CSC is part of eleven new EU projects in 2019

CSC is part of 11 projects funded by the European Union which have started or will start in 2019. These projects receive funding from the EU's Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020 or from the European Regional Development Fund.

Many of these new projects are connected with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) which is a programme of the EU to provide a virtual environment with open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines by federating existing scientific data infrastructures.

The EOSCsecretariat.eu project is an organisational structure with all the necessary competences, resources and vision to support the implementation of the EOSC according to the requirements set in the EOSC Implementation Roadmap.

EOSCsecretariat.eu will provide the cornerstone of support to this framework. CSC leads a central work package in the project that will carry out a number of studies on specific issues to help progress and transform the EOSC into its next operational phase, such as innovative business models, rules of participation for service providers and users, and legal and organisational framework for sustainable governance.

The EOSC-Life project intends to implement the life-science part of the EOSC under coordination of ELIXIR, European infrastructure for life science information. EOSC-Life brings together 13 biological and medical research infrastructures to create an open collaborative space for digital biology. The goal of the EOSC-Life project is to make sure that life-scientists can find, access and integrate life-science data for analysis and reuse in academic and industrial research. EOSC-Life will transform European life-science by providing an open, continent-scale, collaborative and interdisciplinary environment for data science.

The EOSC-Nordic project aims to facilitate the coordination of EOSC relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploit synergies to achieve greater harmonisation at policy and service provisioning across these countries, in compliance with EOSC agreed standards and practices. By doing so, the project seeks to establish the Nordic and Baltic countries as frontrunners in the take-up of the EOSC concept, principles and approach.

The FAIRsFAIR project, as a part of the EOSC framework, aims to supply practical solutions for the use of the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) throughout the research data life cycle. The emphasis is on fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of good practices in making data FAIR. The aim is to support all scientific communities for creating, further developing and implementing a common scheme to ensure data development, wide uptake of and compliance with FAIR data principles and practices by data producers as well as national and European research data providers and repositories contributing to the EOSC.

The CINECA consortium includes access to more than 1,4 million samples maintained by the biobank network in Europe, Africa and Canada. The CINECA project will share competence and provide tools for metadata standardisation, federated data discovery and access to computation without need for moving the data across national borders. It will also address complex ethical, legal and societal issues and data security requirements that span across the three continents leveraging environment for scientific impact.

CSC is part in eleven new EU projects in 2019 Image: Adobe Stock
 

High-performance computing and plasma physics codes for exascale

PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), is a unique horizontal research infrastructure, offering world class computing and data management resources and services to researchers and industry throughout Europe. The 6th PRACE implementation phase project, PRACE-6IP, will start in spring 2019, with a total of 107 person months for CSC, making it the biggest project measured by person months at CSC starting in 2019.  

There is a new element in PRACE-6IP, namely a new work package WP8: "Forward looking software solutions". In this work package, CSC is leading a project named Modernisation of Plasma Physics Simulation Codes for Heterogenous Exascale Architectures. Goal of this work package is to refactor simulation codes that have very significant scientific potential. Seven projects were chosen in a competitive process employing scientific and technical peer review.

– The project led by CSC, in collaboration with MPCDF (Garching, Germany) and University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), was ranked as best amongst all the proposals. CSC will work together with Finnish partners Aalto University on fusion energy simulation code Elmfire and University of Helsinki on space physics code Vlasiator. Both codes are of high leading international quality and developed in Finland. This effort will help keeping these Finnish spearheads in computational science internationally competitive, says Janne Ignatius, Program Director at CSC.
 

Rare diseases and chemical biology

The EJP-RD project (European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases) brings over 130 institutions from 35 countries to create a comprehensive, sustainable ecosystem allowing a virtuous circle between research, care and medical innovation. The focus of CSC effort is reaching out to the national rare diseases research requirements and communicating these needs and national solutions in the context of EJP.

EU-OPENSCREEN (EU-OS), the European Research Infrastructure of Open Screening Platforms for Chemical Biology, builds a distributed organization of national screening and chemistry facilities, a common database, and a central headquarter that manages the joint compound collection and coordinates project flow and training. It provides world-class services to academia and industry in the fields of small molecule screening and medicinal chemistry. The newly funded EU-OPENCREEN-DRIVE project will enhance the sustainability and operational excellence of EU-OPENCREEN and its services.

It will thereby underpin its mission to advance the understanding of human health, and the interconnection between a healthy environment and food supply by using small chemical molecules as a basis for the development of new innovative research tools. EU-OPENSCREEN receives also funding from Academy of Finland.

In addition, the Horizon2020 project Arrowhead Tools will start in spring 2019. The Arrowhead Tools project aims for digitalisation and automation solutions for the European industry. The project will provide engineering processes, integration platform, tools and tool chains for the cost-efficient development of digitalisation, connectivity and automation system solutions in various fields of application. With more than 80 partners from all over Europe, Arrowhead Tools is Europe's largest automation and digitalisation engineering project. CSC will develop its open source finite element code Elmer to be better suited for highly automated industrial workflows. Also CSC will employ cloud environments to provide containerized solutions that can be started on demand. The work will be carried out in close collaboration with the other Finnish partners: VTT, ABB and Wapice.
 

Smart industrial solutions and wellbeing, health care and sports innovation platforms

Two projects, TÄRY and HYTELI, receive money from the European Regional Development Fund.

The TÄRY (Collaboration for smart industrial solutions) project's aim is to strengthen the competitiveness of the target group companies by developing Kajaani University of Applied Sciences' (KAMK) expertise and education in industrial operation and maintenance management. The project provides such education to the target group companies directly, and after the project completion, such education continues as a regular education of KAMK for degree students as well as continuing education students. The project is accomplished in a solid collaboration with industry.

The HYTELI (Wellbeing, health care and sports innovation platforms) project is aiming to develop technologically advanced innovation platforms and environments in order to increase the international level of technology expertise and boost the competitiveness in Kainuu, area located in north-eastern Finland.

– For CSC to stay relevant we need to innovate and co-create together with our customers and peers, and the European projects are a major vehicle for this activity, says Per Öster, Director at CSC.

– The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) takes a lot of our attention with a focus on engaging researchers in the development to ensure that the implementation of the great vision actually meet the researchers' demand and deliver a true benefit for them, Öster continues.

In total, CSC is currently part of 25 active EU funded projects and 3 more projects will start in 2019. These 25 projects have received nearly 200 million euros funding from the European Commission of which over 9 million directly to CSC. Currently CSC is coordinating 3 EU projects and is leading 9 work packages.

See all CSC's collaboration projects at www.csc.fi/collaboration