BRUSSELS—The European Commission’s DG Connect revealed on Friday the winners of the public procurement tender titled “Managed Services for the European Open Science Cloud Platform (EOSC)” (Ref. CNECT/LUX/2022/CD/0023), published under the Horizon Europe Research Infrastructures Work Programme 2022.
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) procurement is to build and deploy a fully operational enabling infrastructure for EOSC – referred to as “the EOSC EU Node” – providing access to a rich portfolio of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data and professional quality interoperable services in all relevant domains from data handling to computing, processing, analysis and storing.
EOSC Procurement’s Award Notice in TED
The public tender was organized in three lots:
Lot 1 – Core Federation Services for the EOSC EU Node
The winner of the lot is the Open Science Agora Consortium.
The consortium is coordinated by Athena Research Center (ARC), and participated by EGI Foundation, OpenAIRE A.M.K.E and Netcompany Intrasoft SA. The subcontractors are: GÉANT Association, Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET S.A.), and Scientific Compute and Competence Centre of University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Society (GWDG mbH). The underlying infrastructure providers are CESNET z. s. p. o, Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM) at University Warsaw, and GRNET S.A. offering their community and public cloud tenancies.
The consortium is going to provide professionally managed services for the core components of the EOSC EU Node including functions such as: the Web Portal Front Office, the Resource Catalogues and Registry Services, the Application Workflow Management engine, the Federated Identity Management and Single-Sign-On solution, the Monitoring and Accounting function, and the overall Service Management System and service integration.
Lot 2 – Exchange Infrastructure Services for the EOSC EU Node
The winner of the lot is the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC).
The subcontractors are: NORDUnet A/S representing the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Sikt), and Blue Safespring AB. The underlying network provider is the GÉANT Association.
The contractor and its subcontractors are going to provide fully managed services for the infrastructure services component of the EOSC EU Node including Managed Container service, Managed Compute (Virtual Machine) service and Managed Bulk Data Transfer service.
Lot 3 – Exchange Application Services for the EOSC EU Node
The winner of the lot is the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC).
The subcontractors for this lot are: NORDUnet A/S representing the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Sikt), Blue Safespring AB, EGI Foundation, CESNET z. s. p. o, and ownCloud GmbH.
The contractor and its subcontractors are going to provide fully managed services for the application services component of the EOSC EU Node including Managed File Synchronisation and Sharing service, Interactive Notebooks service, and Managed Large File Transfer service for end-users.
Next step
The European Commission and the awarded contractors are going to hold their joint kick-off meeting for the managed services deployment and delivery phase in the coming three weeks.
The operational services of the EOSC EU Node are expected to be launched in production gradually starting from January until July 2024.
Background
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to achieve a federation of infrastructures providing seamless access to interoperable research objects and value-added services for the whole research data cycle, from discovery to storage, management, analysis, and reuse. The EOSC Procurement is to build and deploy an operational, secure, cloud-based EOSC EU Node, that includes both the core and exchange service components, offering high quality managed services and superior user experience for a large number of users, with the functionalities available 24/7. The procurement also covers operations, maintenance, and support of the EOSC EU Node for 36 months.
SOURCE: European Commission
