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 covered the procurement of R&D services for the design, prototype development and pilot use of innovative cloud services. The tender wss 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 were 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 were 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).