In short
EGI-ACE is a 30-month project coordinated by the EGI Foundation (European Grid Initiative). EGI-ACE aims to empower researchers from all disciplines to collaborate in data- and compute-intensive research through free-at-point-of-use services. The consortium of the project builds on the expertise and assets of the EGI federation members, key research communities, data providers and collaborating initiatives.
EGI-ACE works closely with European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to provide storage facilities, technical services, analytics tools and support. At the same time, the PHIRI project (Population Health Information Research Infrastructure) coordinated by Sciensano will be one of the early adopters that will test the technical services provided by EGI-ACE, essential to store and share data in a safely manner (e.g. population health data, healthcare data).
Project description
EGI-ACE’s main goal is to implement the compute platform of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and contribute to the EOSC Data Commons by delivering integrated computing platforms, data spaces and tools as an integrated solution that is aligned with major European cloud federation projects. The objectives of the project are:
- Deliver the EOSC Compute Platform and expand the supply-side;
- Contribute to the implementation of the EU Data Strategy and the EOSC Data Commons to support the green deal, health, fundamental research and social sciences and humanities;
- Integrate the EOSC Compute Platform with the EOSC Portal and the EOSC Core;
- Contribute to the realisation of a global open science cloud;
- Expand the demand-side of EOSC across sectors and disciplines.
Building on the distributed computing integration in the EOSC-hub project, EGI-ACE delivers the EOSC Compute Platform and contributes to the EOSC Data Commons through a federation of cloud compute and storage facilities, PaaS services and data spaces with analytics tools and federated access services.
The EOSC Compute Platform builds on the EGI Federation, the largest distributed computing infrastructure for research. As a result, the platform pools the capacity of some of Europe’s largest research data centres. Its services address the needs of major research infrastructures and communities previously engaged through the EOSC-hub project such as PHIRI. The data spaces and analytics tools are delivered in collaboration with tens of research infrastructures and projects, to support use cases for Health, the Green Deal, and fundamental sciences. PHIRI and other 6 projects will be the early adopters of the EGI ACE services developed during the life course of the project.
Over the life course of the project, the platform will evolve beyond the state of the art through a data-centric approach, where data, tools and compute and storage facilities form a fully integrated environment accessible across borders thanks to virtual access.