GÉANT Project Above-the-Net Services Incubator (GN5-2 WP4 T4)

GÉANT Project Above-the-Net Services incubator
Call for proposals for innovative research services development.

The Incubator is looking for practical proposals to test key aspects relevant for the three service concept investment proposals being being developed in the GN5-2 WP4 Above-the-Net work package:

• Digital Research Environment (DRE)
• Object Storage Infrastructure
• Data Movement Infrastructure

The GN5-2 project has available manpower to develop service proof-of-concepts with the eventual aim of extending the GÉANT community’s portfolio of above-the-net services.

The call will open on 1 May 2025 and close for proposals on 30 June 2025. This gives interested parties eight weeks to complete and submit their proposal. ACT NOW! The incubator will award between two and four proposals based on potential impact, innovation, and overall value to the three service concept developments.

BE CREATIVE! Formulate a hypothesis you wish to test that supports one or more of the following service concept developments:

1. Digital Research Environment (DRE) - Many of the NRENs in the GÉANT community are needing to respond to the rapidly changing digital needs of their national open science community. This need is driven by local research governing bodies, national funders, and the EC in their support for the EOSC and its proposed node structures. SURF has a digital services distribution platform capable of identifying a local researcher using community AAI protocols, assigning a research project to the researcher, and then presenting the researcher with a catalogue of services that the project has been assigned. The open scientist can select and consume services against a pre-defined budget or wallet. This highly functional platform is multi-tenant by nature and can thus be ‘white-labelled’ and used by GÉANT and other NRENs within the community. The GN5-2 project is working on a service concept proposal to transition the SURF Research Cloud into a joint software development effort by the GEANT community, potentially complemented with a collective SaaS offering. An NREN tenancy of the DRE platform would significantly enhance the NREN’s ability to support their local research community in with easy access to national, institutional and commercial mid-tier compute through a consistent interface, well integrated with other NREN assets. An NREN tenancy would also likely be a useful technical building block for a national or thematic node of the currently being developed EOSC Federation. There are already a few NRENs participating in related proof-of-concepts and hoping to demonstrate that a GÉANT community DRE based on the SURF Research Cloud is a ‘no-brainer’ at this point.

2. Object Storage Infrastructure - European data sovereignty is highly topical. As the global geopolitical situation shifts towards regional autonomy, the protection of regional research data becomes more dependent on the development of localised, bespoke, secure storage solutions. At the same time, the need for in-situ, FAIR sharing of research data within Europe is an imperative. The European Commission is focused on the development of the regional data economy and the use of data dependent Artificial Intelligence at scale within its Public Sector. This requires standardisation in the approach towards data storage, sharing, governance, and policy.
   Within the NREN community there are numerous platforms in support of siloed sync and share, object, and general file storage. These require standardisation in terms of approach, and interoperability between these platforms. There is an opportunity for NRENs to collaborate on a collectively procured, built, and managed pan-European technology platform that offers simple S3 object storage interfaces, deployed in a distributed way that supports digital sovereignty requirements. This targets research data repositories with the promise of providing better and cheaper low-level storage by leveraging pan-European economies of scale and economies of scope. There will be significant organisational and technical challenges that will need to be addressed to make this concept a reality, e.g. trans-national long-distance replication between storage pods.

3. Data Movement Infrastructure - Although the concept of data visitation is increasing in popularity, we know that the exploitation of our network infrastructures for the migration of massive research data workloads is still a priority. Most European HPC centres still require that the data workload visits the compute platform and not vice versa. While there are many data tranfser solutions available, none is widely deployed in an optimised fashion to allow all researchers to fully leverage the available network capability, and most suffer from sub-optimal user experiences. At the end of the day, if a researcher wants to move more than a couple of terabytes, they require hand holding by specialists. In a time where all research has gone digital with ever increasing amounts of research data this needs to change. Platforms such as Globus, which fulfil the bespoke requirements of the global researcher, are not necessarily compliant with the European data processing regulations from a regional sovereignty perspective, particularly in the current political environment.
   Again, the opportunity exists for the NREN community in Europe to collaborate on the development/evolution of such a platform.

With the GÉANT community developing investment proposals for these shared, open-source services, the opportunities for innovation are ENDLESS!

Eligibility and rules of participation
The call will be limited to GN5-2 project partners as the cost of concept development will be covered by project person months available specifically for this purpose. 38 PM’s will be distributed across the two to four successful proposals, so please be clear on your budget (required manpower) and timeline (projects need to be complete by Q1 2027).

It is possible to form a collaboration of partners within the GN5-2 project in order to harness all the skills necessary to develop and demonstrate your concept. It is anticipated that the development of your idea will occur in 4-month sprints. If you need additional information on either of the service types or wish to discuss your proposed hypothesis and approach, please reach out to us on incubator@geant.org, and we will connect you with the relevant team.

Each of the partners in any awarded proposal will simply need to sign a MoU committing that time charged against PMs reallocated to the partner will be focused on PoC development. Each PoC will be executed in close coordination with the GN5-2 WP4 service concept development team to ensure highest relevance of PoC results for the service concept developments.

The ultimate objective behind the incubator is to develop the capability to reduce risk before committing resources to innovative ideas on the level of a project task or GÉANT service.

In order to submit a proposal:

• Download the Application Form template and use it to prepare your proposal
• Click on the "Submit new abstract" button below and fill in all the essential details
• Attach the PDF of the filled-out application form
• Click on the "Submit" button to submit your proposal

All call materials are available here: https://events.geant.org/event/1470/overview

Only GN5-2 Project Partners can participate in the call.