An agreement has been made between a group of EGI resource centres and the MoBrain research collaboration. The main objective of the MoBrain competence centre is to lower barriers for scientists to access modern e-Science solutions from micro to macro scales. MoBrain is represented by Prof. Alexandre Bonvin from the Faculty of Science, Utrecht University. The MoBrain collaboration relies on the existing expertise available within the WeNMR/West-Life and N4U projects and technology providers (NGIs and other institutions).
Seven resource centres have pledged 75 million hours of computing time and more than 50 TB storage capacity to support the MoBrain community. Thanks to this agreement, MoBrain will be able to access the High-Throughput Computing and File Storage services they need for their research.
The resource centres involved in the agreement that will be valid for at least one year are:
- INFN-PADOVA (Italy)
- RAL-LCG2 (UK)
- TW-NCHC (Taiwan)
- SURFsara (The Netherlands)
- NCG-INGRID-PT (Portugal)
- NIKHEF (The Netherlands)
- CESNET-MetaCloud (Czech Republic)
Alexandre Bonvin, Professor at Utrecht University and leading the MoBrain consortium, comments on the collaboration:
“It is really nice to see that sites such as NIHKEF, SURFSara and INFN-PADOVA, which have always strongly supported us, are renewing their vows and that news sites are joining in this marriage. Such commitments are key to successfully serving our communities.”
Jan Bot, Senior Consultant at SURFsara, adds:
“The important thing for us as SURF is that the MoBrain services are of benefit to a great number of researchers, both within the Netherlands and abroad. The user-friendly interface provided by this consortium enables researchers to efficiently use a complex infrastructure. The benefit of this approach has been clearly shown by the growing international community of researchers that regularly use the services. We are therefore extremely pleased that we, together with the other NGIs that have pledged resources to this EGI Competence Centre, can contribute to this area of research.”
Giuseppe la Rocca, Technical Outreach Expert at the EGI Foundation mediated the agreement and says:
“The agreement offers MoBrain the possibility to access several HTC- and cloud-based computing and storage resources which can be used to further exploit EGI services and kick-start the development of a larger and integrated virtual research environment for life and brain scientists worldwide.”
Read the original news item on the EGI website.