Experts from SRCE participated in the EOSC Beyond project workshop held on November 27 and 28, 2024, in Athens. The event, organized by the Greek national infrastructure GRNET, focused on the next steps in developing the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The primary goal of the EOSC Beyond project is to advance the core services of EOSC, enabling the discovery, access, and reuse of resources within European scientific communities, organizations, and countries by integrating and connecting multiple EOSC resources.
The workshop addressed topics related to the technical and organizational aspects of implementing EOSC, including the development of national nodes and their integration into a broader European federation of nodes. To establish a functional EOSC federation, several new national and thematic EOSC federation nodes will be established in the coming period. More than 120 institutions expressed interest, and among the 29 selected for the next round is SRCE, which will participate in the first phase of preparations during December 2024. Following this, seven to ten institutions will be chosen to establish national nodes.
During the workshop, SRCE representatives participated in discussions related to the architecture and implementation of the EOSC federation nodes. SRCE has been actively involved for many years in developing systems for monitoring large distributed infrastructures like ARGO. The monitoring system, along with other components such as authentication and authorization systems, message exchange, service catalogs, support services, and tools for tracking the usage of services and resources, will be provided to EOSC federation nodes. These nodes can either deploy their own instances or utilize centralized services on an "as a service" basis. Discussions also covered protocols enabling standardized retrieval of information from central services. These components and standard interfaces will facilitate the successful establishment of EOSC federation nodes.
