The GÉANT Cloud initiative is focused on National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) making cloud services available to their communities alongside cloud-based ICT services being developed within and for the GÉANT community. This is all part of the overarching goal to assist NRENs and their member institutions emerge more agile with the right mix and range of IT cloud-based services and products that meet their needs and that are uniquely suited to the community’s requirements.
Three ongoing development projects to extend the functionality of two cloud-based services developed by the GÉANT Cloud team were awarded funding through the 2021 GÉANT Innovation Programme. On Thursday, March 3, 2022, these three development projects were showcased. Along with the other ten projects awarded funding as part of the program.
The three follow-on projects built on GÉANT Cloud services showcased:
PLAS Platformed Workflows
This is an extension of the GÉANT Cloud Flow (GCF) platform being developed by the CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications). It provides researchers with platform-as-service to run tasks that can use a sidecar platform like Spark or Horovod to make calculus. The PLAS platform extends GCF’s services with open-source software so that users can run tasks running within overlay platforms to leverage better the underlying cloud resources and make the workflow faster.
mingleMEET
mingleMEET is an interactive meeting space for eduMEET being developed by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC). mingleMEET allows users to spontaneously create groups to create a dynamic web conferencing environment. This will add a new way to conduct eduMEET networking sessions with the added functionality of spontaneous meetings, dedicated rooms for subset of participants and virtual coffee breaks for networking and mingling during online conferences.
VoDsync
VoDsync, also being developed by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), is an extension for eduMEET. It is designed to overcome the compression and quality challenges of screen sharing audio-visual materials via videoconferencing and the asynchronous issues of sharing links to external service. VoDsync offers an innovative, synchronous approach to embed audio-visual materials into the web-conferencing system. The ability to allow remote viewers to exactly follow the presenter’s interactions are especially relevant for applications like telemedicine, art and education, where accurate synchronization is vital.
