The EGI-Engage project (full name: Engaging the Research Community towards an Open Science Commons) ran from March 2015 to August 2017 with funds from European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 programme (grant number 654142).

The project brought together 43 partners with a mission to expand the capabilities of a backbone of federated services for compute, storage, data, communication, knowledge and expertise, complementing community-specific capabilities.

What were the key results of EGI-Engage?

Update of the strategy, governance & procurement procedures

The EGI Federation now has a new EGI strategy and a new governance model adapted to the recent evolutions of the e-Infrastructure landscape in Europe. The team also worked on an analysis of opportunities and barriers for cross-border procurement of e-Infrastructure services.

Integrated Management System and Certification

Foillowing 18 months of work to define a system to plan, implement, monitor and continually improve all business processes under its responsibility, the EGI Foundation was awarded ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011 certifications.

Security policies

The security team updated the policy frameworks to follow the technical evolution of the EGI services and also to make them more general and re-usable by other initiatives.

Thematic services integrated

Thrpoughout the project, the team worked with research communities and research infrastructures to co-design and co-develop new services. Most of these services are now offered as integrated scientific applications with EGI’s e-Infrastructure services.

Improved EGI service portfolio

The EGI service portfolio was redesigned during EGI-Engage, with improved service definitions, and divided in:

• External service catalogue
  Aimed at researchers, research communities and businesses, contains compute, storage and data, training and applications services provided by the EGI Federation.
• Internal service catalogue
  This catalogue contains tools designed to facilitate coordination and improve how the EGI Federation works together. The EGI internal services are provided for the benefit of the EGI Council members and affiliated organisations.

Tools for federated service management

The project supported technological innovation and new services in the area of Service Registry and resource allocation. During EGI-Engage, the EGI Accounting Portal was redeveloped and improved with a new user interface, new views and features. The operational tools were also continuously improved and adapted to satisfy new requirements from service providers and user communities.

Open Data platform: during the project, the team developed a platform designed to make data discoverable and available in an easy way across all EGI federated resources. The EGI DataHub will offer scalable data access and compute capabilities around scientific datasets for scientific groups at the large scale. Once in production, the EGI DataHub will enable data processing in hybrid environments like public and private clouds.

Expanded Federated Cloud computing

The EGI Federated Cloud was expanded with new IaaS capabilities. It now integrates existing commercial and public IaaS Cloud deployments and e-Infrastructures with the current EGI production infrastructures.

EGI Marketplace

A platform where EGI-related services, delivered by EGI providers and partners, can be promoted, discovered, shared, ordered and accessed. It will include EGI services as well as discipline and community-specific tools and services enabled by EGI and/or provided by third parties.

Applications on Demand

A service providing researchers dedicated access to computational and storage resources, as well as other facilities needed to run scientific applications.