Large scale scientific projects in fields like genome analysis, astrophysics, life science and photon science rely on global collaboration. This requires huge amounts of data storage and analysis tools, all which meet the specific needs of the science and research community.

These storage and analysis tools are not yet commercially available, so a group of 10 public research organisations from seven Euroepan countries – headed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – joined forces in a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project, which aimed to design a cloud-based system specifically for science and research.

A PCP allows public organisations to communicate their needs in detail with the market, and buy research and development services to build a new product or service, which the organisation can then buy and deploy, or not.

After several phases of work, two groups (called T-Systems and RHEA) were selected to build platforms that were ideally fit for this purpose. The consortium of end-users are now actively using one of these platforms, the Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud). This hybrid cloud platform links together commercial cloud service providers and publicly funded research organisations’ in-house IT resources to provide innovative solutions that support data intensive science.

This PCP was cofounded by the European Commission’s H2020 Framework Programme via the Helix Nebula Science Cloud project.

In recognition of its outstanding use of PCP, CERN was also awarded the 2019 Procura+ Outstanding Innovation Procurement in ICT Award, which is supported by the EU-funded Procure2Innovate project.

For more information and to read the full case study, click here.