GÉANT
It is Europe’s main computer network for research and education, used by some 3 million researchers in 3,500 research centres. GÉANT is a project bringing together Europe’s national research networks. GÉANT and its services enable the research communities in Europe and worldwide to work closely together at the cutting edge of technology in cutting-edge fields. Together with national research networks, GÉANT’s communication infrastructure provides high-speed, reliable data transmission services.
In addition to network infrastructure, the GÉANT3 project will focus on the development of services and solutions for the European research community, including the delivery of the “Future Internet” by developing existing infrastructures and expanding the portfolio of advanced user services. It will also be important to address the problem of “digital exclusion”. Stimulating technological development is expected to put Europe at the forefront of the network technology and e-Science race.
EOSC
The European Open Science Cloud, an open cloud of data and services for science, was created on the initiative of the European Commission to develop infrastructure and access to knowledge for a wide range of users. Data aggregated within the EOSC are provided by a large number of scientific institutions.
Important for the cooperation of PIONIER with EOSC are projects connecting Polish computing centres (so called High Performance Computing centres) and urban networks, so called MANs (Metropolitan Area Networks). Examples of such projects are PRACE-LAB (PRACE – The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and the National Data Warehouse, built under the KMD, KMD2 projects and its current continuation: “National Data Warehouse – Universal infrastructure for storage and sharing of data and efficient processing of large volumes of data in HPC, BigData and artificial intelligence models”.
As part of the IT infrastructure, it provides appropriate services and tools that offer functionality to search for scientific data to “know where it is” and then ensure that data and digital objects are accessed and properly identified to “know what it is”.
Internet2
The Internet2 consortium develops and implements network technologies, using mainly high-speed data transfer. The activities and services of the PIONIER Consortium fit perfectly into the idea and mainstream of the Internet2.
The aim of the organisation is to carry out research and to computerise society as much as possible, and to develop a very high performance Internet. It assumes that data will be transmitted at speeds up to 1,000 times faster than today. Through scientific and academic research together with leaders in specific technologies and cooperation with government, industry and the international community, Internet2 promotes cooperation and innovation that affects the future of the network.
Open Clouds for Research Environments
The Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project aims to accelerate open science cloud adoption by bringing together cloud providers,Earth Observation (eng. EO) organizations and the scientific and educational community. This is made possible through ready-to-use service agreements.
Cloud-based services offer a wealth of tools to the European research community, but they are currently inaccessible to many researchers, and the right services are difficult to find and select.
The OCRE project was launched in January 2019. As part of a pan-European tender, a framework agreement was concluded for the provision of services by public cloud providers in the IaaS/SaaS (Infrastructure as a Service / Software as a service) area.
Services are directed to the scientific community all over Europe. Originator and initiator of OCRE project was GÉANT, as a central contracting authority with national network operators (National Research and Education Network – NREN) as a members.
Cloud-based services offer a various tools for the European research community, but for many researchers they are currently unavailable and services are difficult to find and select. Services based on framework agreements can be used by all organizations connected to the e-infrastructure of PIONIER network – member and non-member organizations that have a valid agreement with PIONIER consortium.
Key benefits include fast and secure direct peering on the web via PIONIER and GÉANT, as well as the ability to classify confidential information and define its processing. User login is possible by PIONIER.Id federation using your own institutional account. GÉANT has carried out a thorough legal check and defined the legal conditions of the framework contract, and the data is processed and stored in accordance with European and national legislation.
