Samuel Bernardo describes the KOM of the EOSC Synergy project, taking place in Santiago de Compostela
The kick-off meeting of EOSC Synergy took place during the 10th Iberian Grid Conference, in Santiago de Compostela between Monday 23rd to Thursday 26th of September.
EOSC-synergy will contribute to the European Open Science Cloud landscape by expanding the capacities and building the capabilities of EOSC by leveraging the experience, effort and resources of national publicly-funded digital infrastructures. In practice this will mean more compute and storage available to researchers, and more datasets and tools to expand avenues of research. In the upcoming 3 years, EOSC-synergy will be the H2020 instrument to promote the implementation and adoption of EOSC services by scientific users in the countries involved in the consortium.
The ultimate goal is to build EOSC as a coordinated effort, as an open environment for scientific data and related processing that promotes convergence of infrastructures and scientific thematic services provided at national or European level. The project is coordinated by IBERGRID, the Iberian scientific and technological cooperation framework signed by Spain and Portugal on distributed computing.
Starting Day
Monday morning opened with the reception of all conference participants. Everyone received a bag with flyers about the meeting conveners and information about Santiago points of interest.
The day was full of presentations from different knowledge areas and ended with working groups presentation. It opened with welcome and opening plenaries, where the project coordinators presented an overview of EOSC Synergy. That sessions were the slipway to launch the goals for project, providing the interaction between all stakeholders.
Second day
The morning started with very pleasant plenary sessions on environmental sciences. It ended with sessions about the research communities talking about their projects and the interest in EOSC. The afternoon was filled with many parallel presentations with a wide scope of subjects and work packages breakouts. After a very hard working day, all participants were graced with a guided tour through the historical streets of Santiago de Compostela, followed by the conference dinner. It was very interesting to build soft skills and let loose in Santiago history, monuments and the pilgrims arriving ways. The tour ended at the entrance of the restaurant.
The dinner was very pleasant with good atmosphere and getting all together in a historical place. In the end there was the Queimada conjure staging, to kick away all bad EOSC spirits and place all positive energy in the coming days.
Third day
The morning presentations were focused on services innovation, started with IBM quantum computing, serverless computing and evolution of production software tools in EOSC. After lunch there was a visit to the CESGA datacenter where Finis Terrae supercomputer is hosted. Finis Terrae II is a linux based heterogeneous cluster with 317 computing nodes. It was interesting to compare the space reduction for hosting the new supercomputer compared to the old one.
In the afternoon there were tutorials about quantum computing applications and authorization and authentication on clouds. At the same time there was another meetings for coordinators and task leaders of the working groups.
Last day
Tutorials sessions started at 9h30 and ended at 18h30. The presentations covered various themes such as Openstack, Docker containers, Event-Driven computing, development of Serverless systems, DEEP-Hybrid Data Cloud introducing deep learning tools, Alien4Cloud and INDIGO datacloud platform. This was a hands-on experience day, where it was possible to review the work already developed by previous projects and understand how they can answer to the computing demand and infrastructure management. After lunch, at the same time, there was the kick off meeting of EOSC Synergy WP7.
And this was the EOSC Synergy kick off that aroused the interest of all attendees looking forward the interesting roadmap.
