The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the Universitat de Barcelona will use the December 2020 Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) of the European Space Agency mission Gaia to investigate Milky Way star formation and its interaction with its satellite galaxies, employing OCRE’s cloud resources for data mining, N-body simulations, and Bayesian techniques on the Gaia catalogue containing 1.8 billion sources.
Fifteen innovative research projects will benefit from commercial cloud solutions through EU cloud project Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE), demonstrating the effectiveness of cloud services in research.
€1.175 million will be distributed to the successful applicants, each receiving between €50,000 and €100,000. In its first call for the adoption of the cloud services available through the OCRE IaaS+ framework agreements, OCRE received 31 applications. All applications were screened by the OCRE cloud adoption funding team and overseen by the OCRE External Advisory Board.
The distribution of cloud adoption funding is a key milestone in OCRE’s goal of piloting a digital single market for cloud and digital services for European research. The research projects will be able to benefit from 27 different commercial cloud-based platforms that were sourced through the OCRE IaaS+ Tender concluded mid-2020 and will be made available in the OCRE Service Catalogue in the first quarter of2021.
Through this single procurement, thousands of research institutions across the European Research Area will be able to benefit from easy and procurement regulation-compliant access to commercial cloud services.
OCRE Adoption Funding Lead Jan Meijer (Uninett)said, “thanks to the good response to the call for projects we managed to assemble a balanced portfolio of 15 projects; showcasing the benefits of commercial cloud services on research outcomes from different angles. Our hope is that these showcases will inspire other researchers to follow in their footsteps and leverage the benefits of the OCRE portfolio of services for their research.”
More information about Gaia here.
