Implementation of a European e-Infrastructure for the 21st Century

This document proposes an implementation plan for the vision of an e-infrastructure as described in “A Vision for a European e-Infrastructure for the 21st Century”. The objective of the implementation plan is to put in place the e-infrastructure commons that will enable digital science by introducing IT as a service to the public research sector in Europe. The rationale calls for a hybrid model that brings together public and commercial service suppliers to build a network of Centres of Excellence offering a range of services to a wide user base. The platform will make use of and cooperate with existing European e-infrastructures by jointly offering integrated services to the end-user. This hybrid model represents a significant change from the status-quo and will bring benefits for the stakeholders: end-users, research organisations, service providers (public and commercial) and funding agencies. Centres of Excellence can be owned and operated by a mixture of commercial companies and public organisations. Their portfolio of services, starting with those listed by eIRG and the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data, will be made available under a set of terms and conditions that are compliant with European jurisdiction and legislation with service definitions implementing recognised policies for trust, security and privacy notably for data protection. A funding model engaging all stakeholder groups is described. The ability to fully exploit the potential for knowledge and job creation that is locked-up in the datasets and algorithms to be hosted by the Centres of Excellence will require the nurturing of a new generation of data scientists with a core set of ICT skills. A management board where all the Centres of Excellence operating organisations are represented will provide strategic and financial oversight is coupled with a user forum, through which the end-users themselves, in a cross‐disciplinary body collaborate to define requirements and policies for the services. A pilot service is proposed that can be rapidly established by building on the existing investments. The pilot service will demonstrate the feasibility of the e-infrastructure Centres of Excellence model for a range of scientific disciplines and evaluate the suitability for the ESFRI Research Infrastructures, that are currently under-development and represent Europe’s future “big data factories”. Implementation will start in 2014, initially offering a limited set of services at a prototype Centre of Excellence. This document has been prepared by CERN’s IT department on behalf of the EIROforum IT working group.