EUDAT in the EU landscape

EUDAT and its Supported Communities

EUDAT has been supporting European projects through its services for the research data lifecycle as well as through user communities and institutions. It also advocates the best practices in research data management, providing valuable experience and expertise to various projects and institutions. Learn more by visiting:

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The EUDAT CDI supports the vision of the European Open Science Cloud offering open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines. More on EUDAT & EOSC.

In June 2019, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) has announced the selection of eight sites for supercomputing centres across the EU. These new supercomputers will be made accessible to European researchers, industry and businesses, to develop new applications in areas such as artificial intelligence and personalised medicine, drug and material design, bio-engineering, weather forecasting, and combatting climate change. Three members of the EUDAT CDI (BSC, CINECA, CSC) are the organisations hosting the three pre-exascale supercomputers: Marenostrum 5 (BSC), Leonardo (CINECA) and LUMI (CSC Finland).

The G8 Open Data Charter declares that “open data are an untapped resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish”, and sets out five principles that will be the foundation for access to, and the release and re-use of, data made available by G8 governments. Science and research is recognised as one of the areas of high-value data. The European Commission published in 2011 a Communication entitled “Open data: An engine for innovation, growth and transparent governance” that singles out the acceleration of scientific progress as one of the reasons why open data is crucial for Europe. Funding agencies increasingly require open access to research data in the investigations that they support. EUDAT itself aims to support sharing and reuse of open data through its services, while recognising that not all data will be completely unrestricted.

European Union (EU) funded e-infrastructures address the needs of European researchers and innovators for transnational communication networks, high performance and high throughput computing, multidisciplinary data management and collaborative scientific software. They empower researchers with easy and secure online access to facilities and resources and enable them to deliver reusable and reproducible research and innovation outputs. During the period 2014-2020, the EU has invested more than 850 million euros in digital infrastructures through its Horizon 2020 e-infrastructure programme [1]. In October 2024, major pan-European e-Infrastructures, EUDAT, EGI, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and PRACE have signed an MoU establishing the European e-Infrastructures Assembly to work towards joint advocacy, collaboration and coordination, innovation and open science, community engagement and policy influence.

EUDAT has established synergies with other e-Infrastructures as illustrated below:

EUDAT worked on connecting the CDI to high throughput and cloud computing resources provided through EGI, integrating storage resources managed by EUDAT and computing resources available at EGI sites. This was demonstrated via two pilots involving ICOS and EPOS. This collaboration was continued as well as part of the EOSC-hub project.

EUDAT worked with GÉANT to bring forward communities’ networking and AAI requirements and to ensure that the networking infrastructure on which EUDAT relies remains strong enough to meet its existing and future needs.

EUDAT is collaborating with OpenAIRE, ensuring that EUDAT services are compliant with OpenAIRE guidelines and discussing how to connect the two infrastructures through greater interoperability of the services and exchange of data. Concrete joint activities, including service integration, were carried out between EUDAT and OpenAIRE as part of the collaboration agreement between EOSC-hub and OpenAIRE Advance projects.

EUDAT has provided data resources and services to PRACE projects for a total amount of 700 TB of storage space. A long-term sustainability plan for the contribution of resources is under discussion within the EUDAT CDI Council. EUDAT also worked with PRACE to harmonise access to both infrastructures through federated AAI, delivered joint training activities to PRACE users about data management practices and plans, and offered the central EUDAT B2SHARE instance to publish information material, publications, reports on results of PRACE resource allocation, white papers, best practice guides, etc. Finally, EUDAT and PRACE both contribute in the cross-organisation security workgroups (WISE).

EUDAT has provided continuous support to RDA since its beginning and has been working within RDA to foster interoperability at a global level and remove barriers for sharing and (re)using data. EUDAT is also an organisational member of RDA.

EUDAT in the EU landscape

EUDAT and its Supported Communities

EUDAT Ltd