Status of the user engagement in EGI-ACE

One of the main objectives of the EGI-ACE project is to increase the user base by reaching out to multi-national scientific communities, Research Infrastructures (RIs) and EC-funded projects with an international footprint. To reach this goal, EGI.eu leveraged on the lessons learned from past EC-funded projects such as EOSC-hub, where users struggled a bit to receive the right technical support to integrate the EOSC services published in the EOSC Portal in their domain-specific Thematic Services, web-based platforms and data science environments. To bridge this gap, EGI-ACE launched the open call for selecting new scientific use case applications and reaching a wider user base. Through the EGI-ACE open call, EGI.eu offers access to the EOSC infrastructure and platform services, dedicated user support and training. The access to services of the EOSC Compute is sponsored by the European Commission via the Virtual Access (VA) mechanism and various national and institutional funding.

From a technical point of view, the EGI-ACE open call was officially launched in April 2021. A dedicated marketing campaign was conducted during the project’s lifetime to promote the open call and reach international projects working on AI/ML, Big Data, and ESFRI Research Infrastructures. To provide the best support to the selected scientific use cases, the following User Support pipeline was defined by the project.

Key points of the EGI-ACE user support pipeline are:

• The Competence Centres – scalable and distributed use-case specific support groups consisting of service providers, technical experts and other interested parties providing assistance for a scientific use case.
• The Shepherds – technical experts who are assigned to the use cases served by the project, and have overall responsibility for assigning use cases to the appropriate providers, managing the implementation of the use cases, monitoring the use case status and potential problems, and reporting about achievements, lessons learnt and other outcomes.

The break-down of the scientific domains of the use cases selected by the EGI-ACE project, and the most demanded services requested by these scientific use cases are shown in the following figures: