EGI: Key partner in winning consortia in the European Commission’s procurement for further development of EOSC

The EOSC procurement aims to build and deploy a robust infrastructure, the EOSC EU Node, providing access to a diverse portfolio of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data and professional-quality interoperable services across various domains, including data handling, computing, processing, analysis, and storage. The procurement is structured into three areas, referred to as Lots. EGI will strongly contribute to the Lots 1 and 3.

EGI Foundation, together with partners GRNET and GWDG, is a participant in the ‘Open Science Agora Consortium,’ working alongside the lead partner Athena Research Centre, and joined by OpenAIRE AMKE, Netcompany-Intrasoft and GÉANT.

EGI’s responsibilities will include the provision of:

• Monitoring and accounting frameworks, application workflow management, the helpdesk and the configuration management system
• IT services management framework and the onboarding of services
• Software verification and testing
• Single-Sign-On (SSO)
• Security coordination, including coordination of the risk management process for data protection.

EGI will also contribute to communications, community outreach, and training activities to ensure strong user engagement. Finally, EGI will manage its subcontractors, GRNET and GWDG. GRNET’s responsibilities include PID management, SSO, monitoring, accounting for services, messaging, configuration management system, and verification and testing. GWDG will take the lead in PID management.

Lot 3 procures file synchronisation and sharing service, interactive notebook service, and large file transfer service for the ‘EOSC Exchange’. In Lot 3, EGI and CESNET are members of a consortium led by EGI’s partner PSNC and participated by ownCloud, Safespring and NORDUnet.
EGI Foundation’s support will include:
the provisioning of Jupyter notebooks (together with CESNET), and
the overall service management coordination and integration with the services in other Lots.

EGI, in collaboration with the awarded contractors, is gearing up for the next phase. A joint kick-off meeting for the managed services deployment and delivery is scheduled in December.