Blue-Cloud: Piloting innovative services for Marine Research & the Blue Economy

Ocean sustainability research goes to the Blue Cloud

Marine research is playing a crucial role in wider efforts to preserve and support ocean sustainability. Innovative technology such as Blue Cloud offers us unique opportunities to understand, exploit and protect the ocean environment. The rise of the 'Blue Economy' concept needs to be accompanied by new technological applications for more effective marine research that will support efforts to minimise environmental risks and ecological catastrophes. The EU-funded Blue Cloud project proposes a practical approach to understand the potential that cloud-based open science offers to the research of the ocean. The project will develop a pilot cyber platform to collect and elaborate multidisciplinary data and provide analytical instruments as well as computing facilities.

Project Objective

Blue-Cloud addresses the IA ‘The Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative’ (BG-07-2019-2020) for the following topic: [A] 2019 - Blue Cloud services. The project implements a practical approach to address the potential of cloud based open science to achieve a set of services identifying also longer term challenges to build and demonstrate the Pilot Blue Cloud as a thematic EOSC cloud to support research to better understand & manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators. It seeks to capitalise on what exists already and to develop and deploy, through a pragmatic workplan, the pilot Blue Cloud as a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to: 1) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, 2) analytical tools, & 3) computing facilities essential for key blue science use cases. Outputs include: a Blue Cloud Framework, Data Discovery & Access Service (approx. 400 users) & VRE (approx. 1,000 users) from 25 countries, Blue Cloud Service Catalogue including 50+ services deployed through 5 compelling pilot demonstrators, A Blue Cloud 2030 implementation Policy Roadmap, Whitepaper on outcomes of the Food/Blue-Cloud Pilots to support the implementation of thematic EOSC, 4 focused Roadmap events & Workshops, 1 hackathon, 10 webinars, 1 Final results conference, engaged community with all stakeholder groups represented. Led by a consortium bringing together leading European marine data management infrastructures, EOSC horizontal e-infrastructures, and excellent marine researchers. Coordinated by a neutral ICT intensive SME with over 15 years’ experience, technically coordinated by a community leading marine & ocean data specialist, and supported by 17 experienced partners, from research, academia & industry, with strategic and practical involvement in design and delivery of blue community needs. An influential External Stakeholders Experts Board & an Expert Foresight Group support the project.