Enabling European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment.
EUDAT offers a complete set of research data services, expertise and technology solutions to all European scientists and researchers. These shared services and storage resources are distributed across 15 European nations and data is stored alongside some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.
Putting Users First:
EUDAT puts communities in the driving seat & gives them what they need. EUDAT offers a suite of common data services, supporting multiple research communities and individuals. These services are offered through a geographically distributed, resilient network connecting general purpose data centres & community-specific data repositories and are designed, built & implemented based on user community requirements.
CLARIN Use Case
“EUDAT provides a layer of infrastructure services on which we can build our own infrastructure. B2SHARE makes it possible for homeless researchers and citizen scientists to deposit their resources into a serious and good repository. Other services, e.g. B2DROP (cloud workspace), safe replication etc., are all integrated into the infrastructure on which both CLARIN and other research communities can build. It makes sense to pool these resources and make sure there are decent, good and stably running services out there that can be used by and benefit all scientific communities”. Dieter Van Uytvanck, CLARIN ERIC Chief Technology Offer CLARIN-ERIC for Social Sciences & Humanities.
Some Figures Always
Help The recently adopted 315 billion euro Juncker EU Investment Plan is the first important signal of the new European Commission to get Europe growing again and get more people back to work. The creation of a dynamic EU Digital Single Market is a key element in this process and its impact extends to the whole Society. Research e-Infrastructures like EUDAT make a concrete contribution to reinforce the level-playing field and eliminate barriers to investment in the Digital Single Market by identifying and proposing solutions to barriers to the development of an e-infrastructure ecosystem. As part of the concrete plans proposed by the EC, “to establish a European data service infrastructure with 100 nodes in Europe (universities, research laboratories, research organisations, etc.), 40 high-end and 60 medium-end (respectively establishment costs 1.5m and 0.5m, recurrent costs 0.8m and 0.4m annually)”, EUDAT recently received a further €19 million to continue laying the foundations for that data infrastructure.
Building Trust & Sharing Work load
“There is no fundamental reason why a Research Infrastructure could not obtain their e-infrastructure from some national centre or other service provider. But why is this not done, or at least, not enough? If we want to share the workload optimally and let everyone concentrate on what they do best – for example researchers on research and e-infrastructure providers on running the ICT services – we need to build trust between each of them. If technology providers remember to develop services in a user driven mode, it will help”. Kimmo Koski, Managing Director, CSC – IT Center for Science & EUDAT Coordinator
Call to Action
Currently EUDAT interacts with and serves 29 scientific communities and plans to increase this interaction to over 50 communities in the next 3 years. In February 2015, EUDAT launched a data pilot with PRACE offering data storage, up to 1PB at one or several of the 12 EUDAT sites for at least 24 months after the end of the PRACE grant, free of charge . In May 2015, EUDAT will launch the first of two calls for collaboration inviting scientific communities to avail of research data services and consortium expertise to collaboratively tackle data challenges and find concrete solutions together.
About EUDAT. This pan-European Data Infrastructure (EUDAT) is a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, combining the richness of numerous community specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe’s largest scientific data centres. EUDAT offers common data services, supporting multiple research communities as well as individuals, through a geographically distributed, resilient network of 33 European organisations. EUDAT receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, DG Connect e-Infrastructures Unit under contract number 654065.