EGI Foundation Turns 15!
EGI's 15-Year Adventure: Milestones Along the Way
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The EGI Foundation, established under Dutch law, launched its flagship EC-funded project, EGI-Inspire. This project successfully established a new governance model for the EGI federated infrastructure, based on a network of national and regional operations centres—a significant pan-European undertaking. EGI also forged cooperative agreements with partners across the globe, including North and South America, South Africa, India, and the Asia-Pacific region. This extensive coordination positioned EGI and its partners to effectively address the ICT needs of leading data-intensive scientific collaborations.
Steven Newhouse leads the newly formed EGI Foundation.
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This year marked a turning point. The groundbreaking ICT research program that underpins today’s EGI infrastructure, launched at the turn of the century and driven by the High Energy Physics community, began to bear fruit. This year also saw formal recognition of the scientific achievements of the LHC collaboration—made possible by the crucial collaboration between WLCG and EGI—with the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs. This was followed in 2017 by a second Nobel Prize, awarded to the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration for their groundbreaking detection of gravitational waves. Their work relied on a distributed computing platform that included some of Europe’s largest research data centres, federated through EGI services.
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The EGI Federated Cloud launched this year, representing the first European initiative to federate cloud providers using open-source software. Over the following years, the EGI Federated Cloud grew into the largest pan-European cloud platform for research, opening new possibilities in distributed computing for fields such as environmental science, life sciences, and numerous other scientific collaborations.
Also this year, Yannick Legré assumed the Directorship of the EGI Foundation.
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EGI achieved record-breaking performance, with its federation members collectively providing over 1 million CPU cores and federating 1 exabyte of research data globally. The year also saw a 17% increase in registered users across all scientific disciplines.
The EC-funded EOSC-hub project, a first-of-its-kind project, united a broad range of partners to coordinate research support through data, software, and compute and storage resources provided by EGI infrastructure members. EOSC-hub paved the way for a research and innovation agenda centred around co-design with research communities.
Tiziana Ferrari takes over as the Director of the EGI Foundation, leading the Federation through new stages of innovation.
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EGI delivered over 7 billion CPU hours through its HTC platform. Its federated data centres processed a combined 650 million CPU hours per month, a landmark achievement for the infrastructure.
EGI also celebrated the societal impact of the WeNMR community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through its simulation applications and the EGI compute infrastructure, WeNMR provided crucial tools to structural biologists researching the crisis. Structural biology contributes to numerous applications, including drug design, crop improvement, and the engineering of industrially significant enzymes.
EGI and WeNMR marked over 20 years of partnership, addressing ICT challenges such as integrating data from diverse methods, accessing sufficient computational resources, developing ready-made solutions for non-experts, and managing large datasets. WeNMR is projected to reach an unprecedented milestone of over 50,000 registered users in 2025.
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EGI reached a significant milestone, serving over 100.000 researchers and innovators worldwide from 155 countries, delivering an impact on research that is truly global. The collaboration of the EGI members and partners from the research community is central to this achievement.
With the EGI Foundation coordinated projects during 2020-2025 +70 M€ of funding are made available for ICT co-design, research and innovation. EGI establishes itself as a cornerstone initiative that brings together research data centres and research community experts from all domains of science to deliver a joint research and innovation programme.
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The EGI Foundation is powered by a dedicated team of 55 professionals supporting the EGI Federation. The Foundation coordinates seven flagship projects, including ENVRI-Hub NEXT, EOSC Beyond, EOSC Data Commons, iMagine, interTwin, RI-SCALE, and SPECTRUM. It contributes to an additional 28 EU-funded projects and plays a key role in two contracts supporting the development of the EOSC Federation.
Thank you!
EGI Foundation wishes to thank all its members and partners for the success achieved, which would not be possible without their dedication and excellence. The worldwide collaboration model established during all these years is inspiring our work daily. We are determined to continue this journey with all of you, to reach new highs together.
We thank the European Commission for the funds made available through its innovation programmes, without which all this impact on science is not possible.
