EOSC-Nordic 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. EOSC-Nordic brings together a strong consortium of 24 partners including e-Infrastructure providers, research performing organisations and expert networks, with national mandates with regards to the provision of research services and open science policy, and wide experience of engaging with the research community and mobilising national governments, funding agencies, international bodies and global initiatives and high-level experts on EOSC strategic matters.

The EOSC-hub project creates the integration and management system of the future European Open Science Cloud that delivers a catalogue of services, software and data from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and major research e-infrastructures. This integration and management system (the Hub) builds on mature processes, policies and tools from the leading European federated e-Infrastructures to cover the whole life-cycle of services, from planning to delivery. The Hub aggregates services from local, regional and national e-Infrastructures in Europe, Africa, Asia, Canada and South America. The Hub acts as a single contact point for researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research. Through the virtual access mechanism, more scientific communities and users have access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. The project also improves skills and knowledge among researchers and service operators by delivering specialised trainings and by establishing competence centres to co-create solutions with the users. In the area of engagement with the private sector, the project creates a Joint Digital Innovation Hub that stimulates an ecosystem of industry/SMEs, service providers and researchers to support business pilots, market take-up and commercial boost strategies. EOSC-hub builds on existing technology already at TRL 8 and addresses the need for interoperability by promoting the adoption of open standards and protocols. By mobilizing e-Infrastructures comprising more than 300 data centres worldwide and 18 pan-European infrastructures, this project is a ground-breaking milestone for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud.

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing is the permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Systems at the highest performance level (Tier-0) are deployed by Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, providing researchers with more than 17 billion core hours of compute time. HPC experts from 25 member states enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently PRACE is finalizing the transition to PRACE 2, the successor of the initial five year period. The objectives of PRACE-6IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include: assisting the development of PRACE 2; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing and extend advanced training which so far provided more than 36 400 person·training days; preparing strategies and best practices towards Exascale computing, work on forward-looking SW solutions; coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services; and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures. A high level Service Catalogue is provided. The proven project structure will be used to achieve each of the objectives in 7 dedicated work packages. The activities are designed to increase Europe's research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting take-up by industry and new communities and special offers to SMEs; assistance to PRACE 2 development; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies. This will be monitored through a set of KPIs.