Galactic research in cloud services awarded Cloud Funding by OCRE
Researchers from IEEC at ICCUB will use the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) to investigate the Milky Way star formation and its interaction with its satellite galaxies.
The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) is one of the 15 institutions that have been successful in receiving funding from the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE), an European Union (EU) cloud project.
Researchers from the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC — Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) of the GAIA UB research group at ICCUB will use the EDR3 of the European Space Agency mission Gaia released last December 2020 to further study the formation of the stars of the Milky Way as well as its interaction with its satellite galaxies, by employing OCRE’s cloud resources for data mining, many-body simulations, and Bayesian techniques on the Gaia catalogue containing 1.8 billion sources.
The first call for the adoption of the cloud services available through the OCRE IaaS+ framework agreements was aimed to ease access to commercial cloud services for researchers and research institutions in 40 European countries. From the 31 applications received, 15 innovative research projects will benefit from commercial cloud solutions through the EU cloud project OCRE, demonstrating the effectiveness of cloud services in research. Through this single procurement, thousands of research institutions across the European Research Area will be able to benefit from easy and procurement regulation-compliant access to commercial cloud services.
OCRE Adoption Funding Lead Jan Meijer (Uninett) said: “Thanks to the good response to the call for projects, we managed to assemble a balanced portfolio of 15 projects, showcasing the benefits of commercial cloud services on research outcomes from different angles. Our hope is that these showcases will inspire other researchers to follow in their footsteps and leverage the benefits of the OCRE portfolio of services for their research.”
Links
– IEEC
– ICCUB
– GAIA UB research group
– OCRE
More information
The Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC — Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) promotes and coordinates space research and technology development in Catalonia for the benefit of society. IEEC fosters collaborations both locally and worldwide and is an efficient agent of knowledge, innovation and technology transfer. As a result of over 20 years of high-quality research, done in collaboration with major international organisations, IEEC ranks among the best international research centers, focusing on areas such as: astrophysics, cosmology, planetary science, and Earth Observation. IEEC’s engineering division develops instrumentation for ground- and space-based projects, and has extensive experience in working with private or public organisations from the aerospace and other innovation sectors.
IEEC is a private non-profit foundation, governed by a Board of Trustees composed of Generalitat de Catalunya and four other institutions that each have a research unit, which together constitute the core of IEEC R&D activity: the University of Barcelona (UB) with the research unit ICCUB — Institute of Cosmos Sciences; the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) with the research unit CERES — Center of Space Studies and Research; the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) with the research unit CTE — Research Group in Space Sciences and Technologies; the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) with the research unit ICE — Institute of Space Sciences. IEEC is a CERCA (Centres de Recerca de Catalunya) center.
Contacts
IEEC Communication Office
Barcelona, Spain
Ana Montaner and Rosa Rodríguez
E-mail: comunicacio@ieec.cat
ICCUB Communication Office
Barcelona, Spain
Esther Pallarés
E-mail: secretariacientifica@icc.ub.edu