The GÉANT (GN5-2) Project’s Above-the-Net Services incubator is looking for practical proposals around three areas of service concept investment being developed by the GN5-2 Above-the-Net Services team. These are:
- Digital Research Environment (DRE)
- Object Storage Infrastructure
- Data Movement Infrastructure
Through the incubator, the GN5-2 project will offer person months (PMs) to project partners to develop service Proof-of-Concepts with the eventual aim of expanding the GÉANT community’s portfolio of Above-the-Net services.
The initiative ultimately aims to reduce risks associated with the development of innovative ideas before committing resources on the level of a project task or GÉANT service.
ACT NOW!
The call is now open as of 1 May 2025 and will close for proposals on 30 June 2025. This gives interested parties eight weeks to prepare their proposals, fill in the template (available here) and submit their applications.
The incubator will award 38 PMs across two to four proposals, based on potential impact, innovation, and overall value to the three service concept development areas.
BE CREATIVE!
Formulate a hypothesis you wish to test that supports one or more of the following service concept development areas:
- Digital Research Environment (DRE)
GÉANT member NRENs are increasingly compelled to respond to the ever-evolving digital needs of their national open science communities. This need is driven by local research governing bodies, national funders, and by the European Commission, in their support for the EOSC and its proposed node structures.
One of the solutions developed by SURF to tackle this challenge is the SURF Research Cloud, a digital services distribution platform underpinned by community AAI, allowing scientists and researchers to easily build virtual research environments, collaborate on projects across teams and institutions, and select and consume digital services against a pre-defined budget or wallet. This highly functional platform is multi-tenant by nature and thus presents an opportunity for broader use by GÉANT and other NRENs within the community.
In line with this, the GÉANT Innovation Programme in 2025 is supporting the development of a pilot GÉANT Digital Research Environment (DRE) based on the SURF Research Cloud, to be potentially complemented with a collective service offering. NREN tenancies of the DRE platform would significantly enhance the NREN’s ability to support their local research community with easy access to national, institutional and commercial services through a consistent interface, well integrated with other NREN assets. NREN tenancies are also likely to be useful technical building blocks for national or thematic nodes of the EOSC Federation currently taking shape. Four NRENs are already participating in related Proof-of-Concepts, to establish their tenancies on the GÉANT DRE and add their services and resources to the ecosystem, aiming to demonstrate the vast potential of this initiative. - A pan-European sovereign Object-Storage Infrastructure
European data sovereignty is highly topical. As the global geopolitical situation shifts towards regional autonomy, the protection of regional research data becomes more dependent on the development of localised, bespoke, secure storage solutions. At the same time, there is a consistent need for in-situ, FAIR sharing of research data within Europe. The European Commission is also placing growing focus on the development of regional data economy and on large-scale use of data-dependent Artificial Intelligence within the European public sector. All these factors point to a necessity for standardisation in our approach towards data storage, sharing, governance, and policy.
While numerous platforms supporting siloed sync and share, object, and general file storage are already available within the NREN community, interoperability and standardisation are still lacking.
There is now a concrete opportunity for NRENs to collaborate on a collectively procured, built, and managed pan-European platform, offering simple S3 object storage interfaces, deployed in a distributed way, and supporting digital sovereignty requirements. This would target research data repositories with the promise of providing better and cheaper low-level storage by leveraging pan-European economies of scale and of scope. This effort would also require addressing significant organisational and technical challenges, as trans-national long-distance replication between storage pods, in order to make this concept a reality. - A standardised and sovereign Research Data Movement Infrastructure
Although the concept of data visitation is increasing in popularity, the exploitation of research and education networking infrastructures for the migration of massive research data workloads remains a priority. For instance, most European HPC centres still require data workloads to visit the compute platform and not vice versa.
While there are many data transfer solutions available, none of these is yet widely deployed in an optimised fashion to allow all researchers to fully leverage the available network capability. Most solutions also suffer from sub-optimal user experiences, and the few available platforms that may fulfil the bespoke requirements of global researchers do not guarantee compliance with European data processing regulations from a regional sovereignty perspective.
Ultimately, researchers wanting to move more than a couple of terabytes often end up requiring dedicated support by specialists. In a time where all research has gone digital with ever increasing amounts of research data, this needs to change.
The European NREN community has now a real opportunity to make the difference in this domain, by collaborating on the development and evolution of such infrastructure.
With the GÉANT community developing investment proposals for these shared, open-source services, the opportunities for innovation are ENDLESS!
Eligibility and rules of participation
The call is limited to GN5-2 project partners as the cost of concept development will be covered by project person months made available specifically for this purpose. Please be clear on your budget (required person months) and timeline, keeping in mind that projects will need to be completed by Q1 of 2027.
The call also allows the forming of a collaboration of partners within the GN5-2 project in order to harness all the skills necessary to develop and demonstrate the proposed concepts. It is anticipated that developments will occur in 4-month sprints.
Each of the partners in any awarded proposal will simply need to sign a MoU committing the time charged against PMs reallocated to the partner that will be focused on Proof-of-Concept (PoC) development. Each PoC will be executed in close coordination with the GN5-2 Above-the-Net service concept development team to ensure highest relevance of PoC results for the service concept developments.
Would you like to hear more about the 2025 edition of GÉANT’s Above-the-Net Services Incubator? Don’t miss the dedicated infoshare on 12 May 2025, at 10:00 CEST: https://events.geant.org/event/1893/
For additional information on either of the service types or if you wish to discuss your proposed hypothesis and approach, please reach out to the Above-the-Net Services Incubator team at incubator@geant.org.
