Demonstrators

EOSC-CONNECT tests its federating capabilities for costly resources through two demonstrators, run alongside four complementary use cases across WP4 and WP5. Demonstrators focus on proving the underlying federated technology; use cases show full end-to-end research scenarios built on top of it.

Cross-border project collaboration with a shared pool of costly resources

Researchers from different countries jointly access a shared pool of costly resources — such as HPC, compute and storage — that they collectively own.

Federating capabilities demonstrated

  • Federated AAI, so users log in once and access resources at different nodes with the same procedures.
  • A joint allocation process ensuring fairness and transparency through harmonised usage policies, peer review and reporting requirements.
  • Interoperable service provisioning for consistent procedures across sites, plus integrated helpdesk services for a unified user experience regardless of location.
  • Federated monitoring, usage accounting and reporting, consolidating data across nodes so the Federation can assess scientific impact and resource use.

Countries involved: Austria, France, Italy, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Spain.

Distributed computing resources

Data resides across multiple EOSC Nodes, EuroHPC sites and AI Factories. Users need remote access, efficient data transfer and on-site caching to make full use of these resources.

Federating capabilities demonstrated

  • Technical interoperability between existing storage federations (e.g. WLCG/Rucio) and data services at AI Factories (e.g. LUMI Dataset-as-a-Service).
  • Optimised handling of remotely-hosted input and output datasets in large, data-intensive AI workflows.
  • Access to and processing of CERN datasets within AI Factories for realistic data-intensive workflows (via Rucio, FTS, XRootD).
  • Discoverability of CERN datasets (LHC and non-LHC experiments) through National Node-connected AI Factories — the LUMI AI Factory (CSC) and the Italian AI Factory IT4LIA (ICSC).

Countries involved: Finland, Italy.

Complementary use cases

Four use cases, organised under the project's WP4–WP5, test the EOSC Federation's data-interoperability and discovery capabilities alongside the two demonstrators:

UC#1 
User-driven reconfiguration of data pipelines in biomedical analysis

A federated EFSS lets investigators run distributed compute workflows across borders without ad-hoc accounts or manual data transfers.

UC#2 
Cross-Node Data Sharing Repository Framework

A domain repository (EBRAINS) becomes discoverable across EOSC Nodes through a standardised interface, so researchers can find, access and reuse its datasets Federation-wide.

UC#3 
From satellite imagery to urban climate policy via federated discovery and analysis

Federated semantic discovery (ADEF) and Semantic Artefact Catalogues help researchers locate and correctly interpret heterogeneous, multilingual datasets across nodes.

UC#4 
Cross-Node AI-driven discovery of research data

An AI-driven discovery layer (Open Knowledge Maps) lets researchers build cross-country, cross-disciplinary datasets in a single session instead of weeks.

Results and lessons learned from the demonstrators and use cases will be published on this website as they become available, and will feed directly into the evolution of the EOSC Federation's federating capabilities.

Interested in the other expected outcomes of the project? Learn more:

EOSC-Connect Expected Outcomes