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Bridging cloud computing innovation & Open Science

Updates & major achievements

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The Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) is a €5.3 million 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. HNSciCloud is sponsored by 10 of Europe’s leading public research organisations and co-funded by the European Commission.

Facts about HNSciCloudEstimated Total Value: Value excluding VAT: 5 383 332.00 EURLead Procurer: CERNStart Date: January 2016 End Date: End of 2018November 2016: Design Phase tender awardFebruary 2017: Assessment of the Design Phase deliverablesApril 2017: Prototype Phase award ceremony

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THE HNSciCloud PCP

The HNSciCloud PCP tender covers the procurement of R&D services for the design, prototype development and pilot use of innovative cloud services. The innovative cloud services provided through the platform is being designed and implemented to address a set of challenges that require a combination of services at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) level: » Compute and Storage - support a range of virtual machines and container

configurations working with datasets up to the petabyte range; » Network Connectivity and Federated Identity Management - provide high-end network

capacity for the whole platform with common identity and access management; » Service Payment Models - explore a range of purchasing options to determine the

most appropriate ones for the scientific application workloads that will be deployed.

Who can benefit from HNSciCloud?

The procured cloud services will be integrated with the procurers’ in-house resources and publicly funded e-Infrastructures to provide a hybrid platform that will serve scientists and engineers working in high-energy physics, astronomy, the life sciences including biomedical research, and the photon/neutron science in which the ten procurers operate. These procurers will be the first customers of the platform, and will integrate their in-house resources with the procured cloud services.

High Energy Physics Astronomy Life Sciences Photon/Neutron Sciences Long Tail of Science

PETRA III

3DIX

OCEAN

OSIRIS

Long tail of Science

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The Tender Phase

In March 2016, HNSciCloud organised the Open Market Consultation (OMC) event to analyse and discuss with over 70 cloud providers representatives the HNSciCloud requirements and use cases. The OMC outputs set the basis for the preparation of the tender material. The tender was launched in July 2016 and closed in September 2016. A total of 30 multinational companies, SMEs and public research organisations from 13 countries submitted bids during the summer.In November 2016, 4 Consortia havebeen awarded contracts at the tenderaward ceremony at CNRS, in Lyon, France.

» The tender has generated a high-level of interest in the cloud services market » A significant number of FP7 and H2020 projects were cited in the bids as

sources of innovation contributing to the proposed solutions » 4 consortia awarded contracts for the Design Phase

Awarded Consortia » Contractor 1: T-Systems, Huawei, Cyfronet, Divia » Contractor 2: IBM » Contractor 3: RHEA Group, T-Systems, Exoscale, SixSq » Contractor 4: Indra, HPE, Advania, SixSq

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The HNSciCloud Pre-Commercial Procurement tender in numbers

€5.3 million Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender to establish a European hybrid cloud platform€

Tender launched on 21 July 2016

Phase 0: January 2016 - October 2016: Solution Exploration

Phase 1: November 2016 - February 2017: Solution Design

�

Tender material downloaded more than 200 times�

1 Award Ceremony in Lyon, France 2 november 2016 http://snurl.eu/1BX7Lr�

Approximately 500,000€ in total granted for the Design Phase�

Over 50 press clippings promoting the tender�

More than 90 written questions received�

4 winning innovative public-private consortia�

11 winning economic operators�

Outputs: 4 Designs

30 bidders from 13 countries including multinational companies, SMEs and public research organisations

�

61 Days to bid�

1 tender Information Session, 7 September 2016 http://snurl.eu/1BF1w4�

Tender closed on 19 September 2016�

More than 300 views of the animated video describing the tender http://snurl.eu/1BLGvW

�

Phase 2: March 2017 - October 2017: Solution Prototyping

Outputs: 3 Prototypes�

Phase 3: November 2017 - December 2018: Pilot

Outputs: 2 Pilots�

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Janu

ary

2016

- S

epte

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16

HNSciCloud Tender Award Ceremony

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The Design Phase

The Design Phase of HNSciCloud was kicked off during the tender award ceremony of the 2nd November, in Lyon, France, with the 15% of the tender budget allocated to this phase. In February 2017, the 4 consortia delivered their design proposals (including architecture and technical design of components together with unit cost). The eligible contractors submitted their prototype phase bids in early March and the HNSciCloud evaluation committee assessed the bids and selected the 3 most promising. The 3 winning Consortia moving to the HNSciCloud Prototype Phase were announced on the 3rd April 2017 during the awards ceremony held at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

