Webinar: Scaling Earth Science in the Cloud: How EPOS ERIC Deploys Virtual Research Environments with SWIRRL and EGI
About the webinar
Modern Solid Earth sciences require seamless access to massive, diverse datasets alongside high-performance computing resources to model, simulate, and understand our planet. To empower researchers, the European Plate Observing System (EPOS ERIC) has turned a visionary concept into a production-ready reality: deploying customizable Virtual Research Environments (VREs) directly within a federated cloud infrastructure.
Marking one year of intensive, successful collaboration between EGI and EPOS, this webinar pulls back the curtain on how this powerful ecosystem is built. We will dive deep into how EPOS leverages SWIRRL (a specialized solution developed by KNMI) alongside EGI’s federated computing resources to allow researchers to instantly spin up web-based data processing environments without worrying about the underlying cloud complexity.
Key Topics:
- The EPOS Success Story: A firsthand look at the milestones achieved after a year of federated collaboration.
- VREs in Action: How Virtual Research Environments are deployed seamlessly within the EOSC Platform framework.
- The SWIRRL Blueprint: How the KNMI-developed SWIRRL tool manages complex workflows, data staging, and provenance tracking for end-users.
- Federated Scaling: How technology providers and infrastructure operators collaborate to provide predictable, scalable compute for domain scientists.
Target Audience:
This webinar is highly relevant for domain scientists seeking smarter ways to run complex data workflows, technology providers interested in advanced cloud-orchestration solutions like SWIRRL, and infrastructure operators looking for proven blueprints of successful cross-infrastructure integrations.
Programme
- Presentation 25′
- Demo 25′
- Q&A 10′
About the speaker
Alessandro Turco got a PhD in Applied Math in 2008 and then worked for 15 years at a software house. He started as a numerical researcher, then became project manager and later the product manager of a SaaS platform. To support this transition he completed a Master of Management in 2018. He joined EPOS ERIC in 2024 as IT project lead. He supported the IT team in several project and in particular in ENVRI-Hub NEXT, where the Hub has been deployed in a production environment and selected as an EOSC node for the second wave of enrollment.
Over the past year, he has been instrumental in coordinating the technical collaboration between EPOS and the EGI Federation, driving the scalable deployment of Virtual Research Environments (VREs). His work sits at the cutting edge of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, successfully integrating innovative data-handling technologies—like the SWIRRL solution—with federated cloud frameworks to support reproducible, multi-disciplinary science.