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HNSciCloud updates & major achievements

HNSciCloud moved to Pilot Phase: 2 consortia have been awarded in Bologna, Italy

On the 6th of February 2018, the awards ceremony for the successful contractors moving to Pilot Phase of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud Pre-Commecial Procurement took place in Bologna, Italy.

Congratulations to the two winning consortia!
Contractor 1: T-Systems, Huawei, Cyfronet, Divia
Contractor 2: RHEA Group, Exoscale, SixSq

 

Are you interested in procuring the cloud services developed by HNSciCloud?

Join the Early Adopter Group

 

Since its creation in 2011, Helix Nebula has grown to become a leading public-private partnership between public research actors and cloud service providers. The initiative has undertaken its first joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender called HNSciCloud to create a common hybrid science cloud platform for the European research community. The PCP is sponsored by 10 of Europe’s leading public research organisations (CERN,  CNRS,  DESY,  EMBL-EBI,  ESRF,  IFAE, INFN, KIT, STFC, SURFSara) and co-funded by the European Commission. In addition to these procurers, a wider range of organisations has shown interest in participating in the procurement group.

 

This is why  HNSciCloud is pleased to launch the Early adopter group with the aim of widening the set of procurers.

Early adopter group members will benefit from the results of the HNSciCloud project which will offer them advantages as opposed to performing cloud service evaluations and procurements independently.

LEARN MORE

About the HNSciCloud Pre-Commercial Procurement

The Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud is a €5.3 million Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender for the establishment of a European hybrid cloud platform to support the deployment of high-performance computing and big-data capabilities for scientific research.

It covers the procurement of R&D services for the design, prototype development and pilot use of innovative cloud services. The tender is operated as a competitive development with contracts in each phase (design, prototype, pilot) being awarded to multiple contractors using Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) criterion. The innovative cloud services provided through the platform will be designed and implemented to address a set of challenges that require a combination of services at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) level:

  • Compute and Storage – support a range of virtual machines and container configurations working with datasets in the petabyte range;
  • Network Connectivity and Federated Identity Management – provide high-end network capacity for the whole platform with common identity and access management;
  • Service Payment Models - explore a range of purchasing options to determine the most appropriate ones for the scientific application workloads that will be deployed.

The procured cloud services will be integrated with the procurers’ in-house resources and publicly funded e-Infrastructures to provide a hybrid platform for end-users from a wide range of scientific fields (See the HNSciCloud User Groups).

Facts about HNSciCloud

NEWS & EVENTS

Laying the foundations of the EOSC Business Model
News - 27 Nov 2018
The purpose of this session is to call European infrastructures, research networks and facilities to debate around the potential business model for the EOSC, starting from the existing funding models...
Helix Nebula the Science Cloud Pilot Phase final event. 29 November, Geneva, Switzerland
News - 07 Nov 2018
HNSciCloud Pilot Phase final event will take place on 29 November 2018 at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. The public webcast session will promote the results achieved with the HNSciCloud pilot platform...
HNSciCloud Procurer Hosted Event @SurfSARA: come and discover Onedata and the other HNSciCloud pilot platform services
News - 04 Sep 2018
Next 10 and 11 September HNSciCloud user community will meet in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, at SurfSARA's premises.

PICSE Wizard facilitating cloud procurement for public research organisations

PICSE Wizard (http://wiz.picse.eu): Cloud service procurement made easy!
Are you a Procurement official, IT manager or procurement initiator? Then, complete the PICSE wizard easy-to-use services to help you make informed decisions about how to procure cloud services. The PICSE Wizard is a web-based application that public research organisations can use to obtain guidelines on the most suitable model for procuring cloud services, to make a self-assessment and evaluate their procurement procedures. Each checklist comes with a set of recommendations & tips.

 

 

Who's behind HNSciCloud?

HNSciCloud Pre-Commercial Procurement is driven by ten leading research organisations from across Europe.