Since 2016, GÉANT’s flagship cloud frameworks have fostered digital transformation across Europe, by enabling easy, convenient, and compliant consumption of commercial cloud services for Research and Education (R&E) institutions. In this article, we provide a comprehensive update on the current and upcoming cloud service agreements for the pan-European R&E community. An update on the OCRE 2024 Framework (available from February 2025) Following an intensive phase of evaluation of tender responses, we are pleased to share with our community that the new GÉANT cloud framework – OCRE2024 – is now in the final stages of preparation. The new framework agreements are expected to become available on 3 February 2025 and will be in place...
Tag - OCRE
GÉANT and EUNIS (European University Information Systems) recently collaborated in an online workshop, bringing together NRENs and universities to exchange insights on Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and Cloud Cost Management. This joint effort aims to explore shared challenges, leveraging EUNIS’s focus on high-level requirements and GÉANT and NRENs’ ability to build solutions. The collaboration ensures an efficient and insightful exploration of innovative solutions, saving time and resources in addressing common issues faced by the research and education community. Maria Ristkok (co-leader of the GÉANT Cloud Team) and Denise Dittrich (leader of the EUNIS Special Interest Group on Cloud Management) set the stage by...
Aortic disease is one of the most common forms of cardiovascular diseases, causing 150,000 to 200,000 deaths worldwide every year. This silent threat often goes undetected, is commonly misdiagnosed and – despite progress in research – its overall global death rate keeps growing. Thanks to OCRE Cloud funding, researchers from the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics (aka “Insight”) at the University of Galway used AWS cloud services through Rackspace to advance and accelerate research on aortic disease. Using AI & ML models on AWS cloud infrastructure allowed them to reduce data processing times from 150 hours to mere minutes, and to clear the path for more timely and accurate diagnoses of aortic complications. Edward Curry...
GÉANT, the collaboration of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), is pleased to announce the opening of a market consultation for the upcoming ‘OCRE 2024’ tender, with the issue of a related Prior Information Notice (PIN). Towards the GÉANT Cloud Framework ‘OCRE 2024’ As one of the main high-level objectives of the GN5-1 project, GÉANT is currently preparing the re-procurement of its flagship cloud framework. Now gearing up towards its third iteration, this successful initiative has driven innovation and digital transformation across Europe since 2016 by enabling Research and Education institutions to find, acquire and consume vetted commercial cloud services, whilst benefiting from reduced costs and easier procurement...
The results are in! After extensive deliberation and oversight, the EOSC Future project is ready to announce the outcomes of its third procurement call: European Research e-Infrastructures – Distribution of Commercial Cloud Services 2.0 mini-competition. Read more to discover the awardees and their solutions for making commercial services more accessible to R&E communities in the EU via the EOSC Marketplace! A proven funding mechanism: opportunities for European research infrastructures and commercial cloud services through EOSC In June 2023 the EOSC Future project published its EUR 1.2 million (+VAT) mini-competition 2.0 call as the final part of a EUR 4.8 million adoption funding programme supported by the EU, aimed at bridging the...
Join Quistor for an exclusive webinar on Tuesday 16 May, 11:00-12:00 BST. Quistor experts will showcase the features of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) native database platforms, specifically tailored for research and education institutions. The speakers will delve into Quistor’s expertise in database performance tuning and monitoring, as well as demonstrate how Quistor can help you successfully lift and shift your applications and databases to OCI. Discover the OCI Database Service for Azure, and how the Azure/OCI interconnect can provide compatibility with your existing cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, they will discuss the benefits of the OCI Autonomous Database and Exadata, and how this can help you increase database...
Following a successful final review by the European Commission, the OCRE project team celebrates the culmination of their work, together with the project’s conclusion and its remarkable achievements. In its role of OCRE’s coordinator, GÉANT extends its heartfelt appreciation to partner organisations CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT, as well as to contractors EARSC, Evenflow and SixSq for their contributions and for their dedication to the project’s success. Our thanks also to the community of European NRENs for their crucial role in support of the project, and to commercial partners for their proactive approach. Unlocking the potential of cloud and EO services for European research Concluded in December 2022, the OCRE (Open Clouds for Research...
The OCRE project, which came to a close in December 2022, made commercial cloud services available to accelerate research and education throughout 10,000 institutions across Europe Driving innovation through research and driving research through innovation The OCRE project was initiated to stimulate the use of commercial cloud and Earth Observation (EO) services by the European research community. According to Dave Heyns, OCRE Project Director, the adoption of such services was particularly low before the project commenced because researchers and research institutions struggled to find the proper service providers and reach legal and technical agreements with them. “What we did was to aggregate community demand and requirements and applied...
The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) announces the 6th edition of its Techno Week workshop. The workshop is dedicated to the use of Cloud for scientific computing, and will be held at the premises of the ICCUB in Barcelona from 29 May to 2 June 2023. The Techno Week will be a hybrid event, with 40 seats for on-site participation and 100 seats for remote participation. It will include presentations on several cloud use cases from different disciplines and talks on cloud technology, tools, and initiatives, including a presentation on the OCRE project by GÉANT‘s Procurement Specialist Monique Pellinkhof. Additionally, on-site participation to the Techno Week will include three hands-on workshops with...
Recommendations on how to improve access to cloud and EO services for the scientific community in Europe Since its launch in January 2019, the EU-funded Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project has greatly improved ease of access to cloud services and EO data for researchers through several tendering processes. OCRE has played a strong supporting role in the development of cloud computing and innovation in Europe by providing European public institutions with an online catalogue of commodity-type commercial digital services. Via the catalogue the project granted access to a vast choice of cloud and EO data suppliers, many of whom were not previously available, and provided volume discounts to both research and...
