The INDIGO-Data Cloud project: new paper highlighting achievements

The INDIGO-Data Cloud project recently published a paper that highlights the project’s achievements. The paper, entitled “INDIGO-DataCloud: a platform to facilitate seamless access to e-infrastructures”, was published online in Journal of Grid Computing in July 2018.

INDIGO-Data Cloud (in short: INDIGO) was a 30 months European project running from 2015 to 2017 which developed a comprehensive open source cloud software platform targeted to multi-disciplinary scientific communities. The project produced innovative tools that facilitate and optimize the exploitation of distributed compute and storage resources through public or private cloud infrastructures.

Since its inception, the project roadmap was user-driven and involved many scientific communities with the purpose of identifying use cases, requirements and technology gaps. The work of the INDIGO team led to two major software releases, codenamed MidnightBlue (August 2016) and ElectricIndigo (April 2017), as well as to two versions of the INDIGO service catalogue. 

Thanks to the software components developed by the INDIGO project, researchers in Europe are now using public and private cloud resources to get new results in physics, biology, astronomy, medicine, humanities and other scientific disciplines. The project also led to the positive evaluation and start of two spin-off European projects: eXtreme-DataCloud and DEEP-HybridDataCloud, which are now continuing INDIGO’s work and developing new and enhanced software components derived from INDIGO.

Finally, INDIGO is a key partner of the EOSC-hub project, bringing on board its successful components and nominating the project’s Technical Coordinator - Giacinto Donvito, who will drive the evolution of the EOSC-hub’s technical roadmap and supervise the contribution to several open source community projects.

Davide Salomoni, INDIGO Project Coordinator, says about the achievement: "The INDIGO project, which started as an ambitious vision back in 2014, continues to bear fruit in the open source distributed computing and data area, with multiple opportunities and solutions offered to both scientific communities and industry. I am very pleased to see the project achievements published in the Journal of Grid Computing, which will contribute to further appreciation and exploitation of the INDIGO solutions and of its follow-on activities."

Isabel Campos, INDIGO Deputy Coordinator, adds: “Publishing a summary paper of this magnitude in Journal of Grid Computing has implied an additional effort in terms of clarifying the technological impact of INDIGO for the general readers of the Journal. We are very thankful to the referees and editors of the journal for their constructive comments and constant encouragement to improve the accessibility of our work to a general audience”.

Read the full paper to find out about the successes of the INDIGO-Data Cloud project.