» Regular meetings organized to facilitate the information flow between contractors and use case representatives and experts

» 4 design proposals presented and 3 prototype bids submitted » Around 100 relevant stakeholders at the Prototype Phase award ceremony » 3 consortia awarded contracts for the Prototype Phase

Consortia moving from the Design to the Prototype Phase » Contractor 1: T-Systems, Huawei, Cyfronet, Divia » Contractor 2: IBM » Contractor 3: RHEA Group, T-Systems, Exoscale, SixSq

Oct

ober

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Mar

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017

Consortia moving from the Design to the Prototype Phase

Lessons learnt » Prepare detailed information about

each use-case » Start the dialogue between the

buyers group and the contractors early and continue during the whole phase

» Set intermediate milestones for each contractor to present their progress

» Revise the buyers group effort planning when the Request for Tender is published

» Establish a dedicated technical team to collect input from all procurers, interact with the contractors and perform tests

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Apr

il 20

17 -

End

of 2

017 The Prototype Phase

In the Prototype development Phase, which kicked-off in April 2017, the contractors built prototypes and made them accessible to experts from the buyers group for testing. In order to ensure a successful outcome of this phase, the buyers group monitored closely the contractors’ activities, performed extensive testing of the prototype solutions and organized meetings and progress review events to facilitate the information flow between contractors, researchers and IT experts.The prototype phase has produced results that address the major PCP challenges of Compute and Storage by supporting a range of virtual machines and container configurations workingwith datasets; Network Connectivity with high-end network capacity via GÉANT, and Federated Identity Management using the SAML2 protocol supporting eduGAIN and ELIXIR.

Consortia moving from the Prototype Phase to the Pilot Phase » Contractor 1: T-Systems, Huawei,

Cyfronet, Divia » Contractor 3: RHEA Group,

T-Systems, Exoscale, SixSq

Recommendations for the pilot phase » Precise definitions of key technical

requirements including examples/user stories should be provided at the earlier stages of the project.

» Feature freeze periods must be enforced more strictly, both in tender documentation and during the project execution.

» A ticketing system and shared collaboration tool between the buyers group and each contractor should be put in place at the very beginning of the phase.

» A single point of access to all procurers’ documentation is needed.

» Foreseen IaaS capacity and cloud resource utilization should be planned more carefully. Tender documentation should describe a solution in case not all of the resource were utilized due to delays from contractors’ side.

» The involvement of the same partners, subcontractors or technologies in multiple bids should be avoided to ensure the solutions developed within the PCP are sufficiently distinct.

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The Prototype Phase

During the Prototype development Phase, kicked-off in April 2017, 3 prototype platforms will be developed. In this phase, the contractors will build prototypes including all components and make them accessible to experts from the buyers group for testing.

Prototypes will be ready by the end of the year.

“Our prototype solution will benefit from the long-term experience with GÉANT, the European academic network: we believe that this will put us in a strong position to grant access to large amounts of data and be able to transfer large amounts of data across Europe. We also have good experience working in the science sector, and we are very anxious to learn how this will adapt to a large scale project like this and how we can show that it really performs up to the level that is required.”Jurry de la Mar, Account Director in the Public Sector for T-Systems, representative of Contractor 1

“Our objective is to build a hybrid solution based on existing IBM services products and technologies and develop new capabilities built on top of the IBM technologies to best fit the special requirements of Helix Nebula.”Ezra Silvera, Researcher and Cloud Architect for IBM, representative of Contractor 2

“The solution that we are going to prototype is a true multi cloud and hybrid cloud solution, composed by Exoscale and Open Telekom from T-Systems and managed by Nuvla, a service from SixSq. The data management layers will be provided by Cyfronet, while the open data solution and the entire project will be managed by RHEA.”Marc-Elian Bégin, CEO and co-founder of SixSq, representative of Contractor 3

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The Pilot Phase

During the Pilot phase, which started in February 2018, contractors deploy expanded prototypes that are made available firstly to IT experts who perform scalability tests and then to the end-users so they can deploy their applications. The assessment of each pilot will be used to provide feedback to the contractors.

