This could be very useful. I collaborate with many fellow researchers, mainly in the EU, on various projects increasingly involving massive data sets. A platform that would allow more efficient sharing and processing of data could certainly help in many such projects. We will see how this pans out
EU: We're splashing out €6.7bn on a giant scientific cloud
The EU is launching a €6.7bn (£5.3bn) mega “science cloud”, intended to better exploit the continent's academic research via big data. According to a press release from the European Commission, the EU is the "largest producer of scientific data in the world, but insufficient and fragmented infrastructure means this 'big data' …
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Tuesday 19th April 2016 14:45 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Certainly not novel, there are similar efforts in the US (also amongst scientists). It's just that we do not necessarily want to have our scientific data on US-owned clouds. Commercial clouds are geared to particular classes of (business) problems, which are very suitable for distributed computing (often embarrassingly parallel). Scientists often have different requirements for which commercial clouds are not that suitable (I have a couple), so scientists may come up with different technical solutions. These solutions may well be of use to industry. My data? Less so, I would say
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Tuesday 19th April 2016 13:03 GMT TRT
"It will then be expanded to the public sector and to industry."
Yeah, right. I'd like to see that happen. Patient data is one thing when it comes to security - anything else Big Pharma has, like potential drug structures, they want wrapped up and buried twice as deep at least.
In principle, not a bad idea. In practice... we'll have to see.
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Tuesday 19th April 2016 13:15 GMT Rich 11
Brexiters, rejoice!
Here's another thing you'll want us to pay up to join after we leave the EU. All that money you say we'll be saving which could be spent on the NHS or on education or on the deficit will instead be sliced up to pay through the nose for access to things like this which will give us a chance of keeping up with France and Germany. Although you could say it will instead go on a uk.gov project to establish a data grid of our own, and then some bright spark will suggest halfway through development that perhaps it should be able to talk to the EU system -- yeah, I can see how well that might turn out.
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Tuesday 19th April 2016 14:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Brexiters, rejoice!
Well presumably we pay in both scenarios. We stay in we pay, we go out we pay. Apparently, pace Goris and Bove, we would still get all the access to EU research funds we had before, which won't happen unless we still pay in, as before, to initiatives like 2020. But in the 'out' case we will be like Switzerland - an associated 'third country' - eligible to bid, but not on the steering committees that prioritise and divvy things up.
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Tuesday 19th April 2016 14:50 GMT TRT
Re: What could possibly go wrong?
You can see little bits of grant money spent on paying for commercial hosting services, or one big thump of money on something people might actually use. Of course data structures are so massively varied that there can be no standardisation of even meta-data storage and indexing, so I expect it will end up as just a simple file store. We had a collaborative system that scoured meta-data and stored it in a searchable index. You could search by, for example, instrument manufacturer, objective, fluorescence filter & magnification for microscopes, column type for chromatography, run-time, voltage & current for blots etc, reagents, antibodies (provided someone entered those data) - loads of stuff. Did it ever get used? No. Just got used as one big file store, and now it's gathering dust at the top of a server rack.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
