CERFACS, the French research centre specialised in modelling and numerical simulation that recently became a thematic EUDAT CDI service provider, is deploying a B2SHARE instance for the climate scientific domain.
B2SHARE is the EUDAT solution to facilitate research data storage, guarantee long-term persistence of data and allow data, results or ideas to be shared worldwide. It provides a user-friendly, reliable and trustworthy way for researchers, scientific communities and citizen scientists to store and publish small-scale research data from diverse contexts.
User-friendliness and reliability are the two factors that convinced CERFACS to deploy B2SHARE for its climate-related projects. “In the climate domain, we are used to work with the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). This Research Infrastructure provides us with all the tools and resources that we need but storing data into that system sometimes means going through a very strict compliance process on standards and metadata that is not always what it is needed especially with project datasets as it is very time consuming. B2SHARE enables us to share project-related datasets with partners, collaborators and publicly in an easy way. It supports metadata and, thanks to its seamless integration with B2NOTE, also annotation”, says Christian Pagé, Research Engineer at CERFACS.
CERFACS has already started deploying a specific dedicated server with attached storage adopting an incremental approach: the first server and storage will have limited resources, that then will be increased according to the needs. The first prototype test installation is planned by September 2019.