The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has selected Chinese networking and telecommunications company Huawei and German IT services and consulting company T-Systems to design, prototype and complete pilot phase of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud.
The two technology partners will develop the cloud solution based on the T-Systems Open TeleKom Cloud, a public cloud service launched in March this year. This cloud system currently supports the workload of several companies, SMEs and public sector organisations.
The plan is for this to be a European hybrid cloud platform that is designed to support high performance, data-intensive scientific use-cases sponsored by Europe’s 10 leading public research organisations.
The €5.3m joint pre-commercial procurement (PCP) tender will be led by CERN and will be co-funded by the European Commission. A total of 28 multinational corporations, SMEs and public research organisations from 12 countries have tendered bids this summer.
The first phase of the project will include four teams that will compete to provide designs for the cloud and will go through to the next phase, which is prototyping.
At present, one of the world’s largest OpenStack private clouds is being operated by CERN. This cloud service is supported by 7000 servers and 190,000 cores.
According to CERN, the demand for transparently activated dynamic capacity on hybrid cloud is growing due to increased use of cloud services by research organisations.
With the new cloud system, CERN expects that the open source architecture can help in managing and migrating data and resources between private and public clouds.
CERN and T-Systems have completed the evaluation of Open Telekom Cloud’s capabilities in a three month pilot testing.
T-Systems Digital Division Open Telekom Cloud vice president Andreas Falkner said: “Following the extensive tests, it has become apparent, that Open Telekom Cloud can support the high-performance and data-intensive workloads required.”
The research organisations which will be using the cloud services, apart from CERN include Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, (CNRS) in France.
Other research centers include Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) in Germany, SURFsara in Netherlands, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany, Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE) in Spain and European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France.
