The EGI Foundation (also known as Stichting EGI and abbreviated as EGI.eu) is a not-for-profit foundation established under the Dutch law to coordinate the EGI Federation (abbreviated as EGI), an international collaboration that federates the digital capabilities, resources and expertise of national and international research communities in Europe and worldwide. The main goal is to empower researchers from all disciplines to collaborate and to carry out data- and compute-intensive science and innovation.
The EGI Federation is one of the largest distributed computing infrastructures for data-intensive research collaborations. It federates hundreds of major research data centres in Europe and worldwide, making advanced computing services, capacity and research data accessible in a federated manner to members of international scientific collaborations. The EGI Federation provides access to more than 1.2 Exabyte of research data and 1.2 Million CPU Cores for data processing and analysis needs to thousands of researchers. EGI expanded the federation of its facilities with other non-European digital infrastructures in North America, South America, Africa-Arabia and the Asia-Pacific region, as such EGI fully realises the “Open to the World” vision. In order to interoperate at international level, EGI and its partners operate in the context of a lightweight collaboration framework defining rules of participations via a corpus of policies and technical guidelines.
The EGI Foundation has participants and associated participants drawn from representatives of national e-infrastructure consortium (NGIs), EIROs, ERICs, and other legal entities. These entities provide the physical resources and shared services that enable EGI to deliver, improve and innovate services for communities.
The EGI Foundation coordinates areas such as overseeing infrastructure operations, user community support, contact with technology providers, strategy and policy development, flagship events and dissemination of news and achievements. As part of its mandate, the EGI Foundation actively represents the EGI federation at European level with policy makers and funding agencies, it provides expert advice to shape policies and funding programs and also support the implementation of the policy priorities. In the policy area of open science, EGI is a key stakeholder represented in and contributing to the EC Open Science Policy Platform. The EGI Foundation holds certifications in both ISO/IEC 9000 “Quality Management” and ISO/IEC 20000 “IT Service Management”.
The EGI Foundation has experience in defining, setting-up and operating multi-level governance frameworks suitable for coordinating and enabling service and resource provisioning across multiple stakeholders from different countries and organisations. In addition, has experience in legal, procurement and governance functions in EU research infrastructures including the setting up and the establishment of a European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC).
Over the last decade, EGI has built a federation of long-term distributed compute and storage infrastructures that has delivered unprecedented data analysis capabilities to more than 82,000 researchers from many disciplines. Examples of the supported research include the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN; finding new tools to diagnose and monitor diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and the development of complex simulations to model climate change.
Role of institution in the project
“T4.2 – Core services”
Contribution = Offer Help-desk, service registry (GOCDB), security coordination and incident response management.
“T6.1 – Technical design and implementation of a federated learning and data analysis infrastructure”
Contribution = Federated cloud-based data management RUCIO service instance.
“T6.5 – Access to HPC/Cloud resources across Europe”
Contribution = Federated cloud resource provisioning coordination, Cloud resource on-boarding and cloud federation coordination (cloud resources are external, in-kind from the EGI federation).
