Universities and academic research networks across Europe are building a giant “science cloud” by scaling up open source solutions for synchronising and sharing data. The researchers are “following the open-source strategy for delivering services” to tie together their local implementations into an integrated network.
ScienceMesh has become the nickname for this EUR 6 million initiative, which is largely funded by the EU and registered as the CS3MESH4EOSC project (CS3 mesh for European Open Science Cloud).
Holger Angenent, IT administrator at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität (WWU) in Münster, Germany, is working with colleagues in universities and research computer networks in Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Spain.
“CS3MESH4EOSC is possibly one of the worst project names ever,” Mr Angenent admits. “But ScienceMesh will bring us closer together, letting us share and collaborate on the same data sets.” The project is led by the European research organisation CERN, and the consortium includes the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, as well as Australia’s Academic and Research Network.
Software components involved in the project includes Indico, an open source tool for event organisation, archiving and collaboration, origially developed by CERN as open source software.
Open source cloud
In Münster, the university is adding to the mix other open source solutions such as the file hosting service OwnCloud and the 10 petabyte OpenStack cloud.
The university is relying on open source for several other projects. One example is the high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, which is being built with other universities in the state of North Rhine-Westfalia. Here one of the building blocks is EasyBuild, which helps the universities deploy HPC software.
“At the Münster university we use open source software to be more independent of IT vendors,” Mr Angenent explains. “Other reasons include lower total costs, and being able to use software sustainably: by making our contributions public, everyone benefits.”
“Also, as a publicly-funded organisation, the software that we develop should be widely available,” he says. The university publishes its code on a local instance of GitLab, an open source code repository solution.
Mail, calendaring and real-time communication server Kopano is the latest addition to Münster’s list of open source solutions. The university is testing Kopano on the Kubernetes platform, and in due course the software could potentially be used by all 500,000 students, teachers, researchers and staff at Germany’s state universities. The country’s sciebo “campus cloud” [I’m a bit hazy about what this does!] service also plans to adopt Kopano. However, the scale of the implementation depends on the willingness of institutions to migrate their mail and calendaring services to the open source platform.
More information:
CS3MESH4EOSC (ScienceMesh)
High Performance Computing at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
CS3 Community