The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to be the Europe’s virtual environment for all researchers to store, manage, analyse and re-use data for research, innovation and educational purposes.
INDIGO-DataCloud (INDIGO) and its two follow-up projects, Deep-HybridDataCloud (DEEP) and eXtreme-DataCloud (XDC) are considered to be part of the key contributors to the actual implementation of EOSC.
Funded by the EC, the projects are aimed at developing cloud-oriented scalable technologies capable of operating at the unprecedented scale as required by the most demanding, data intensive, research experiments in Europe and Worldwide.
Thanks to the service components developed by INDIGO, researchers in Europe are now using public and private cloud resources to handle large volume data that enables new research and innovations different scientific disciplines and research fields. In particular, many INDIGO services are included – or in the process to be included – in the unified service catalogue provided by the EOSC-hub project, endeavoured putting in place the basic layout for the European Open Science Cloud.
Built upon the already existing INDIGO service components, DEEP released Genesis a set of software components enabling the easy development and integration of applications requiring cutting-edge techniques such as artificial intelligence (deep learning and machine learning), data mining and analysis of massive online data streams. These components are now available as a consistent and modular suite, ready to be included in the service catalogue.
The INDIGO service components are also the building blocks of Pulsar, the first XDC release, featuring new or improved functionalities that cover important topics like federation of storage resources, smart caching solutions, policy driven data management based on Quality of Service, data lifecycle management, metadata handling and manipulation, optimised data management based on access patterns. Some of them ready to be included in the service catalogue.
Suitable to run in the already existing and the next generation e-Infrastructures deployed in Europe, the INDIGO, DEEP and XDC solutions have been implemented following a community-driven approach by addressing requirements from research communities belonging to a wide range of scientific domains: Life Science, Biodiversity, Clinical Research, Astrophysics, High Energy Physics and Photon Science, that represent an indicator in terms of computational needs in Europe and worldwide.
This is exactly the way forward for EOSC: an advanced and all-encompassing research environment that founds its core mission on community-driven open source solutions.
