EU researchers attained a federated cloud

Helsinki 21st May, 2014. The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) yesterday launched the Federated Cloud—a cloud service tailored for European researchers. The announcement was made by EGI at the annual EGI Community Forum, taking place in Helsinki this week. The Czech Education and Scientific NETwork (CESNET), association of public universities and Academy of Sciences, is one of the 16 resource providers involved.

The Federated Cloud pools resources and services provided by various partners, both public and private, and offers them through a single point of contact. This unique set up has allowed EGI to create a cloud that offers researchers:

  • Access to advanced compute capabilities for their research
  • Virtualised resources to run any environment they choose
  • Support services to ensure applications run as efficiently as possible

Any European researcher can start using the Federated Cloud global service today by contacting EGI (support@egi.eu), or consulting the instructions at http://www.egi.eu/how-to/use_the_federated_Cloud.html.

„I am delighted to be able to announce that after so much hard work from everyone involved we now have a research orientated cloud platform based on open standards that is ready to support every researcher in Europe. This is an important milestone for all areas of research in Europe“, said David Wallom, Chair of the Federated Clouds Task Force.

The Federated Cloud has been built to support development and innovation within the European Research Area. The infrastructure has been designed in collaboration with communities across Europe to support all fields of research. All researchers working within the EU may use the Federated Cloud to manage, disseminate and process their data flexibly, quickly and efficiently.

Work on the Federated Cloud started back in 2011 to address the need to provide community-specific cloud services that would provide the scalability and flexibility that modern research needs.

During the development of the service, EGI has worked with many research communities to specify the requirements. The communities involved are the WeNMR project (structural biology), the European Space Agency (satellite image processing), Peachnote (musicology), BioVeL (biodiversity), CHAIN-REDS (promoting international collaborations) and EISCAT-3D (geospace).

At its launch, the Federated Cloud pools resources and the expertise of 19 countries around Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, the Republic of Macedonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom. There are many countries outside Europe also involved in the project.

Project details are available at: www.egi.eu

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a pan-European federation of publicly funded computing, storage and data resources to support excellent science, research and innovation in Europe. EGI pools together resources from more than 40 countries and supports more than 22,000 researchers across many scientific fields with solutions such as high-throughput data analysis, federated cloud, federated operations and community-driven innovation and support. EGI is coordinated by EGI.eu, a not-for-profit foundation, supported by the EGI-InSPIRE project and governed by the National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) and international research communities.

The CESNET Association was founded by Czech universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in 1996. It is engaged in research and development in information and communication technologies and builds and develops the CESNET national e-infrastructure for research and education. Thanks to its research involvement, CESNET represents the Czech Republic in important international projects, most notably the pan-European GÉANT network development and grid projects (EGI.eu), and participates actively in their implementation.

Press release, May 21, 2014

Last change: 23.5.2014