommercialProcurement (PCP) project.Thanks to this integration, usersof the Mario Negri Institute inMilan were able to allocate theresources needed to configurethe cluster to analyse the EEGwith the RQA mathematical tool.Fully-dedicated high-performingCPUs strongly contribute toreduce the calculation times inimple-menting the RQA of EEGtracings, so that long-runningjobs that normally take monthsto complete can be accom-plished in a matter of days. Thisallows researchers to get resultsmuch quicker and to increasethe amount of informationgained by the analyses.


Thanks to EGI, the voucherscheme offered by theHNSciCloud PCP project and theEC3 framework, we alreadyplanned to enrich our investi-gation by using further analyticaltools. In the future, we hope tosignificantly improve ourunderstanding of mechanismsleading to the development ofepilepsy and to discover newapproaches of prevention.

Do you want to use aHNSciCloud voucher for yourown research?

HNSciCloud has made a numberof Exoscale vouchers available toEGI to support the work ofresearchers.

• Access the EOSC Marketplace -marketplace.eosc-portal.eu.

• Select Elastic Cloud ComputeCluster from the list of services.

• Place an order requestingaccess to the service using oneof the available HNSciCloudvouchers.

• When the service request isapproved you will be notified byemail.

• Service orders are usuallyprocessed in three working days.

More information

Elis Bertazzon is part of theAARC project communicationsteam.

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EGI was one of the majorcontributors of the AARC project,the EU-funded initiative thatanswered the increasing needamong research collaborationsand e-infrastructures for authen-tication and authorisationmechanisms and for federatedaccess to their online services.

After 4 years, the project hascome to an end but its mainoutputs are already having apositive impact on the researchcommunity, and some AARC-based solutions have beenadopted by EGI, EUDAT, GEANTand the EOSC.

The Blueprint Architecture: a“community-first” approachAARC Blueprint Architecture(BPA) is a reference architecturethat provides “building blocks”for an AAI that supportsfederated access. Research ande-infrastructures adopting theBPA can take advantage of theidentity federations & eduGAINand enable federated access toresources in a way that was notpossible before.

The new version of the BPAfocuses on allowing the AAIs ofdifferent research and e-infrastructures to inter-operate.This functionality is needed byresearch communities requiringaccess to resources that areoffered by other infrastructureproviders. The new BPApromotes a “community-first”approach, introducing theCommunity AAI. This elementstreamlines how researchers canaccess services via theirCommunity AAI using theirinstitutional credentials from the

The new AARC Blueprint Architecture

Elis Bertazzon on a new AARC functionality for research collaborations

National Identity Federations ineduGAIN, but also from othersources as needed by thecommunity, such as social mediaor other community-managedidentity providers.

The new version of the AARC BPAfocuses on the cross-AAIinteroperability aspects andprovides a broader view foraddressing an increasing numberof use cases from researchcommunities requiring access tofederated resources offered bydifferent infrastructure providers.

The BPA is proving to be a successand it has been adopted by EGI,EUDAT and GEANT, and providesa cornerstone AAI in the EuropeanOpen Science Cloud. Also, severalresearch infrastructures areadopting BPA-based solutions,including DARIAH, the pan-European infrastructure for artsand humanities scholars workingwith computational tools.

EGI and DARIAH:interoperable thanks to AARCThe challenge for DARIAH was tomake their AAI interoperable withother e-Infrastructure services toallow, for example, a DARIAHresearcher to access the CloudCompute service offered by theEGI Federation without a new setof log in details and with thenecessary authorization attributesmanaged by DARIAH. The BPAprovided a set of softwarebuilding blocks that allowedDARIAH to connect IdentityProviders (IdPs) and ServiceProviders (SPs) through acentralized proxy. AARC alsoprovided guidelines for intero-perability between multiple


infrastructures, in this case thecommunity AAI of DARIAH andthe e-Infrastructure of EGI.

A legacy for years to comeFind out more and#StartWithAARC:bit.ly/startwithaarc

The AARC Blueprint Architecture,Policy Development Kit (atoolbox of information, templatedocuments, training materialsand guidelines) and ‘AARC inAction’ collection of case studiesgive a head start to anyone whois seeking an Authentication andAuthorisation Infrastructure(AAI) solution for their researchcollaboration.

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We are pleased to announce thatthe EGI Foundation and ShanghaiScience and Technology InnovationResources Center (SSTIR) signeda Memorandum of Understanding.

Shanghai Science and TechnologyInnovation Resources Center(SSTIR), is based in Shanghai andsupports a platform promotingtechnologic resources andresearch data sharing.

Through this MoU, the EGIFoundation will support SSTIR inthe design and construction ofthe Yangtze River Delta UnitedCloud Platform. The supportenvisaged includes consultancyon building a cloud federationand management platform, aswell as provisioning of tools andservices for the users (SaaS).

The mutual interest in buildingand operating cloud federationsfor science and research broughttogether the two parties.

EGI signs MoU with Shanghai Science and TechnologyInnovation Resources Center

The request for help reached EGIvia the EOSC Portal, demonstratingthe visibility and power of theEOSC Portal connecting communitieseven across continents.

Gergely Sipos, Customer andTechnical Outreach Manager atthe EGI Foundation, says: “Thiscollaboration is a great opportunityto further demonstrate EGI’sexpertise in connecting cloudresources from multipleinstitutes, and to enable access todistributed communities for bigdata analysis. We believe that thetechnologies and components


that enable the EGI Cloud Com-pute service and higher levelservices on top - such as EGINotebooks - will prove theirusefulness among the commu-nities in the Shanghai region.The MoU also enables EGI tostrengthen its ties and visibilityin China and in Asia in general."

Zhu Yue, head of SSTIR, says:“EGI will help us to strengthenour capability of serving theresearch institutions andinnovative companies in theirown transformations."

The 2nd call for the EOSC Early Adopter Programme is open!The EOSC-hub project invitesresearchers and researchcommunities that require thecombined use of multipleservices and resources to applyto the 2nd call of the EOSC EarlyAdopter Programme.

The deadline for applications is15 October 2019, 18:00 CEST.

The services and resources inscope for the programme arethose currently provided by theEOSC-hub project and its part-ners OCRE, OpenAIRE, GÉANT.

Why the EOSC Early AdopterProgramme?

• To train and support resear-chers on the usage of theresources and services madeavailable by EOSC-hub andpartners via the EOSC market-place and the OCRE project;

• To get insight into digital needsof researchers & their use cases;

• To foster a culture of collaborationbetween researchers and EOSCservice service providers (EOSC-hub, Open-AIRE, OCRE, GÉANT).

• To foster confidence in thecapability and capacity that willbe provided via the EOSC.

How to apply

Interested parties are requestedto fill an online application formon the EOSC-hub website:

www.eosc-hub.eu/early-adopter-programme-application-form

Documents

Inspired - EGI · EGI Inspired Newsletter // September 2019 // 4 TheHigh-PerformanceComputing Center of the University of Lille, registered in the EGI GOCDB as UNIV-LILLE, provides