Call for Use Cases

The purpose of the open call is to facilitate co-designing the C-SCALE federation with the scientific community, to ensure that the e-infrastructure implementation is aligned with end-user needs.

With this call for use cases, the C-SCALE project aims to offer access to infrastructure and platform services, dedicated user support and training.

Selected use cases will collaborate with the C-SCALE platform providers to deploy their applications, thereby helping us to identify the needs and requirements of the end-users to improve and refine the functional and non-functional aspects of the overall C-SCALE service portfolio.

Are you interested in piloting a new federated infrastructure for Copernicus and Earth Observation data, with a core computing (Cloud, High-Throughput Computing, High-Performance Computing) and storage architecture optimised for very large data handling and fast user query response? Apply now!

The call targets international researchers, research projects, communities, and infrastructures, as well as national research groups, SMEs and industries who are interested in piloting new technologies and platform services in their Copernicus and/or Earth Observation processing and analysis workflows.

Generally, the use cases supported by the open call mechanism can benefit from new technologies and platform services and through collaboration with infrastructure providers can reach higher technology readiness levels. Moreover, well-established methodologies that are hard to fit in the formal technology readiness model, but have been published and peer-reviewed, can benefit in a similar fashion.

Additionally, working with C-SCALE service providers, the use cases can:

• Reduce their reliance on proprietary, commercial cloud platforms.
• Scale their application up and out to achieve planetary-scale analytics.
• Leverage EOSC services and solutions from other scientific disciplines.
• Receive support for the development of scalable cloud agnostic and interoperable solutions.
• Easy and free at the point of use access to European Cloud IaaS
• Large repository of Copernicus data with fast access from the project Cloud IaaS
• Develop collaboration with European research infrastructures.
• Create awareness about their application by registering their services in the EOSC Portal and ESA’s Network of Resources to engage a broader, cross-disciplinary, group of stakeholders.

₁ The selected use cases should represent operational methods that support open Copernicus / Earth Observation research based on the FAIR principles. The criteria, their background and the priorities that the evaluators have been asked to take into account during the selection process have been published in project deliverable D5.2 Criteria for choosing candidates for the Early Adopter Programme.

The project offers access to compute and storage resources hosting Copernicus data, compute platform services supporting Earth Observation data analytics, data management services and related user support and training.
The total capacity that the C-SCALE project makes available through the call between 2021-2023 is:

• 12 PB months of storage
• 18 million Cloud CPU hours
• 3.1 million HPC/HTC CPU hours
• 6,000 GPU hours.

The portfolio of services offered to applicants includes:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, High-Throughput Compute, High-Performance Compute and storage resources from pan-European partners of the project: EODC (AT), CESNET (CZ), INFN (IT), SURF (NL), VITO (BE), GRNET (GR) and INCD (PT).
• Commercial cloud services from CloudFerro (PL).
• A portfolio of scientific tools, applications and virtual machine images that can be used and customised on the infrastructure resources for your analysis.
• Platform services to manage complex workloads, to train AI models, to deploy automated clusters, to run containerised applications, to perform interactive analysis with Notebooks.
• Data management services to transfer, to catalogue, to cache and, federate data across multiple compute and data sites.
• Federation services to manage user access, to monitor service availability-reliability, to measure CPU and storage usage.
• Network of experts who can help you port custom analytics and simulation applications and scientific datasets to the infrastructure, to operate applications and scientific services in the cloud.

We encourage interested parties to join the C-SCALE user community and engage with the other developers.

• The call opens in August 2021 and will be kept open until January 2022.
• Expressions of interest can be submitted any time following the below instructions (see ‘Submit use case’ below).
• There are cut-off dates with a 2-monthly frequency, when the expressions of interest are evaluated, and successful applicants will be invited to submit short proposals.
• Next cut-off date: 30 September 2021
• Evaluation and invitations to submit full proposals are within 2 weeks after the cut-off date.
• Invited applicants will have 4 weeks to submit the full proposal.
• Selected use cases will be notified within 2 weeks of submitting the proposal.

Applicants are requested to provide the following information:

• Principal Investigator and optionally additional contact person
• High-level description of the use case and relation to the C-SCALE goals
• Scientific and computing objectives of the use case
• Beneficiaries of the use case and expected impact (incl. contribution to Open Access and FAIRFindability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability)
• Scientific applications, platforms and datasets to be used in the context of the use case
• Compute and storage requirements

Submissions can be made either online using the below application form, or in e-mail (c-scale-call@mailing-list.eodc.eu) using this templateLink to online Word file “C-SCALE_Use_Case_Submission_Form.docx”.

Online form to submit your use case.

For further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at c-scale-call@mailing-list.eodc.eu.