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EGI-ACE delivers ‘EOSC Compute Platform’ services and ‘Data Space services’ in EOSC. This deliverable reports on the integration and alignment activities between EGI-ACE and EOSC. The document describes the approaches that were taken by the project for the service portfolio integration; technical interoperability; service management system; FAIRness assessment of the data spaces. Based on the findings the project will continue to strengthen the links with EOSC in 2022. An updated version of this deliverable will be produced as D2.8 in December 2022.

This deliverable introduces the second version of the Technical Roadmap for the EOSC-hub services. It describes the capabilities, the features and the plan for the technical evolution of the services within the EOSC hub service portfolios, with a focus on the activities needed to improve the interoperability among the services and to enable service composition in the wider EOSC environment. Plans depicted in this deliverable will be implemented in EOSC-hub follow-up projects, notably those funded under the INFRAEOSC-03 (EOSC Future) and INFRAOESC-07 calls (EGI-ACE, DICE, etc.).

The Technical Coordination Work Package (WP10) in the EOSC-hub project plays an important role aimed at supporting both participants (e.g. Thematic Services, Competence Centres and Business pilots) and external user communities (not directly involved in the project but engaged through other channels, e.g. the EOSC Portal) in the process to integrate their services into the Hub. In the first report WP10 has defined and is currently operating procedures to elicit, assess and track the technical requirements of such communities and, consequently, provide adequate assistance to the user communities to adopt the service of the Hub. In order to better structure and consolidate this support WP10 extended such activities by launching the Early Adopter Programme for research communities interested in exploring the latest state-of-art technologies and services offered by the European Open Science Cloud. In this respect, details are provided about the outcome of the above mentioned technical support activities, together with the related requirements and gap analysis extracted from the needs of the different communities involved.

Monitoring allows to quickly detect, correlate, and analyse data for a fast reaction to anomalous behaviour that may affect end-users and ultimately the productivity of the organization. The key functional requirements of a monitoring system are monitoring of services, reporting availability and reliability, visualization of the services status, provide dashboard interfaces and sending real-time alerts. This document describes the high-level service architecture for an EOSC Monitoring service and presents the main integration and usage use cases for monitoring in EOSC. It proposes interfaces as guidelines to be followed to achieve the interoperability between monitoring systems in EOSC for three envisaged use cases: (1) combine Results of one or more infrastructures in EOSC in a unified UI, (2) add a Service Provider/Infrastructure to EOSC Monitoring and (3) Third-party services exploiting EOSC Monitoring data.

This document describes the EOSC-hub contribution to the definition of the EOSC Technical Architecture, which is currently being developed by the EOSC architecture Working Group. It is based on the concepts of service interoperability and end-to-end composition of services and foresees the definition of a reference architecture in which EOSC building blocks and the main functions, interfaces, APIs and standards are identified. This architecture is expected to facilitate access to services, lower the barriers to integrate and composes services and promote the usage of services between adjacent communities. As a basis for the proposed architecture, service categories have been introduced, mapping their functions, relationships and organisation to the kinds of services required for the federating core of EOSC and the external EOSC service portfolio. The concept of the end-to-end composition of services has been presented, highlighting the most common integration scenarios. Leveraging the defined service categories and on the concepts of service interoperability and composition, a reference EOSC Technical Architecture has been defined identifying a hierarchical structure where the first level relies on service categories (Federation & Access enabling,, Common and Thematic), the second level introduces functional categories, that groups technical functions to facilitate their identification, and the third is made of the technical functions that has been called building blocks. EOSC-hub is working on defining the building blocks of the architecture for each service type and specified a common approach to complete this task. It foresees the identification of the main building blocks/technical functions in each service category and, for each of those, the definition of a technical specification that includes a high-level architecture, suggested EOSC standards and APIs and interoperability guidelines. As a consequence, interoperability between services compliant with the EOSC specifications will be easier to be achieved.

