The Instituto de Física de Cantabria leads this initiative which represents an advance for health technologies, space exploration or ICT.
The project, financed by the European Commission, was created with the aim of boosting the capacity of the future virtual environment, the European Open Science Cloud, for science and open innovation.
This environment seeks to ensure that all researchers can store, manage, analyse and reuse data for research, innovation and education.
2nd November 2020
One year has passed since the Instituto de Física de Cantabria, through the CSIC, led this project, the H2020 EOSC-Synergy, one of the most important research projects financed by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, where the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB) and the Unidad de Recursos de Información Científica para la Investigación (URICI) responsible for Digital.CSIC also work.
With a budget of 5.6 million euros and a duration of 3 years, EOSC-Synergy seeks to increase the computing and storage capacity of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the training of future users of this pan-European infrastructure.
The CSIC researcher at the Instituto de Física in Cantabria, Isabel Campos, and coordinator of the project explains that "the EOSC-Synergy understands the challenge of EOSC as an opportunity to eliminate the obstacles that currently prevent the effective exchange and reuse of data and scientific resources, allowing the full potential of these data to be exploited and the capacity of regional investments to be harnessed. In doing so, we will also help close the "digital divide" between EU countries at different levels of development".
The initiative is being developed by a consortium coordinated by the IFCA (CSIC-UC) on behalf of IBERGRID, the Iberian framework for scientific and technological cooperation signed by Spain and Portugal, in the field of distributed computing. It also includes the main providers of data and research infrastructure from Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, experts in policy development and FAIR data repositories in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, as well as the EGI.eu Foundation (CSIC, LIP, PSNC, KIT, IISAS, CESNET, CYFRONET, DANS, LNEC, UFGC, FCT, EGI, UPV, INCD, JISC, LEGOS, BIFI, CESGA, CIEMAT, and BSC).
The project includes research groups in areas such as Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences and Astrophysics. Earth Observation is represented by research centres in Portugal, France and Spain and a leading industrial partner, INDRA. In addition, EOSC-Synergy was created with the aim of crossing the pond and becoming a bridge to South America, combining the Cloud infrastructure of Brazil and the experiments carried out there with Europe.
First year of life
In 2020, the project is celebrating its first anniversary with a video on the achievements made during 2019, with the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud. Throughout these 365 days, it has managed to provide a universal access point to research resources for all European researchers, facilitate access to interdisciplinary data and services by improving their interoperability and increase the recognition of data research and data science. In short, the ultimate goal of the project.
