This document highlights the results achieved by the Helix Nebula consortium in the last two years, in retrospect against the initial goals outlined in the strategy published in 2011. It also considers the policy developments in Europe - including the key actions targeted by the European Cloud Computing Strategy in alignment with the long term objectives of the Digital Agenda for Europe - to identify areas requiring further effort and focus in the next three years.
This document summarizes the main outcomes and the agreed roadmap resulting from the two-year Helix Nebula (HN) project contextualized with the objectives set in the “Strategic Plan for a Scientific Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Europe” published in 2011, which laid the ground for the Helix Nebula Initiative and the related EU coordination and support action.
This document provides a source of information and support for decision-making regarding the potential governance model for the Helix Nebula Initiative. It shows how the European Science Cloud could be managed and supported, once the business models are chosen and implemented.
This document provides a summary of the work achieved during the second year of the Helix Nebula pilot-phase project in the area of interoperability between commercial cloud providers and publicly funded infrastructures.
The work package delivered:
During May and September 2014 the Flagship Application Deployment activity was undertaken as part of the Helix Nebula initiative and was coordinated as part of the FP7 project activity.
During the deployments, the Flagship applications of CERN, ESA and EMBL were deployed on to the two Blue Box platforms created for the purposes of the initiative, one was open source solution (SlipStream) and the other a commercial solution (EnStratius).
Throughout the Helix Nebula initiative a number of activities have taken place to identify the requirements of the users for a brokerage platform that would meet their particular flagship application needs. Initially these requirements were formulated by the Technical Architecture Committee as a series of User Stories that were created together with the existing user communities of the initiative.
This document describes the context for and the outline content of the catalogue facility within the Helix Nebula Marketplace (HNX). It is intended both to provide orientation to HNX Suppliers as to what they could include and guidance to HNX Users as to what they should expect to find. The catalogue will evolve with use and this document is expected to evolve accordingly.
The last decade has seen a tremendous growth in e-infrastructure and related activity in a number of research communities as a result of funding by the European Commission in the 7th (and earlier) Framework Programmes and by corresponding national investments. Consequent to this investment in capacity, research communities are presented with several individually excellent, but independent – cross-layer initiatives which present researchers with sometimes inconsistent technical approaches and disjointed managerial structures to achieving a production quality infrastructure.
The project “Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud” will support the massive IT requirements of European scientists and aims to pave the way for the development and exploitation of a Cloud Computing Infrastructure, initially based on the needs of European IT-intense scientific research organisations, while also allowing the inclusion of other stakeholders’ needs (governments, businesses and citizens).