EUDAT aims to enable European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment. To do so, it offers a set of research data services, expertise and technology solutions to all European scientists and researchers. These shared services and storage resources are distributed across 15 European nations and data is stored alongside some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.
The creation of a Digital Single Market is a key strand of the European Union’s economic strategy. Research e-Infrastructures like EUDAT are helping to smooth the way by providing solutions to overcome barriers which hinder the development of an e-infrastructure ecosystem. As part of the plans proposed by the European Commission to establish a European data service infrastructure with 100 nodes, EUDAT recently received a further €19 million to continue laying the foundations for this infrastructure.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has been part of the EUDAT initiative from the outset. Over the next three years, BSC will coordinate work relating to the data life cycle across communities, as well as providing support for service building, operations and technology exploration.
David Vicente, Head of User Support at BSC, commented: ‘BSC will draw on its expertise in areas relating to big data to continue playing a key role in the EUDAT project. By supporting research communities to store, share and process their data, the project will continue to greatly benefit research in Europe.’
Currently EUDAT works with 29 scientific communities and plans to increase this interaction to over 50 communities in the next 3 years. In February 2015, EUDAT launched a data pilot with PRACE offering data storage of up to 1PB for at least 24 months after the end of the PRACE grant, free of charge. In May 2015, EUDAT will launch the first of two calls for collaboration inviting scientific communities to avail of research data services and consortium expertise to collaboratively tackle data challenges and find concrete solutions together.
EUDAT is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (DG Connect e-Infrastructures Unit) under contract number 654065.