News

In November 2016, 4 Consortia won the HNSciCloud Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender for the establishment of a European hybrid cloud platform to support the deployment of high-performance computing and big-data capabilities for scientific research.

After the submission of their designs, 3 out of the 4 consortia were selected to build the prototypes.

On the 6th of February 2018 the consortia that will move from the Prototype to the Pilot Phase of the HNSciCloud PCP will be announced.

If you are a potential user of the hybrid cloud platform or you are simply interested in understanding more about the pilots that will be deployed, mark the date in your agenda and  follow the live webcast of the event directly from our website www.hnsicloud.eu.

AGENDA

14:00 – Pilot phase Award Ceremony – INFN Introduction and welcome

14:10 – Innovation Procurement and the Open Science Cloud as drivers of Europe’s Digital Single Market – Dr. Dirk Van Rooy (DG CNECT)

14:20 –  Overview of HNSciCloud – CERN

14:35 – Pilot phase Award Ceremony – Contractor 1

14:55 – Pilot phase Award Ceremony – Contractor 2

15:15 – HNSciCloud pilot phase – INFN

15:30 – EOSC in practice – Silvana Muscella (chair EOSC HLEG)

15:45 – Early adopter group and closing of webinar- CERN

 

If you want more information about the event please do not hesitate to contact us at info@hnscicloud.eu

El «Euclid Flagship», un catàleg de més de dos mil milions de galàxies sintètiques ha estat presentat aquest dies a Londres en el marc de la conferència anual del projecte Euclid. Aquest projecte és una missió de l’Agència Espacial Europea (ESA) i de centenars de científics de més d’una quinzena de països, agrupats sota el paraigües del Consorci Euclid. L’objectiu de la missió és posar en òrbita un telescopi per estudiar l’origen de l’expansió accelerada de l’Univers, coneguda pels físics i astrònoms com “energia fosca”, per observar i mesurar la distribució de centenars de milions de galàxies.

Aquest catàleg, fonamental per a permetre l’explotació científica de les dades, ha estat produït íntegrament al Port d’Informació Científica (PIC), en un esforç coordinat amb l’Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (ICE, IEEC-CSIC) i l’«Institute for Computational Science» de la Universitat de Zurich.

Per a la seva generació s’ha utilitzat la plataforma Big Data recentment instal·lada al PIC, basada en un clúster Hadoop i tecnologia Spark, que disposa de més de 500 processadors. El temps necessari per a generar el catàleg ha estat tot un rècord, tan sols 5 hores i escaig, el que ha permès als científics fer múltiples rondes per a refinar-lo fins a assolir uns resultats òptims. El catàleg finalitzat ocupa quasi un miler de gigabytes i es pot trobar a la plataforma CosmoHub. Aquesta plataforma, també allotjada al PIC, permet als seus usuaris d’analitzar i distribuir dades massives amb molta facilitat i rapidesa.

Per veure la presentació que es va fer, podeu fer click aquí.

PIC was invited to present CosmoHub at Jornadas Técnicas de RedIRIS. Jorge Carretero, astrophysics researcher at PIC showed a small presentation about the platform and did a small demo to the assistants. In case you would like to review it, you can do it here.

At the event, PIC was also rewarded with the second place in the IPv6 contest. You can check all the results here.

On the 2^nd November 2016, the awards ceremony for the successful bidders of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud tender is taking place in Lyon, France, at the CC-IN2P3 (CNRS) premises, one of the main academic data centres in France and a procurer of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud).

This €5.3 million joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender, led by CERN, will establish a European hybrid cloud platform that will support high-performance, data-intensive scientific use-cases sponsored by 10 of Europe’s leading public research organisations and co-funded by the European Commission.

A total of 28 multinational companies, SMEs and public research organisations from 12 countries submitted bids during the summer. The 4 selected consortia will be announced at the event and present their visions for the hybrid cloud platform.

This event marks the conclusion of the preparation of the pre-commercial procurement and will kick off the design phase where the four consortia compete to go through to the prototyping phase.

If you want to meet the procurers and the highly innovative consortia in Lyon, please register now. For those who cannot join us in Lyon, a webcast of the event will be available at www.hnscicloud.eu.

Join us on Wednesday 2^nd November, 2016, at 2.30pm CET

www.hnscicloud.eu

#HNtenderawards

View the event agenda and details here.

For more information on HNSciCloud follow us @HelixNebulaSC

We have been working very hard to release a new and much improved rework of CosmoHub.

This new version builds up on big data technologies to be able to analyze and create custom catalogs of hundreds of millions of objects in a matter of seconds.

PIC’s cooling system with oils is on the cover of the last issue of the DatacenterDynamics, a magazine about the business of data centers.

Read More…

Manuel Delfino was participate in the talk “CERN’s computing at the service of science and its impact on society”.

Maite Barroso Lopez, Deputy Head Of The Information Technology Department at CERN and Pippa Wells, Inner Detector System Project Leader at the ATLAS Experiment will be keynote speakers.

 
Link to the talk information.

The PIC computer equipment is submerged in tanks filled with mineral oil. The new system may represent up to €140,000 in yearly savings. This cooling system has an average of 40% more efficiency than those in other data centres around the world.

Read More…