Community Use Cases

Societal challenges

This use case addresses three key societal challenges:

• Disaster risk: CASEarth provides high resolution (8 m) satellite data and radiation satellite images for the simulation of tsunami, hurricane, earthquakes,
  typhoons, floods and extreme weather.
• Smart City: ESA and CSTCloud provide high resolution data and sensor data for the city of Shenzhen in Guangzhou province, China.
• Precision Medicine: Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) provides datasets for analysing genetic make up of diseases.

Technical challenges

This early adopter aims to allow researchers from Africa and China to use EOSC services on top of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC) resources.

How EOSC can help and add value

This use case was facilitated by the EOSC-hub project via the following services: EGI Check-in, OCRE, OPENCoasT, DMCC, AGROS, WRF 4DVAR.

Specific steps:

• Access resources and migration on the CSTCloud
• Integrate EGI Check-in service
• Install and test the pilot use cases
• Taiwan Typhoon forecasting with the WRF 4DVAR service, precision medicine using Elixir tools, Smart City application for storm surge and disaster damage assessment of ShenZhen
• Use cases in production

Societal Challenges

Climate change is one of the most pressing societal challenges and is having an adverse impact on many of the World’s environments. Notable recent examples include Hurricane Dorian (September 2016) and extreme forest fires in Australia (early 2020), with both leading to substantive damage to natural and managed forests and associated loss of biodiversity. The increased frequency and intensity of many climate-related events and processes increases the need to manage and protect ecosystems to both increase resilience but also mitigate the impacts of our changing climate. 

This use case shows how Earth Observation and Earth Science modelling can provide knowledge for decision-makers, and particularly those charged with addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Life on Land (SDG 15). 

Technical Challenges

• Computing infrastructure scalability;
• Scientific model sharing and use for decision-making;
• Moving code closer to available data.

How EOSC can help and add value

Scaling up the EODESM system and widening the user base

The Earth Observation Data for Ecosystem Monitoring (EODESM) generates land cover and change maps based primarily on the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). The EOSC-hub project has allowed EODESM to be openly available to the wider community through the Ecopotential Virtual Laboratory (VL). The VL has been developed to give access to the Sentinel-2 data archive and thereby provide capacity to generate land cover and change maps for any site globally and for multiple points in time. EuroGEO, the European regional component of GEO, is using EOSC as a provider of computing resources through its Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities, and specifically to allow execution of EODESM.  These digital infrastructures allow scientists and decision-makers (through dedicated user interfaces) to run sophisticated models or applications, such as EODESM, without the need of setting up their own infrastructure.  As such, collaborative working, reproducibility, replicability, and reusability of research outcomes are significantly enhanced.

Societal challenges

The basic technology of radio telescopes has not changed since the 1960’s: large mechanical dish antennas collect signals before a receiver detects and analyses them. Half the cost of these telescopes lies in the steel and moving structure. A telescope 100x larger than existing instruments would therefore be unaffordable. New technology is required to make the next step in sensitivity needed to unravel the secrets of the early universe and the physical processes in the centers of active galactic nuclei.

LOFAR is the first telescope of this new sort, using an array of simple omni-directional antennas instead of mechanical signal processing with a dish antenna.

To make radio pictures of the sky with adequate sharpness, these antennas are to be arranged in clusters that are spread out over an area of 100 km in diameter within the Netherlands and over 1500 km throughout Europe.

Technical challenges

The Radio Astronomy Competence Centre of EOSC-hub’s project has been supporting the radio astronomical community to find, access, manage, and process data produced by the LOFAR telescope. The CC directly addresses the community’s technology needs – such as computing infrastructure and storage – by offering resources and services from European e-Infrastructures through the European Open Science Cloud.

How EOSC can help and add value

EOSC can add value by providing a compute and storage infrastructure where LOFAR data can be pushed for analysis. In particular, the aspects addressed are federated single sign-on access in a distributed environment and support for data-intensive processing workflows – for example having access to user workspace connected to high-throughput processing systems, offer portable application deployment, and provide integrated access to a FAIR science data repository.

The radio astronomical community is therefore empowered to profit from these resources and increase the science outputs from multi-petabyte radio astronomical data archives of current and future instruments.

Societal challenges

Oceanographers work to analyse and interpret measurements of different physical and chemical parameters (temperature, salinity) in order to understand the effects of global warming in marine environments. These parameters are collected by large sea observation consortiums, such as Euro-Argo. To improve their understanding of ocean circulation and climate machinery, oceanographers need to access original observations from diverse sources.

Technical challenges

EOSC-hub’s Marine Competence Centre has been working on deploying ocean observations on the EOSC infrastructure for data analytics. One of the focuses is to make Euro-Argo (The European research infrastructure for ocean observation) data more easily accessible for online processing and subsetting.

How EOSC can help and add value

The EOSC-hub project has been bringing together services and tools from the European Open Science Cloud to support the Euro-Argo Data Discovery Platform and integrate the Argo research community with the EOSC. These services include compute cloud environments for hosting of the ARGO data and the data visualization environments, as well as data transfer services. 

Societal challenges

EISCAT_3D will be the world’s leading facility to explore and study the Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere, including phenomena such as the aurora borealis (northern lights) and noctilucent clouds.

Construction kicked off in September 2017, with the first stage of the radar system expected to become operational in 2021. Using separate stations in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, based on phased array technology, EISCAT_3D will be able to make three-dimensional measurements of the plasma densities and temperatures and the direction of motion of that plasma, among other things. This will provide scientists a more comprehensive view of the important physical processes. 

Technical challenges

EISCAT_3D has opened up new opportunities for physicists to explore a variety of research fields, but it comes with significant challenges in handling large-scale experimental data. The EISCAT_3D Competence Centre worked on developing a web portal for researchers to access and analyse the data generated by EISCAT_3D. 

