Content about European Commission

Last month, the European Commission signed a €13m (~$14.5m) contract with the networking organization GÉANT to expand connectivity in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries. It will interconnect the national research and education networks in the EaP partner countries, and will integrate them into the pan-European GÉANT network.

The European CHAIN-REDS project, which ran for 30 months starting in December 2012, worked to promote and support technological and scientific collaboration across e-infrastructures established and operated in different continents, in order to define a path towards a global e-infrastructure ecosystem. The CHAIN-REDS vision is that this ecosystem will enable virtual research communities, research groups, and even individual researchers to access and efficiently use worldwide distributed resources (e.g., computing, storage, data, services, tools, and applications). A booklet published last month gives an overview of the project’s success in facilitating this ambitious vision and assesses the project’s global impact.

Computer simulation has the power to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to become more innovative and competitive. However, the cost of purchasing both the necessary hardware and software is often a major barrier to uptake.

Help is now at hand in the form of the CloudSME platform, through which simulation software packages and managed IT infrastructure can be rented on demand via a simple pay-per-use model.
 

Have you ever thought about using acoustics to collect data? The EAR-IT project has explored this possibility with various pioneering applications that impact on our daily lives. Monitoring traffic density in cities and assisting energy-saving devices in houses, for example, could enable the development of smart cities and buildings.

The EAR-IT project has taken intelligent acoustic technology developed in laboratories and modified and adapted it to real-life environments. The project, involving both research institutes and market advisors, has focused on outdoor and indoor applications: traffic flow monitoring and controling the use of energy indoors based on the number of people in a room.

iSGTW reports from Cloudscape VI, where Helix Nebula gave attendees a first glimpse of its new production platform. Discussion at the event, held in Brussels, Belgium, also focused on sustainability and the legal aspects of cloud computing, as well as the barriers to greater adoption of this technology in both the public and private sectors. 

Scientific output is not just about academic papers: datasets, software, and various forms of multimedia may be produced in the course of research. It is vital that these diverse outputs be citable using persistent identifiers, so that the sharing and the reuse of such materials can be tracked. 

Two weeks ago, the ODIN first year conference was held at CERN to discuss the challenges related to increasing the interoperability of persistent author and object identifiers. These efforts are of particular relevance to large research organizations like CERN, where some high-level datasets have recently been made available to other scientists for re-use.  Equally, the large numbers of collaborators working on the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider can make correct attribution of articles and datasets challenging, too.

It may be named after a dying star, but the Helix Nebula project is very much alive. Now half way through its pilot phase, the project is moving ahead with new organizations coming on board.