Phase objectives » Assess each pilot providing feedback to contractors » Open the pilot platforms to end users to deploy their applications

Access to cloud service capacity

Functional Testing

ScalabilityTesting

End User Access

2 Pilots3 Prototypes

10Gbps 40Gbps

10k/1PB

5k/500TB

3.5k/350TB

2k/200TB

100/10TB

Core

s/St

orag

e

JUN17 DEC17 FEB18 DEC18

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How to learn about HNSciCloud service offer?

Attend one of the upcoming HNSciCloud procurer hosted events. Users and procurers are welcome to join. The HNSciCloud solutions will be demonstrated and training sessions organised.

» 17-18 April, ESRF, Grenoble, France » 4-7 June, EMBL, Berlin, Germany, co-located with the ELIXIR All hands meeting » 13-14 June CERN, Geneva, Switzerland » 9-13 July: CHEP 2018 conference, Sofia, Bulgaria » 27-31 August, KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany, co-located with the GridKa School 2018 » 11 September, SURFsara, Amsterdam, The Netherlands » 24 October, DESY, Hamburg, Germany » 28-30 November, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland » 4-6 December, ICT 2018 event, Wien, Austria

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Early Adopter Group

Interested in procuring the cloud services developed by HNSciCloud? Join now to the Early Adopter GroupOver past months, the HNSciCloud consortium has promoted the common hybrid science cloud platform currently under development to groups of research communities, organisations and ESFRI research infrastructures across Europe resulting in a number of requests from organisations wishing to join the procurement group. HNSciCloud is now pleased to launch the Early adopter group with the purpose to expand the set of procurers

Who can join the Early Adopter Group?

The Early Adopter group will include research organisations wishing to become procurers for the resulting HNSciCloud services and wanting to take advantage of all the benefits related to joint procurement.

The Early Adopter Group rules of engagement are available at www.hnscicloud.eu

Apply now!

Please visit http://bit.ly/adopter_group to discover all the conditions and the key steps for the procurement implementation and send your expression of interest to HNSciCloud-PO@cern.ch.

The HNSciCloudEarly Adopter Group

Benefits » Opportunity to evaluate the use

of commercially supported cloud services selected and tested by the HNSciCloud procurers

» Make use of the legal framework and access conditions established by HNSciCloud

» Be able to fund the use of the cloud services via their regional, national or EC projects

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What they say about us

e-IRG highlights Helix Nebula as a Cloud Service Provider for ESFRI communities In March 2017 e-IRG released its support document “Guide to e-Infrastructure Requirements for European Research Infrastructures”.Helix Nebula is listed among the cloud service providers for the ESFRI research community, with a dedicated section in the document which highlights the project’s features and objectives. To read the latest e-IRG Guide to e-Infrastructure Requirements for European Research Infrastructures, visit https://goo.gl/SCDXeW

The HNSciCloud tender material speeds up the tender material preparation of the SELECT for Cities PCP projectIn February 2017, the SELECT for Cities initiative launched its call for tender for the development of an Internet-of-Everything (IoE) platform. HNSciCloud tender material has been used for the preparation of the tender documentation, as source of good practices. In particular, the SELECT consortium took inspiration from the general structure of the documentation and used the same language and presentation model of the HNSciCloud tender material. To read the interview with Hugo Tamagnini Gonçalves, the SELECT for Cities Coordinator, visit https://goo.gl/liKaRR

HNSciCloud is contributing to the establishment of the European Open Science CloudOn the 3rd of February 2017 renowned leading experts met the Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas to discuss the next steps of the European Open Science Cloud. Bob Jones, CERN & HNSciCloud coordinator, brought to the table his experience and the major findings coming out from the HNSciCloud Pre-Commercial Procurement and from the Helix Nebula Initiative. https://goo.gl/FUTzF4

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Helix Nebula - The Science Cloud with Grant Agreement 687614 is a Pre-Commercial Procurement Action

funded by H2020 Framework Programme.

Stay Tuned

K www.hnscicloud.eu

A info@hnscicloud.eu

t @HelixNebulaSC

Who’s behind HNSciCloud?