How EOSC can help and add value

The EOSC-hub team has been building on the existing portal prototype and enriched it with EOSC services made available via the project. These services include EGI Check-In (for user single sign-on in the portal), EGI Clouds (for user data analysis from the portal), EGI Workload Manager (to provide the portal graphical environment and for managing complex set of jobs across multiple, federated clouds).

Societal challenges

ELIXIR is an organisation aiming to coordinate, integrate and sustain bioinformatics resources – such as databases, computational services, applications – across its member states and enables users in academia and industry to access what is vital for their research. 

The challenge is to unite Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing the increasing volume of data generated by publicly-funded research.

Technical challenges

ELIXIR wants to establish a federation of cloud sites, each providing storage and compute capacity for researchers. An established Competence Centre in EOSC-hub is supporting this activity. The CC team has been supporting ELIXIR to set up a compute platform that allows ELIXIR cloud and data providers to share cloud compute and storage capacity to replicate and share reference datasets with each other and with their users.

How EOSC can help and add value

The ELIXIR Compute Platform aims to enable researchers to combine technical components of the platform services into a seamless ecosystem, creating a science-ready interface to the key resources and technological capabilities that are available for life sciences.

The ELIXIR Compute Platform has been leveraging the EOSC Service Catalogue, especially in the area of aligning ELIXIR with the EOSC AAI.

Societal challenges

e-Science & e-Infrastructures are having profound impacts in Asia and have recently been moving towards open science supported by the EOSC-Hub project.

The project’s competence centre  –  DMCC+ – is working on pursuing humanity sustainable development in Asia by reducing the impacts of natural disasters. DMCC+ conducts case studies on tsunami, storm surge, flood, forest fire monitoring and dust transportation. The purpose is to assemble and make available simulation services to support climate and disaster mitigation research.

Technical challenges

DMCC+ aims to build up the capacity of disaster risk analysis by innovating simulation services. A deeper qualitative understanding and reproduction of the whole lifecycle of the target hazards contribute directly to more accurate risk analysis as well as a mitigation strategy.

How EOSC can help and add value

The work is being carried out via the EOSC-hub project. The project’s CC leverages the EOSC technical offer and works together with institutes from the Asia-Pacific region that focus on modelling and predicting disaster events. The final ambition is to be able to predict such events and design mitigation actions against them.

Societal challenges

Erasmus+ is the EU’s programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. Its budget of over €14 billion provides opportunities for Europeans to study, train, and gain experience abroad. 

Over 800.000 people participate in the Erasmus+ programme and over 50% of them have difficulties in finding and booking their new homes when studying abroad.

Technical challenges

On the one hand, online platforms for booking accomodation are not very well known to international students and on the other hand, students have a hard time searching and comparing through the internet. 

This is why Erasmus Play aims to bring into one site all accommodation available in all Europe. The concept of Erasmus Play is a meta-search engine similar to that of skyscanner, in which all student accommodations available in the market both short and mid-term will be displaced for comparison.

How EOSC can help and add value

Erasmus Play is supported by the EOSC DIH, the international and multi-partner cooperation that supports companies in easily accessing the digital technologies and services offered by the EOSC. 

The DIH helped us find partners in the academic world who supported us in porting our platform to a scalable computational platform.

The Erasmus Play platform aims to make the search and booking of accomodation easier, faster and safer by aggregating into its meta- searcher all available online accommodations on local trustworthy platforms. Through Erasmus Play, users can search and compare accommodations and when they are ready to book, they will be directed to the correspondent platform.

Societal challenges

Audiences are consuming more and more video, demanding increasingly higher quality, using a variety of devices including TVs, smartphones, tablets and computers. 

This is why video compression standards are needed, which allow compressed content to be distributed and then decoded by anyone – ready to be displayed on the device of choice.

The video coding team within BBC R&D focuses on multiple aspects of video technology, with the general goal of supporting the delivery of high-quality content to all BBC audiences. In addition to performing core fundamental research on video compression standards, the video coding team is researching new, advanced ways of performing compression based on machine learning, artificial intelligence and content analytics, while also applying our findings to enable new content experiences.

Technical challenges

The use of large-scale processing resources have the capabilities to transform how content providers obtain, produce and deliver content in challenging scenarios. A move away from expensive bespoke broadcast specific facilities and hardware to more commoditised scalable-cloud based resources will enable providers to more efficiently manage its content compared to what has traditionally been achievable.

How EOSC can help and add value

This use case is part of the EOSC Digital Innovation Hub, which supports its implementation and facilitates access to the EOSC services to the private sector. BBC is advised and supported in the use of scalable GPU compute platforms provided by European e-infrastructure providers. 

Societal challenges

Space Weather concerns the phenomena that arise from the changing physical conditions of the Sun and its effects at Earth. It may seem an abstract topic, but events such as geomagnetic storms have actual practical and economic consequences at Earth, especially as our economies are increasingly dependent on technology and satellite communications and services. The possible consequences and damages due to Space Weather can be mitigated with appropriate protocols that rely on accurate forecasts.

Technical challenges

The DRACO project aims to establish a planetary network of observatories capable of generating high-resolution cosmic ray Space Weather data with an unprecedented level of detail. An advanced cloud infrastructure is essential to manage the distribution and ensure the availability of this Space Weather data. 

How EOSC can help and add value

The DS-DRACO pilot, developed by Hidronav as an EOSC DIH business pilot, was the first step to develop such data infrastructure. The underlying DS-DRACO pilot infrastructure is now storing and providing access to high-resolution data from and for early adopters. 

The research-facing web portal is also online, as a hub of interoperable data for Space Weather modelers and forecasters. Future Space Weather products derived from raw data will be distributed through this platform.