The European Open Science Cloud is an initiative of the European Commission set up to implement a large infrastructure to support open science and open innovation in Europe. The main vehicle to deliver the services researchers need for their work is the EOSC Portal.

The EOSC Portal was launched in November 2018 at an event in Vienna, following an intense period of work jointly undertaken by the EOSC-hub, OpenAIRE-Advance, EOSCpilot and eInfraCentral projects. The result is an online platform where researchers can learn about what is available, as well as access services, tools to manage data and compute & storage resources through the EOSC Marketplace.

The EOSC Marketplace is where researchers can discover, order and access services and resources that conform to community best-practices and standards. Through the EOSC Marketplace, researchers can also obtain assistance from international technical teams on the most suitable solutions to address their digital needs.

From the supplier side, the EOSC Marketplace offers local, national and international providers, such as European e-Infrastructures and Research Infrastructures, the opportunity to advertise their own services and resources to a broader community of practice. This will in turn increase the sustainability of e-infrastructures at all scales and the diversity of tools available for researchers.

EGI in the EOSC landscape

The EOSC marketplace is co-funded by EGI participants’ fees and the H2020 EOSC-hub project, and is technically developed and operated by two  EGI partners: CYFRONET – Poland, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel – Belgium. The EOSC marketplace leverages the development efforts and experience gathered during the EGI-Engage project.

The EGI Federation is now offering all its user-facing services through the EOSC Marketplace. Researchers from all disciplines can now access the federation’s compute, storage, data and professional services with the digital convenience of an online platform.

Taking the EGI Cloud Compute service as an example, researchers can:

• Discover the service in the EOSC Portal (under the Compute category)
• Proceed to the EOSC Marketplace entry
• Analyse the four configuration options offered off the shelf (GPUs, High-memory, Compute-intensive or General Purpose)
• Place an order

But the EGI contribution to the EOSC Portal goes even further: the EGI Federation is also providing the back-end compute abilities that power a significant number of thematic services and analytical tools offered through the marketplace. The compute resources are guaranteed via Service Level Agreements signed by the service providers and the data centres that contribute hardware, and brokered by the EGI Foundation.

Here are two examples:

• HADDOCK and the other tools in the WeNMR suite for Structural Biology are powered by High-Throughput Compute resources pledged by seven EGI data centres: INFN-Padov, RAL-LCG2, TW-NCHC, SURFsara, NCG-INGRID-PT, NIKHEF, and CESNET-MetaCloud
• The DARIAH Science Gateway is operated by LPDS SZTAKI and is using Cloud Compute resources from two EGI cloud providers: INFN-BARI and INFN-CATANIA.