Co-funded by the European Commission under the Framework Programme 7, the EU’s primary programme for funding all research-related EU initiatives for the period of 2007-2013, the two-year Venus-C programme has concluded. One of the first cloud initiatives to feature in the European Digital Agenda (DAE), Venus-C provides scalable and interoperable cloud resources that combine both open source and commercial solutions.
The programme’s approach has been guided by the requirements of end-users: researchers from across Europe working in seven different scientific fields, from bioinformatics to civil engineering and civil protection. The wide-ranging applications, complemented by an additional 15 pilot applications, were selected through a European-wide call for proposal reported on by Scientific Computing World in November 2010 here. Together, their cloud computing requirements have steered the infrastructure design and validation process.
‘Cloud computing empowers researchers in a number of different ways, enabling them not only to accelerate scientific discovery but also do new science they could not have done before,’ explained Andrea Manieri, the Venus-C project director from Engineering (Ingegneria Informatica) in Italy. ‘These researchers number in their thousands for each traditional supercomputer user. They are the so-called 'long tail' of the scientific user distribution and their work helps society in many different ways. They often leverage their research work to create start-up companies, utilising the power of the cloud, with an obvious impact on the EU economy.’
