The EGI federation is the largest distributed computing infrastructure in the world, and brings together hundreds of data centres worldwide and also includes the largest community cloud federation in Europe with tends of cloud providers across most of the European countries offering IaaS cloud and storage services. The current federated resources represent altogether more than 350 Petabytes of online storage and 380 Petabytes of archival storage supported by approximately 1M Cores. EGI expanded the federation of its facilities with other non-European digital infrastructures in North America, South America, Africa-Arabia and the Asia-Pacific region, as such EGI fully realised the “Open to the World” vision. In order to interoperate at international level, EGI and its partners operate in the context of a lightweight collaboration framework defining rules of participations via a corpus of policies and technical guidelines.
EGI offering includes a federated IaaS cloud to run compute- or data-intensive tasks and host online services in virtual machines or docker containers on IT resources accessible via a uniform interface; high-throughput data analysis to run compute-intensive tasks for producing and analysing large datasets and store/retrieve research data efficiently across multiple service providers; federated operations to manage service access and operations from heterogeneous distributed infrastructures and integrate resources from multiple independent providers with technologies, processes and expertise offered by EGI; consultancy for user-driven innovation to assess research computing needs and provide tailored solutions for advanced computing.
The notion of a distributed infrastructure offering advanced resources and services for data-intensive processing in research and innovation has been part of the EGI mission and vision since the EGI design and implementation that started with the DataGrid project back in 2000 under the leadership of CERN. Distributed processing of data supported by a pan-European broadband network infrastructure, solutions for trust and identity management and the Grid middleware, have been the enablers of two Nobel prizes in Physics (2013 and 2017), and many more data-driven scientific discoveries in high energy physics, astronomy and astrophysics, health and medicine, and earth sciences resulting in more than 3,000 open access scientific publications enabled each year. In this webinar Gergely will provide an overview of EGI, the pan-european federation of national e-infrastructures and he will explain how EGI supports big data based Open Science and contributes to the implementation of the EOSC vision.