The EGI Federated Cloud is a standards-based, open cloud system as well as its enabling technologies that federates institutional clouds to offer a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services. The EGI Federated Cloud is based on open standards and open source Cloud Management Frameworks and offers to its users IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities and interfaces tuned towards the needs of users in research and education. The federation enables scientific data, workloads, simulations and services to span across multiple administrative locations, allowing researchers and educators to access and exploit the distributed resources as an integrated system. The EGI Federated Cloud collaboration established a user support model and a training infrastructure to raise visibility of this service within European scientific communities with the overarching goal to increase adoption and, ultimately increase the usage of e-infrastructures for the benefit of the whole European Research Area. The paper describes this scalable user support and training infrastructure models. The training infrastructure is built on top of the production sites to reduce costs and increase its sustainability. Appropriate design solutions were implemented to reduce the security risks due to the cohabitation of production and training resources on the same sites. The EGI Federated Cloud educational program foresees different kind of training events from basic tutorials to spread the knowledge of this new infrastructure to events devoted to specific scientific disciplines teaching how to use tools already integrated in the infrastructure with the assistance of experts identified in the EGI community. The main success metric of this educational program is the number of researchers willing to try the Federated Cloud, which are steered into the EGI world by the EGI Federated Cloud Support Team through a formal process that brings them from the initial tests to fully exploit the production resources. © 2015 IEEE.

In the last 10 years, a new way of doing science is spreading in the world thank to the development of virtual research communities across many geographic and administrative boundaries. A virtual research community is a widely dispersed group of researchers and associated scientific instruments working together in a common virtual environment. This new kind of scientific environment, usually addressed as a "collaboratory", is based on the availability of high-speed networks and broadband access, advanced virtual tools and Grid-middleware technologies which, altogether, are the elements of the e-Infrastructures. The European Commission has heavily invested in promoting this new way of collaboration among scientists funding several international projects with the aim of creating e-Infrastructures to enable the European Research Area and connect the European researchers with their colleagues based in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this paper we describe the actual status of these e-Infrastructures and present a complete picture of the virtual research communities currently using them. Information on the scientific domains and on the applications supported are provided together with their geographic distribution. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

The heterogeneous requirements of e-Science applications belonging to several scientific domains makes difficult to provide them with a support able to satisfy all the different needs. Usually, the grid middleware adopted provides applications with general tools unable to meet specific requirements. For this reason, a really powerful e-Infrastructure has to offer some additional services to complete and integrate the functionalities of the basic grid middleware. These services have both to increase the set of functionalities offered by the e-Infrastructure and to make the task of developing and deploying new applications easier. Following this methodology, EELA-2, a project co-funded by the European Commission and involving European and Latin American countries, has fully deployed 53 e-Science applications. This paper describes the services developed to achieve this outstanding result.

This paper describes the EGI ‘Applications on Demand service’, a new offering from EGI specifically for individual researchers, small research teams and early phase research infrastructures to support them in scientific data analysis. The described service is available through the EGI Marketplace and, through a lightweight registration and user identity vetting process, allows user-friendly access to a growing number of scientific applications, tools and application hosting frameworks (science gateways; Virtual Research Environments; portal) that are configured to use a dedicated pool of cloud computing and High Throughput Compute clusters donated by members of the EGI federation. The service operates as an open and extensible ‘hub’ for providers and user support teams who wish to federate and share applications and services with individual researchers or small, fragmented communities — typically called ‘the long tail of science’. At the time of writing the service is under integration into the European Open Science Cloud through the EOSC-hub H2020 project.

The EOSC Early Adopter Programme (EAP) is a programme launched by EOSC-hub for research communities interested in exploring the latest state-of-art technologies and services offered by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). 13 pilots were selected in two calls spanning several scientific disciplines: agriculture, marine, material sciences, disaster mitigation, health science, biology, astronomy, light pollution etc. The pilots exploited generic and thematic services and resources from EOSC-hub and its partners and completed 25 integrations with 9 different EOSC-hub services. Three of the pilots registered new thematic services in EOSC, and two more will follow in 2021, demonstrating how an operational EOSC can boost the research in Europe and the adoption of new paradigms to deal with the increasing complexity of science. The majority of the pilots will continue either as service provider, or with continued integration after the end of EOSC-hub. The follow-up was made possible by individual agreements that the pilots made with EGI and EUDAT, or with INFRAEOSC-07 H2020 projects (EGI-ACE, DICE, C-SCALE).