European Open Science Cloud - Expanding Capacities by building Capabilities

Project Information

EOSC-synergy

Grant agreement ID: 857647

DOI

10.3030/857647

Project closed

EC signature date 22 July 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 31 October 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Research Infrastructures

Total cost

€ 5 584 006,25

EU contribution

€ 5 584 006,25

Coordinated by

AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EOSC-synergy (European Open Science Cloud - Expanding Capacities by building Capabilities)

Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

EOSC-Synergy envisions EOSC as a coordinated effort to provide a European, open environment for scientific data and related processing that promotes convergence of infrastructures and thematic services provided at national or European level.

Realizing this across the European Research Area requires coordinated actions. EOSC-Synergy is providing services to access, process and compute on research data in a scalable way at the European level, ensuring research data is broadly exploitable as a public good.

We are as well promoting the synergy between Europe-wide Research Communities and
scientific computing infrastructures. We bridge the “digital gap” between EC countries with different readiness levels. Our final goal is expanding the capacity and capabilities of EOSC by leveraging the experience, effort and resources of national publicly-funded digital infrastructures in a coherent way.

Therefore the project is fostering incentives for the national resource providers, that participate in the consortium, to participate in the EOSC ecosystem in the countries. The list of high-level objectives to tackle the scientific, technical and policy goals is:


1- Expand EOSC Capacity by integrating national resources and simplifying access by implementing standards and best practices following the EOSC hub concepts;
2- Build EOSC Capabilities across multidisciplinary research areas by adapting to EOSC the architecture of discipline-specific services. This adaptation translates into an immediate benefit in terms of scaling up the EOSC infrastructure capacity;
3- Foster EOSC services integration by promoting a quality-driven integration process that promotes adherence to EOSC standards, and eases the path towards adoption of the FAIR paradigm;
4- Promoting EOSC harmonisation in terms of alignment towards common policies and practices, and support to EU directives in privacy and cloud security;
5- Develop the EOSC Human capital by incorporating online training as a new full-fledged component of the EOSC Portal, facilitating access to high quality technical information and tailored training materials;


The strongest impact of the EOSC-Synergy project will be a measurable increase of the number of resources, services, and data repositories offered to researchers through EOSC. This impact is paired with concrete contributions to the EOSC governance structure from national perspectives and a new channel to support the build-up of EOSC human capabilities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

EOSC-Synergy partners have been working in the capacity expansion, contributing to the enlarging EOSC with computing and storage resources, ensuring the quality of services and developing capabilities of research communities, integrating thematic services for being accessible into the EOSC and developing tools and materials to support the training of skills.

In the area of Capacity Building, the National Clouds of the countries have been integrated, and are already serving the scientific needs of the project thematic services. We have contributed to support research to fight the COVID19 pandemic by deploying the first EOSC-enabled Cloud Computing Service based on Galaxy genomics analysis. Furthermore, the project is supporting the education of young students, for example Master students, where one of our MBSc projects produced a service able to benchmark computing Clouds. We made this material available on our Youtube channel to raise awareness among young researchers. This is part of our educational effort on effective usage of e-infrastructures, available in the playlist "Learn with us" of our Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcS98iVAFmVOldBaBXnl4aBz4ssI__waQ )

In the area of Quality assurance, we have defined the first approach to an EOSC service quality baseline, and defined a Quality Badge scheme. A practical implementation is already available as a prototype for scientific applications. We have developed, and made available in open source, a specialised library (JePL) that supports the deployment of the scientific use cases using quality assurance guidelines. Information on how to use JePL is available in the form of tutorial .

We adapted our 10 pioneer thematic services to use the EOSC core, and with that, increase the size of resources available to scientists. Our scientific cases can bee seen at work in our Youtube channel as well . All the software developed by the project, both in the area of middleware and in the scientific applications area, is open source and has a well-defined license. We foresee all our training material to be delivered via our EOSC training platform, of which a first version is already available at https://learn.eosc-synergy.eu. Our platform is enhancedwith best practices on how to create self-deployable tutorials, using advanced toolsets building on the MOOC concepts, and the provision of advanced services such as "Hackatons as a Service".

Finally an in-depth policy analysis regarding EOSC readiness and awareness in the countries involved in the project has taken place. This work has been done in cooperation with sister regional projects building also EOSC-based ecosystems. EOSC-Synergy has produced 7 Landscape analysis reports of EOSC-related national policies and practices, and contributed substantially to the EOSC Working Groups the project has been invited to participate in.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

EOSC-Synergy is pushing the state-of-the-art to implement EOSC in practice for how infrastructure managers, software developers, and end users perceive the EOSC ecosystem: an environment where actual research takes place, and researchers find a solution to their everyday endeavours when using digital technologies.

Our approach to foster EOSC adoption is based on the development of a quality-based approach. We have developed a coherent definition of a software and service quality baseline, that enables the safe deployment of scientific thematic services, in terms of security and safe data transfer across Europe. Following the EOSC core architecture, EOSC-Synergy has integrated national e-infrastructures and developed a portfolio of services to support the 10 pioneer thematic services to support relevant scientific areas in Europe. We have paid special attention to the connection with science in South American countries like Brazil in environmental sciences, or detectors of Gamma Rays for astro-particle physics distributed across the whole subcontinent.

Our scientific thematic services constitute a key activity to evaluate the societal impact of the capabilities developed in EOSC-Synergy. Socio-economic impact arising from the exploitation of the EOSC-Synergy Thematic Services applies to societal challenges identified as key. In the area of Earth Observation, services address the monitoring of coastal changes and inundations, the processing of satellite image data and the estimation of forest mass, addressing different types of targets. In Environment, the thematic services cover the monitoring and protection of ozone, the forecast of sand and dust storms, the simulation of water network distribution and untargeted mass-spectrometry analysis for toxins. In biomedicine EOSC-Synergy covers the benchmarking of Genomic data processing tools and the processing of Cryo-electron microscopy imaging.

High Level goals of the project

EOSC-Synergy award to the Best Project for Open Badges

Capabilities of the WorSICA Thematic Service to detect water leaks

Workflow of the Ozone Assessment Thematic Service

Video tutorial of the Ozone Assessment Thematic Service