The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has launched the Federated Cloud - a cloud service tailored for European researchers. The announcement was made at the annual EGI Community Forum, in Helsinki and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is one of the technology providers supporting the work.

Built on the experience of supporting scientists’ IT needs for over ten years, EGI’s Federated Cloud provides researchers with a flexible, scalable, standards-based cloud infrastructure. The service includes support and expertise provided by EGI and its partners to ensure researchers benefit fully from the infrastructure.

"I am delighted to be able to announce that after so much hard work from everyone involved we now have a research orientated cloud platform based on open standards that is ready to support every researcher in Europe. This is an important milestone for all areas of research in Europe," said David Wallom, Chair of the Federated Clouds Task Force.

The Federated Cloud pools resources and services provided by various partners, both public and private, and offers them through a single point of contact. This unique set up has allowed EGI to create a cloud that offers researchers:

·         Access to advanced supercompute capabilities for their research.

·         Virtualized resources to run any environment they choose.

·         Support services to ensure applications run as efficiently as possible.

The Federated Cloud has been built to support development and innovation within the European Research Area. The infrastructure has been designed in collaboration with communities across Europe and supports all fields of research. All researchers working within the EU may use the Federated Cloud to manage, disseminate and process their data flexibly, quickly and efficiently.

Work on the Federated Cloud started back in 2011 to address the need to provide community-specific cloud services through open standards. This quickly grew into creating a federation of resource providers/cloud services that would provide the scalability and flexibility that modern research needs.

"Our collaboration with EGI has been very successful. Their use of open standards is key and the interoperability between the Federated Cloud and our cloud testbed has opened up many new possibilities for collaborations between researchers from all over the world," said Federico Ruggieri, Project Director for CHAIN-REDS.

This interpretation of the cloud paradigm and its application to the European academic sector introduces unprecedented versatility in delivering an e-Infrastructure tailored to the European Research Area.

Over the last three years EGI has worked with many research communities to provide requirements for, advise on and test many aspects of the infrastructure. The communities involved are the WeNMR project (structural biology), the European Space Agency (satellite image processing), Peachnote (musicology), EUBrazil OpenBio/BioVeL (biodiversity), CHAIN-REDS (promoting international collaborations) and EISCAT-3D (geospace).

At its launch, the Federated Cloud pools resources and the expertise of 19 countries around Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, the Republic of Macedonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom. There are many countries outside Europe also involved helping make this a truly global activity.

"The Federated Cloud is the next step in evolution for EGI. We have to support the researchers and understand their needs so we can engage, grow and innovate together," said Yannick Legré, EGI.eu Managing Director.

"It has been amazing watching the Federated Cloud grow from a simple idea just a few short years ago to a fully-fledged service. I am proud to have been involved and look forward to where our users take us in the future," commented Michel Drescher, EGI.eu’s Technical Manager.

"It has been great to be involved from the start, we have helped shape the Federated Cloud and hope to make good use of it in the future to better serve our users," said Alexandre Bonvin, WeNMR project coordinator.

Any European researcher can start using the Federated Cloud today by contacting EGI (support@egi.eu), or consulting the instructions athttp://www.egi.eu/how-to/use_the_federated_Cloud.html.