In the last decade, many scientific domains have been transformed into data-driven disciplines. Respective approaches are addressing key societal challenges, driving the bio-economy and inspiring fundamental research. Research projects increasingly and crucially depend on the exchange and processing of data and have developed platforms tailored to their needs. Europe has invested significantly in computational infrastructure suitable for big data-driven computational research. Many national and/or regional initiatives supply HPC, HTC, and distributed compute capabilities, including the EuroHPC2 initiative and the EGI federation. These contribute to the vision of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as a research environment fostering data re-use and method sharing across scientific disciplines and national borders. Alongside data processing, FAIR sharing of data is now heavily emphasised and supported by funders, publishers and infrastructures, effectively being recognized as a crucial component of Open Science, for reproducibility and innovative re-use of research outputs. Beyond data, FAIR sharing of all digital objects - including software tools, data analysis pipelines, predictive models, AI algorithms and multi-stage analytics - is recognised as critical for reproducible, validated and transparent research, and for knowledge exchange, capacity building and productivity in the research endeavour.
Our overall aim of the EuroScienceGateway is to achieve our shared vision of an open collaborative digital space for European scientists. The project’s objectives are thus:
1. Accessible e-Infrastructure resources for European scientists to enable pioneering data-driven research across scientific domains.
A workflow-based gateway to computing and storage infrastructures and services for European scientists will be deployed, based on the open Galaxy platform, the Pulsar Network (a wide job execution system for distributed heterogeneous resources) and FAIR workflow services (WorkflowHub, RO-Crate, and metadata standards). All components will be leveraged to a robust service (TRL-9), showcased by projects from early adopter communities.
2. Supporting the varieties of analysis types and diverse usage patterns through efficient and smart job distribution to appropriate and sustainable infrastructures.
Implementation of Bring Your Own Compute and Bring Your Own Storage will enable EuroScienceGateway to support a broad variety of analysis types, respecting different hardware configuration requirements for efficient execution. By introducing the notion of data locality into the scheduling of jobs, account costs, energy consumption and performance will be taken into account.
3. The application of FAIR principles to workflows and adoption of FAIR Digital Objects to stimulate reusable and reproducible research and enable the EOSC Interoperability Framework.
We will establish FAIR practices in computational research by integrating Galaxy workflows with FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs), capturing workflow run provenance, and making EuroScienceGateway workflow definitions available as FAIR Computational Workflows through RO-Crate, WorkflowHub and metadata standards.
4. Adoption of the EuroScienceGateway by researchers in diverse scientific disciplines.
Through our use cases and communities (WP5), we will demonstrate how EuroScienceGateway can accelerate science in these fields as well as the diverse possibilities of the approach developed in this project in general. Not least, we will provide training to deploy and use the system to answer research questions. With the outreach and training activities and the operational TRL-9 services we expect and plan to grow the services to support 100,000 users.
