A survey of the European Open Science Cloud services for expanding the capacity and capabilities of multidisciplinary scientific applications

Abstract

Open Science is a paradigm in which scientific data, procedures, tools and results are shared transparently and reused by society as a whole. The initiative known as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an effort in Europe to provide an open, trusted, virtual and federated computing environment to execute scientific applications, and to store, share and re-use research data across borders and scientific disciplines. Additionally, scientific services are becoming increasingly data-intensive, not only in terms of computationally intensive tasks but also in terms of storage resources. Computing paradigms such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud Computing are applied to e-science applications to meet these demands. However, adapting applications and services to these paradigms is not a trivial task, commonly requiring a deep knowledge of the underlying technologies, which often constitutes a barrier for its uptake by scientists in general. In this context, EOSC-SYNERGY, a collaborative project involving more than 20 institutions from eight European countries pooling their knowledge and experience to enhance EOSC's capabilities and capacities, aims to bring EOSC closer to the scientific communities. This article provides a summary analysis of the adaptations made in the ten thematic services of EOSC-SYNERGY to embrace this paradigm. These services are grouped into four categories: Earth Observation, Environment, Biomedicine, and Astrophysics. The analysis will lead to the identification of commonalities, best practices and common requirements, regardless of the thematic area of the service. Experience gained from the thematic services could be transferred to new services for the adoption of the EOSC ecosystem framework.