EGI-ACE has not only managed to succeed in its activities and achieved its objectives, but also has became one of the shining stars of the European Open Science Cloud project landscape by delivering unprecedented scales of compute across diverse sectors and scientific disciplines while empowering a large ecosystem of thematic services and data spaces made for open science. It has also federated providers and user supporters from over 30 countries. The project has not only brought EOSC to the next level, but also expanded the EGI Federation and EGI Community with new members, new services, new partners and new users. The impacts can be summarised as:
- Impact towards Science: the project’s objective was achieved through the delivery of 36, free-at-point-of-use compute services through the EOSC Portal (19 Compute Platform services, 17 Thematic Data spaces and Processing Platforms, representing 9% of the total services (413) accessible in the EOSC Portal today. They attracted 189 access requests via the EOSC Marketplace (35% of all access orders), and received 42 access requests through the EGI-ACE Open Call, and were used by nearly 77,000 users.
- Impact towards Research: the Consortium included 15 scientific groups who integrated application and scientific data with the EOSC Compute Platform resources and services, to establish and deliver 17 scalable data hosting and processing services (36 external services from outside of the Consortium) for the EOSC Exchange layer that served over 70,000 users.
- Impact towards Collaboration: MoUs with e-infrastructures outside Europe, based on a shared vision of supporting compute-intensive Open Science with federated compute infrastructures as well as collaboration towards Research Infrastructures that includes in the Consortium RIs, expanded with 7 additional RIs are on the ESFRI roadmap. During EGI-ACE the EGI community also established a formal engagement structure towards industry: the EGI Digital Innovation Hub (EGI DIH): T-Systems and CloudFerro, MathWorks, 15 SMEs were attracted as users to the EGI-ACE services with the Open Calls.
- Impact towards Infrastructure Innovation: the Cloud integration programme to increase both the capacity and the geographical footprint of this federated infrastructure with different level of integration: T-Systems and CloudFerro commercial providers, national cloud providers of Moldova, Latvia, Armenia, Georgia, OpenStack clouds from Greece (GRNET), Italy (INFN CNAF), Germany (GSI), Hungary (ELKH Cloud), Ireland (Walton Institute), China (CSTCloud), and South Africa (ILIFU).
- Open National Infrastructures - Resource allocation approach: an innovative resource allocation model that combined multiple funding streams to reimburse the cost of services: (1) Virtual Access funding went directly from the EC to 33 providers. (73 Million CPU-hours of computing capacity delivered). (2) National and institutional funding from ministries and other types of funding agencies to providers to serve national or thematic user groups. (Over 100 providers providing 24 Million CPU-hours compute capacity. (3) Research community funding brought by the users to providers to consume services on a “pay-for-use” basis. (5 Million CPU-hours delivered).
- Compute Continuum and Data Spaces: the infrastructure layer of the EOSC Compute platform initially built on compute cloud, compute container, and High Throughput Compute facilities. During EGI-ACE this layer was extended with High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. 4 HPC facilities have been brought into EGI CESGA (Spain), IICT-BAS (Bulgaria), LIP/INCD (Portugal), and TUBITAK (Turkey), and defined how the HPC-extension to the EOSC compute platform can be achieved. The project built 5 scientific Data Spaces on top of the Compute Platform
- Impact towards Skills and Expertise : a network of shepherds and competence centres from technical experts in various institutes as well as delivered 26 webinars and 24 longer training events, attended by over 1,000 participants. The project delivered 18 FitSM training sessions in total, the result is 167 FitSM Foundation Certificates and 46 FitSM Advanced Certificates.
- New Knowledge Gained and IP Generated: 69 publications that were submitted to scientific journals or conference proceedings and 2,815 citations. The project generated in total of 35 Intellectual Property assets (excluding the deliverables) including software code and know-how.
