Following an intense planning phase during last year, with INFN and in particular CNAF at the forefront, new projects EU-approved are starting. More details below.

eXtreme-DataCloud (XDC): this project will develop scalable technologies for federating storage resources and
managing data in highly distributed computing environments. The services provided will be capable of operating
at the unprecedented scale required by the most demanding, data intensive, research experiments in Europe and
Worldwide. XDC will be based on existing tools (TRL8+) that the project will enrich with new functionalities
and plugins already available as prototypes (TRL6). The targeted platforms are the current and next generation
e-Infrastructures deployed in Europe, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European Grid
Infrastructure (EGI), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and the computing infrastructures that will
be funded by the upcoming H2020 EINFRA-12 call.

The main high-level topics addressed by the project include:
federation of storage resources with standard protocols, smart caching solutions, policy driven data management
based on Quality of Service, data lifecycle management, metadata handling and manipulation, data preprocessing
and encryption during ingestion, optimized data management based on access patterns.

All the developments will be
driven and tested against real life use cases provided by the consortium partners representing research communities
belonging to a variety of scientific domains: Life Science, Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Photon Science and
Clinical Research. The XDC software will be released as Open Source platforms available for general exploitation.

• Start date: November 1st 2017
• Call: EINFRA-21-2017 (Platform-driven e-infrastructure innovation), topic b: Computing e-infrastructure with extreme large datasets
• Budget: 3 M€
• Coordinator: INFN
• Participants: 8 beneficiaries from 7 countries
• Duration: 27 months

DEEP Hybrid DataCloud: Designing and Enabling E-infrastructures for intensive Processing in a Hybrid DataCloud

The key concept proposed in the DEEP Hybrid DataCloud project is the need to support intensive computing techniques that require specialized HPC hardware, like GPUs or low latency interconnects, to explore very large datasets. A Hybrid Cloud approach enables the access to such resources that are not easily reachable by the researchers at the scale needed in the current EU e-infrastructure.

We also propose to deploy under the common label of “DEEP as a Service” a set of building blocks that enable the easy development of applications requiring these techniques: deep learning using neural networks, parallel post-processing of very large data, and analysis of massive online data streams.

Three pilot applications exploiting very large datasets in Biology, Physics and Network Security are proposed, and further pilots for dissemination into other areas like Medicine, Earth Observation, Astrophysics, and Citizen Science will be supported in a testbed with significant HPC resources, including latest generation GPUs, to evaluate the performance and scalability of the solutions.

A DevOps approach will be implemented to provide the chain to ensure the quality of the software and services released, that will also be offered to the developers of research applications.

The project will evolve to TRL8 existing services and technologies at TRL6+, including relevant contributions to the EOSC by the INDIGO-DataCloud H2020 project, that the project will enrich with new functionalities already available as prototypes, notably the support for GPUs and low latency interconnects. These services will be deployed in the project testbed, offered to the research communities linked to the project through pilot applications, and integrated under the EOSC framework, where they can be further scaled up in the future.

• Start date: November 1st 2017
• Call: EINFRA-21-2017 (Platform-driven e-infrastructure innovation), topic b: Computing e-infrastructure with extreme large datasets
• Budget: 3 M€
• Coordinator: Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC)
• Participants: 10 beneficiaries from 9 countries
• Duration: 30 months

EOSC-Hub: Integrating and managing services for the European Open Science Cloud.

The EOSC-hub mission is to contribute to the EOSC implementation by enabling seamless and open access to a system of research data and services provided across nations and multiple disciplines. The project will offer these resources via the Hub – a integration and management system of the EOSC, acting as a European-level entry point for all stakeholders. This will be achieved through 3 actions.

Governance and funding. Be an EOSC service integrator and federator. Develop the know-how and the prototype procurement and purchasing framework that interested organisations can use to acquire digital services from either publicly funded infrastructures or commercial providers.

Data culture and FAIR data. Provide production-quality FAIR data and services by leveraging current and future FAIR implementation guidelines developed by research communities, e-Infrastructures and other relevant players. Ensure data can be used as widely as possible across scientific disciplines and between the private and public sector by: providing third-party public/private data as a service, making core data resources discoverable and accessible, and interconnecting existing data infrastructures across Europe.

Research data services and architecture. Create an open integration and management system (the Hub) for the future European Open Science Cloud that delivers an evolving catalogue of services, open source software and data, and aggregate services required by key European scientific communities from local, regional and national e-Infrastructures in Europe and worldwide. The Hub acts as a contact point for researchers and innovators to easily discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research. Improve skills and knowledge among researchers and service operators by delivering specialised trainings and by establishing competence centres to co-create solutions. The project also stimulates an ecosystem of industry/SMEs, service providers and researchers to support business pilots, market take-up and commercial boost strategies.

• Start date: January 1st 2018
• Call: EINFRA-12-2017 (Data and Distributed Computing e-infrastructures for Open Science), topic a: Secure and agile data and distributed computing e-infrastructure
• Budget: 30 M€
• Coordinator: EGI Foundation (EGI.eu)
• Participants: 74 beneficiaries (plus 20 linked third-parties) from 36 countries
• Duration: 36 months