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Data and Distributed Computing e-infrastructures for Open Science

 

Grants awarded under this topic will be complementary between them. The respective options of Article 2, Article 31.6 and Article 41.4 of the Model Grant Agreement will be applied. The main purpose of the collaboration agreements referred to in Article 41.4 of the Model Grant Agreement is to work on potential synergies, overlaps and gaps in the overall service offering. In addition, links should also be established with projects selected under topic INFRADEV-04-2016, to collaborate, exploit potential synergies and ensure complementarity.

Proposals will address part (a) or (b), but not both. At least one proposal for each part will be selected:

(a) Secure and agile data and distributed computing e-infrastructures (proposals should address all points below):

(1) integration of computing, software and storage resources exposing them through a dynamic This topic covers two complementary areas of e-infrastructures very closely related with the objective to make research data discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, useable, and wherever possible interoperable – c.f. G8 principles on research data:

(a) Secure and agile data and distributed computing e-infrastructures: fostering the integration of a secure, permanent, on-demand service-driven, privacy-compliant and sustainable e-infrastructure incorporating distributed databases, computing resources and software.

The European data and computing e-infrastructure landscape remains very fragmented which is an obstacle for research collaboration at European and global levels and introduces additional complexity for achieving sustainable governance. The challenge is to integrate at European level the geographically and disciplinary dispersed resources to achieve economies of scale and efficiency gains in providing the best data and computing capacity a

(a) the operation of a federated European data and distributed computing infrastructure for research and education communities will optimise the access to IT equipment and services and will put all European researchers and educators in equal footing to access essential resources to express their talent and creativity. Establishing partnerships with industrial and private partners the e-infrastructure will train people in research and academic organisations preventing lack of skilled and specialised infrastructure operators. It will avoid the locking-in to particular hardware or software platforms that would jeopardise the long-term planning for capacity upgrades. With such an operational infrastructure more scientific communities will use storage and computing infrastructures with state-of-the-art services for their research and education activities. The open nature of the infrastructure will allow scientists, educators and students to improve the service quality by interacting with data,