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EOSC-Nordic at the NeIC All-Hands Meeting

EOSC-Nordic
25.02.2021

The NeIC All-Hands Meeting 2021 was held on Wednesday the 27th and Thursday the 28th of January. While we all sorely miss meeting face-to-face, this online version was an excellent alternative for the EOSC-Nordic project participants to meet other NeIC staff. It is a yearly opportunity to get together and network with each other across projects.

NeIC Coordinator Gudmund Høst,The EOSC-Nordic Project coordinator and Director of NeIC, Gudmund Høst, gave the opening and closing remarks. According to Gudmund “The NeIC All-hands meeting has been an important event for strengthening the NeIC community and culture, but also sharing ideas, since 2015. Providing this possibility, even if it meant that we meet online and don’t get to shake hands, is essential,” he says.

We also had the opportunity to ask Gudmund how he sees EOSC-Nordic in the context of the other NeIC projects and how our project brings value to the other NeIC projects.
“EOSC-Nordic is a very interesting opportunity for NeIC as it is the first EU project that we are involved in. The project is at its midway point, and it has been very valuable for increasing Nordic-Baltic collaboration and linking into European developments,” says Gudmund Høst.

The event, which ran from lunch to lunch over two days, had a program of exciting keynote speakers and both lightning talks and workshops, without forgetting social activities.

EOSC-Nordic Cloud demos workshop

Lorand Szentannai, a member of the EOSC-Nordic WP5, held a workshop on EOSC-Nordic cloud demos on the second day of the event.

He talked about how data-intensive computing and AI/ML workflows often require complex scientific applications to discover and consume cloud computing resources. Platform as a Service allows the researchers to efficiently manage scientific applications without building and maintaining the software and the underlying infrastructure. Several initiatives to share knowledge and set best practices have been started in the Nordics in the last years. The EOSC-Nordic coordination initiatives and collaboration brought to fruition, amongst others, the NIRD Toolkit, the STACKn, and the UCloud tools, making complex technologies accessible and almost instantly available to the end-users.

During the workshop, Lorand presented an overview of the significant features, a high-level overview of the adopted architecture and infrastructure solutions, and goals for the three tools mentioned above.

  • The NIRD Toolkit has a data-centric design and facilitates quick deployment – with just a few clicks – of scientific applications and data analytics without the need to move data.
  • STACKn is a cloud-native solution that supports a systematic way of working for using machine learning in production and enables collaboration and discoverability in ML projects.
  • UCloud provides a data-centric platform for interactive high-performance computing, built to support researchers’ needs for both computing and data management.

All-in-all, the event was a success. “I am happy with how the online AHM21 was put together, and the feedback shows that so were the majority of participants,” says Gudmund Høst. In the EOSC-Nordic, we certainly look forward to next year, where we hope to see each other for real again!