IDIA has joined a project led by EGI, a European organisation specialising in the provision of advanced computing and data analytics services for research and innovation. This project has been submitted as a proposal to the European Commission under the H2020 framework. This is to carry out three main tasks in the area of cloud federation, and these continue work IDIA has already commenced with EGI. The objectives of IDIA in this project are as follows:
1. Federate cloud resources
EGI will support IDIA in federating its Ilifu (cloud) resources within the EGI Federation, enabling it to be accessed by authorised South Africa researchers and EGI users. IDIA aims to use the EGI federation to enhance collaboration with scientific partners in Europe and to make it easier to have new users access the IDIA Cloud resources.
2. Application deployment and shared datasets
The aim of the partnership with EGI is to make some of IDIA’s scientific software available and deployable on EGI cloud resources. IDIA’s further work will focus on data, improving the transparency with which datasets distributed between collaborations can be found and accessed.
3. Impact assessment and dissemination
Information will be exchanged on the impact of services developed and deployed, success stories shared and joint publications will be prepared. Based on these, presentations and demonstrations will be given at high impact event
We should find out in mid-October whether the proposal has been successful, and work will officially commence in January 2021.