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• Federated cloud
  • EGI federated cloud task force

Federated cloud

The European Grid Infrastructure’s (EGI) resource centres have been providing services for collaborative, compute- and data-intensive applications for over a decade. These services use grid middleware software developed and delivered to EGI by external technology providers. Besides these established services, several National Grid Infrastructures (NGIs) are now offering privately run cloud services to their country’s researchers. Many of these researchers want to share this capability within their international research collaborations – a model similar to the way the grid emerged over a decade ago through the federation of institutional batch computing clusters.

To facilitate the setup of a pan-European federated cloud based on the resources of the NGIs, the EGI-InSPIRE project established a Federated Cloud Task Force. Task Force members identify and test technologies, deploy and operate services in a federated cloud. The system is currently in a test bed state, but several of its sites are already available for international research collaborations to use.

Find out more about the EGI Federated Cloud, how to access and use these sites, and the communities and pilot applications that are already benefiting from the services on the User Communities wiki page.

Get involved with the improvements

An efficient and easy to use federated cloud service needs more than just the infrastructure services. User-friendly interfaces for all users, operators and developers are also a must. The EGI community is seeking volunteers to work with us to improve the use and access to the EGI Federated Cloud. If you are interested in participating, please email the User Community Support Team (ucst@egi.eu). A list of example projects for which we need contributors are available on the Federated Cloud Task Force wiki page.