A consortium of IT providers and three of Europe research centres have partnered to launch Helix Nebula, the Science Cloud, that will support the IT requirements of European scientists.
The consortium of IT providers include Atos, Capgemini, CloudSigma, Interoute, Logica, Orange Business Services, SAP, SixSq, Telefonica, Terradue, Thales, The Server Labs and T-Systems, along with the Cloud Security Alliance, the OpenNebula Project and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI.eu).
The three European research centres include European Space Agency (ESA), European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and CERN, the European organization for nuclear research.
During the pilot phase, Helix Nebula will be deployed and tested based on three flagship projects proposed by CERN, EMBL and ESA to accelerate the search for Higgs particle.
CERN will have access to computing power to process data from the ATLAS experiment at its Large Hadron Collider accelerator.
EMBL is setting up a new service to simplify the analysis of large genomes, allowing a deeper insight into evolution and biodiversity across a range of organisms.
ESA in partnership with the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is collaborating with the National Research Council (CNR)in Italy, to create an Earth observation platform focusing on earthquake and volcano research.
ESA director Earth observation programmes Volker Liebig said Helix Nebula, the Science Cloud is a partnership with the potential to support an exploitation of ESA satellite data, as well as to bring other communities on board to better understand the geophysical phenomena of planet Earth.
