How commercial cloud providers can contribute to the EOSC: the HNSciCloud experience

Gisueppe La Rocca explains how the Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster (EC3) service can now be used to deploy virtual clusters on commercial clouds with HNSciCloud vouchers

We are pleased to announce that the Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster (EC3) service can now be used to deploy virtual clusters on commercial clouds with HNSciCloud vouchers.

The voucher scheme was proposed by Exoscale, the IaaS computing resources for the RHEA Cloud platform, as a result of the collaboration with the HNSciCloud Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project.

The Exoscale vouchers provide a pre-paid access for users to a commercial cloud service provider for a specific monetary value and allow researchers with limited computing resources to test different configurations and choose the best service offer for their needs.

 The vouchers aim to:

• Encourage the uptake of the resulted HNSciCloud pilot services for limited scale usage.
• Allow commercial cloud service providers to contribute to the EOSC.
• Offer a convenient mean to finance the use of EOSC services and increase the user base.

Want to try it?

• Access the EOSC portal marketplace.
• Select the Elastic Cloud Compute Cluster (EC3) platform from the list of available services and submit a service-order request.
• Two different service offers are available to any authorized users - default and voucher.
• The vouchers proposed by the HNSciCloud project will have a validity of one year from the date of issue and can be redeemable against any service included in the contractor’s pilot platform.

Guidelines and more information:

• Each Exoscale voucher is worth around 400 euros. A total of 10 vouchers are available for running applications for scientific purposes.
• All vouchers should be consumed before the end of 2019.
• When the request is approved, the user will be notified by email by the EOSC Portal Marketplace.
• Finally, access the EC3 portal and click on the HNSciCloud button, in the deployment section, to access the commercial cloud provider.
• More info in the EC3’s documentation.