A survey of the European Open Science Cloud services for expanding the capacity and capabilities of multidisciplinary scientific applications

Abstract

Open Science is a paradigm in which scientific data, procedures, tools and results are shared transparently and reused by society. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative is an effort in Europe to provide an open, trusted, virtual and federated computing environment to execute scientific applications and store, share and reuse research data across borders and scientific disciplines. Additionally, scientific services are becoming increasingly data-intensive, not only in terms of computationally intensive tasks but also in terms of storage resources. To meet those resource demands, computing paradigms such as High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud Computing are applied to e-science applications. However, adapting applications and services to these paradigms is a challenging task, commonly requiring a deep knowledge of the underlying technologies, which often constitutes a general barrier to its uptake by scientists. In this context, EOSC-Synergy, a collaborative project involving more than 20 institutions from eight European countries pooling their knowledge and experience to enhance EOSC’s capabilities and capacities, aims to bring EOSC closer to the scientific communities. This article provides a summary analysis of the adaptations made in the ten thematic services of EOSC-Synergy to embrace this paradigm. These services are grouped into four categories: Earth Observation, Environment, Biomedicine, and Astrophysics. The analysis will lead to the identification of commonalities, best practices and common requirements, regardless of the thematic area of the service. Experience gained from the thematic services can be transferred to new services for the adoption of the EOSC ecosystem framework. The article made several recommendations for the integration of thematic services in the EOSC ecosystem regarding Authentication and Authorization (federated regional or thematic solutions based on EduGAIN mainly), FAIR data and metadata preservation solutions (both at cataloguing and data preservation—such as EUDAT’s B2SHARE), cloud platform-agnostic resource management services (such as Infrastructure Manager) and workload management solutions.