A Vision for a European e‐Infrastructure for the 21st Century

Over the past decade Europe has developed world‐leading expertise in building and operating very large scale federated and distributed e‐Infrastructures, supporting unprecedented scales of international collaboration in science, both within and across disciplines. We have the opportunity now to capitalize on that investment and experience, to build the next generation infrastructure to enable innovation and opportunities for European science and education, industry and entrepreneurs. We are now in a period of explosive data growth. The foundations for handling the “Data Tsunami” or “Big Data” have been laid in the last 20 years as we have moved from simple commodity computing (“Farms”), to commodity distributed computing (“Grid”) and then commodity computing services (“Cloud”). These have prepared the ground for handling the large amounts of data being produced today. The era of “Data Intensive Science” has begun. To address these challenges for the diverse, emerging “long tail of science” conducted by researchers that do not have access to significant in‐house computing resources and skills, we propose creating a common platform for the future that builds on the experience of the last decade and is flexible enough to adapt to technological and service innovations. Such a platform must provide the underlying layers of common services, but must be adaptable to the very different and evolving needs of the research communities. A key feature should be that established services be operated by European industry, while development of new services may be publicly funded. The proposal has 3 distinct layers of services: 1. European and international networks; services for identity management and federation across all European research and education institutions and integrated with other regions of the world; 2. A small number of facilities to provide cloud and data services of general and widespread usage. 3. Software services and tools to provide value‐added abilities to the research communities, in a managed repository: a. The tools to provide those research communities that have access to large sets of resources the ability to federate and integrate those resources and to operate them for their community, potentially sharing with other communities; b. Tools to help build applications: e.g. tools to manage data, storage, workflows, visualisation and analysis libraries, etc. c. Tools and services to allow researchers to integrate everyday activities with the e‐Infrastructure: collaborative tools and services; office automation, negotiated licensing agreements etc. Services would be operated by industry or on the facilities in layer 2 above; d. Tools to help research communities engage the general public as citizen scientists. These layers would be supplemented by investment in application software in order to build and share expertise in ensuring that applications are capable of exploiting evolving computing architectures. The expectation is that a continuum of financial models is appropriate ranging from sponsored resources for peer‐reviewed scientific cases to communities who would pay for the services they receive, thus the services they receive must be appropriate and provide a clear value. The governance of the platform would be created by representation from the user communities. This document has been prepared by the IT department of CERN on behalf of the EIROforum IT working group.