Towards a European Data and Compute Continuum with EGI, EOSC and EuroHPC: the EGI Approach
This blog was first posted by EGI Foundation Director Tiziana Ferrari on LinkedIn.
Many thanks to ARNES and Marko Drobnjak for hosting a panel on 'Research infrastructures as the intersection of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and supercomputing', at the Slovenian EOSC National Tripartite Event: “Connecting Science”.
During the panel, the experience and developments of the Slovenian National Supercomputing Network - SLING were presented, illustrating how a country is successfully uniting its efforts to realise a national data and compute continuum. JSI in the interTwin project, together with EGI technical partners, pioneered novel approaches to HTC-HPC and Cloud integration, which the panel gave the opportunity to present and discuss.
You are welcome to review the highlights of the interTwin results in this presentation that you get from this presentation.
In summary, today the EGI Federation delivers a large-scale digital research infrastructure pooling 220+ research data centres across 42 countries, serving tens of thousands of researchers from 160+ countries worldwide, covering the full spectrum of scientific disciplines. EGI Federation provides advanced computing and data analytics capabilities through a federation of hundreds of service providers from both public and private sectors across Europe and beyond. Current services include distributed high-throughput and cloud computing, storage and data management, support, and training.
The EGI Federation’s distributed computing approach leverages national and institutional investments in computing facilities, enhancing the overall return on national and institutional investments in computing infrastructure by enabling resource providers across Europe and beyond to securely share and federate their compute capacity. This model maximises utilisation of existing systems, reduces fragmentation, and ensures that all research collaborations, from data-intensive research infrastructures to communities of practice, can easily and securely access high-quality computing resources that would otherwise be beyond their reach.
The EGI Federation compute fabric relies on national operations centres that take care of the federation at the national level, and expands European capacity through collaboration agreements with data centres in other regions, aiming at:
- Establishing a participative service management governance and a corpus of bilaterally supported access and security policies,
- Jointly supporting an interoperability framework of technical standards, protocols and APIs
- Providing different solutions for federated trust and identity management, data management, and compute management that research communities can use to integrate their research environments.
InterTwin demonstrated this approach by delivering technical components that can integrate HPC systems, including EuroHPC nodes, available across different service management jurisdictions.
During the panel, we advocated that this approach, based on 20+ years of best practices defined and adopted by digital infrastructures worldwide, provides a solid baseline to realise a European sovereign data and compute continuum, integrating European compute and data infrastructures from the EGI Federation, Research Infrastructures, the European Open Science Cloud, AI Factories and EuroHPC nodes.
Joint coordinated approaches will be key to support the European Research Area!
interTwin co-designs and implements the prototype of an interdisciplinary Digital Twin Engine( DTE), an open
EGI Council Participant ARNES
EGI Foundation Director Tiziana Ferrari joins the panel “Research infrastructures as the intersection of EOSC