The European Open Science what? The Square Kilometre Array, an international initiative to build the world’s largest radio telescope, will generate 300 petabytes of scientific data per year by 2024. Storing and processing data on this scale is too big a job for any one research organisation. As Michael Wise, Head of Astronomy at ASTRON in the Netherlands, said: We cannot do this alone, we simply have to collaborate. ‘Big’ isn’t the only aspect of the data-driven challenge facing science today. It is also complex – for example, how do you launch, track and manage a computational model of a Tokamak nuclear fusion reactor which involves multiply connected simulations across desktop, cloud and highperformance computers? Sensitive data presents another challenge – linking personal medical data with behavioural data from supermarket loyalty cards could provide insights into the emergence of dementia and other neuro-degenerative diseases, but doing that across borders demands the utmost care. European Open Science Cloud Launched last year, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an EU research initiative that seeks to 16
lay the international computing foundations for tomorrow’s big science. It builds on the ideas of open access to scientific methods and results (software, papers and data), and focuses strongly on open data.
Rob Baxter EPCC Group Manager r.baxter@epcc.ed.ac.uk
EOSC envisages a rich, everexpanding suite of computational services on top of a layer of findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable research data (the FAIR principles). And while EOSC’s push towards openness and interoperability may be new, the data, services and resources that form the heart of this cloud are not.
To tackle some of society’s biggest challenges we need to support large, complex, mission-led, scientific endeavours, and to do that we need an interconnected, interoperable, frictionless platform of compute and storage resources at an international level.
Europe’s scientific computing infrastructure (e-infrastructure) has coalesced into a number of specialised initiatives (EUDAT focuses on storage and data management; EGI on highthroughput and cloud computing; GÉANT on networking) and a number of challenges must be met before frictionless interoperability is achieved. The biggest win for EOSC would be single sign-on, followed by uniform access to data. One of the reasons the Web works so smoothly for many is the ability to “log in with Facebook” or “sign in with Google”, a widely-accepted authentication token that provides access to a broad range of services. Single sign-on is even more useful in a
The European Open Science Cloud may be the answer.
