Cloud Computing - VENUS-C open call: deadline: Monday 11 April 2011
Open Call Launch: Tuesday 11 January 2011 http://www.venus-c.eu/Pages/OpenCall.aspx VENUS-C The aim of the VENUS-C Open Call is to expand the user community, gather additional requirements for the VENUS- platform, test andvalidate it by funding between 10 and 20 new pilot prototypes with applications suited to the Cloud. The Call is open to European public and private research organisations involved in Research and Technology Development (RTD) from the 27 Member States and the 13 Associated Countries (Annex 1). The Open Call targets a spectrum of application areas (Annex 2), spanning the Arts & Humanities, Engineering, Health & Life Sciences, Economics and Financial Services, Natural Sciences, as well as maths and science with application characteristics such as dynamic scaling requirements, peak demands and ubiquitous availability. Specifically VENUS-C aims to bring on board research groups that have operational and scientifically productive application software already running on platforms, whether commodity clusters, HPC clusters, grids or clouds. VENUS-C will work closely with the new pilots to determine what features and capabilities of Cloud computing environments are needed to support the type of computing exemplified by the selected pilots, and to validate the VENUS-C infrastructure in this aim.To this end, the pilots will have collective access to 6.000.000 CPU hours per year of Windows Azure and 40 TBytes of storage plus additional CPU hours and TBytes available from other VENUS-C providers. Seed funds will be provided to catalyse take-off.VENUS-C will also provide technical support to address specific the specific needs of the pilots and enable users through innovative web-based and physical training. The pilot prototypes will have access to the VENUS-C infrastructure from July 2011 until May 2012 with a one-year extension to the Azure and other platforms until May 2013. Visibility will be ensured through focused VENUSC dissemination activities, including the support of media partnerships. Together with infrastructure access and technical support, successful candidates will receive a grant, the amount of which will be the equal share of the ?400,000 available to support activities.
Open Call End Date: Monday 11 April 2011
Open Call Evaluation Notification: Monday 2 May 2011
(Virtual Multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud Infrastructures,www.venus-c.eu)draws its strength from a joint co-operation bringing together industry and scientific users. The aim is to develop an industry-quality Cloud computing service which can be shared by European research institutions. Microsoft contributes substantial Windows Azure data and compute capability and teams of researchers. Additional commercial and open source solutions span the Engineering data centre and two European High Performance Computing centres: The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Sweden) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC, Spain).