EOSC-hub: one year of achievements

EOSC-hub started in January 2018 with a mission to create a single contact point for European researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research.

One year on, here is a summary of the main achievements:

Optimised access to IT equipment and services

• EOSC-hub service portfolio integrating over 70 services from EGI, EUDAT, INDIGO-DataCloud and from research communities;
• From Nov 2018, EOSC-hub services are discoverable and orderable via the Marketplace in the context of the EOSC portal (July-Dec 2018: +27% registrations of service entries in the Marketplace);
• EOSC-hub operates the EOSC Portal website, the Marketplace and the whitelabel EOSC AAI;
• Service Providers onboarding process in place and integrated with the EOSC portal (21 new services currently under integration);
• Streamlined service management (> 60 individuals FitSM certified).

Success story: HADDOCK is an EOSC-hub Thematic Service for structural biologists provided through the EOSC Marketplace. In the past year: +30% users, +126% simulations submitted.

Partnerships with industrial and private partners

• The EOSC Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) was successfully established in late 2018 and is now officially part of the EU Digital Innovation Hub catalogue (6 business pilots up and running; vouchers programme for free Cloud service access is now open);
• Earth Observation (EO) service providers actively engaged in the Marketplace.

Success story: Terradue, an EO private company, provides the engineering and operational support for the Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP), which offers a rich set of ready to use EO data processing services for the analysis and monitoring of earthquake, volcanoes and landslides. GEP is integrated with the EGI Federated Cloud and is now part of the Marketplace offering. In numbers: 1.4 Million Cloud Compute hours and  +108% increase of use of Terradue services.

Over 800 individuals trained in research and academic sectors

• 9 Data Management training events (6 with OpenAIRE-Advance);
• Other areas: Security, AAI, Storage and Cloud Technologies, service-specific training for users;
• 4 FitSM Certification Training events + 2 webinars + 1 individual FitSM process grouping webinar;
• Domain-specific: CODATA, VIRGO, ENVRI, INSTRUCT and NGSchool.

Success story: OPENCoastS, the first national EOSC-hub thematic service provider which joined the Marketplace, opened access to international user communities thanks to VA funding. 148 participants from 14 countries attended the OPENCoastS e-tutorial.

Progress with technical implementation

• 2 technical joint roadmaps developed (OpenAIRE and GÉANT) focusing on DMP, AAI, Cloud interoperability, etc. and one under development with RDA;
• 4 Thematic Service Providers successfully integrated into the EOSC Marketplace exploiting the open interfaces EOSC-hub provides;
• Implementation of AARC AAI Blueprint for the EOSC AAI ] Implementation of the EOSC-hub service management system compliant to the FitSM standard and to ISO service management and quality standards.

Success story: EOSC branded multi-tenant service: for federated AAI supporting all standard authentication options (eduGAIN, social media, ORCID) and group membership capabilities. Completed integration activities: Interconnection of EGI Check-in with EUDAT B2ACCESS; Online Certification Authority (Rcauth) migration and support for high availability.

Extended user base

• Expanded access to services outside the traditional user base via the EOSC portal;
• 8 Competence Centres piloting EOSC-hub Services: ICOS, ELIXIR, Radio-Astronomy; Disaster Mitigation, EPOS-Orfeus, CLARIN, GEO-DAB;
• A stakeholder database with over 50 potential leads;
• 5 new funded ESFRI-cluster projects working in collaboration with EOSC-hub;
• An online community of around 2000 members (Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare).

Sucess story: EGI Federation: increase in the use of computing resources: 4.4 billion CPU core wall time delivered in 2018; > 1 million computing cores for the first time in the EGI history; 356 PB disk & 380 PB tape storage. EUDAT CDI: over 700K datasets discoverable (repositories from 16 communities harvested, 10k datasets in B2SHARE); 90M data objects registered within the CDI (+15% in 2018); 1600 users registered on B2ACCESS (+33% in 2018).