€5.3 million tender to support European cloud initiative

A €5.3 million tender has gone out to help build a pan-European hybrid cloud for the scientific community.

Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) has launched the tender to support the deployment of high-performance computing and big-data capabilities for scientific research.

A pre-commercial procurement tender covers R&D services relevant to the design, development and pilot use of a platform to support hybrid cloud environments.

The HNSciCloud pre-commercial procurement project is funded by ten of Europe’s top research organisations and by the European Commission.

The new cloud platform must address challenges involved with providing a combination of services at the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) level, integrated with an environment that supports the full life cycles of diverse scientific workflows.

These include:

Compute and storage – support a range of virtual machines and container configurations to support researchers working with datasets in the petabyte range

Network connectivity and federated identity management – provide high-end network capacity for the whole platform, with common identity and access management

Service payment models – explore a range of purchasing options to determine the most appropriate ones for the scientific application workloads to be deployed

The platform will serve scientists and engineers working in high-energy physics, astronomy, the life sciences including biomedical research, and the photon/neutron science in which the ten procurers operate. These procurers will be the first customers of the platform, and will integrate their in-house resources with the procured cloud services.

During the pilot phase, the hybrid cloud platform will provide on-demand and elastic services to geographically distributed users. This will include access to data produced by research organisations and hosted on the platform.

The platform must serve stakeholders beyond the initial procurers, reaching out to the private sector to offer innovative services that unlock the potential of research data, says the tender document. This will open up new possibilities for economic growth and contribute to the establishment of the European Cloud Initiative, it says.

Günther Oettinger, commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, said: “The European Cloud Initiative will unlock the value of big data by providing a world-class supercomputing capability, high-speed connectivity and leading-edge data and software services for science, industry and the public sector.”

There will be a Tender Information Day hosted by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland on 7 September.

@AntonySavvas