E-Infrastructures

Call summary

Scene Setter

The e-infrastructures[[a.k.a Information and Communication Technologies infrastructure]] call for 2016/2017[[Is based on the "Scoping Paper” for Research Infrastructures (including e-infrastructures) and other extensive consultations]] will support the European policies on open research data, data and computing intensive science, research and education networking, high-performance computing and big data innovation[[COM Data value chain]]. Its implementation will be informed by the following principles:

Service orientation: The whole work programme aims at supporting a service oriented European e-infrastructure landscape catalysing new knowledge and innovative ICT solutions by global and multidisciplinary research. All projects will contribute to the production of a high quality catalogue of services describing the services that they will provide during the lifetime of the project or that they intend to develop during the project.

Maximizing and assessing the impact of the e-infrastructures:Proposals should define, collect and make available key performance indicators (KPIs) in support of operational, technical and socio-economic impact assessment.

Proposals should plan for active participation in international fora and community-led consensus building initiatives to promote data and computing infrastructure interoperability such as the Research Data Alliance.

Co-Design: In order to successfully achieve the work programme objectives and to increase the scope, depth and economies of scale of e-infrastructures, the Commission encourages that consortia applying to all topics, in particular to those in the platform-driven and user-driven innovation themes, are composed by a balanced set of partners with complementary competences and roles.

Open Research Data: Producers and users of research data will benefit from more systematically opening it to broad access, depositing and accessing their data with the objective to make research data discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, useable, and wherever possible interoperable – c.f. G8 principles on research data[[G8 Science Ministers Statement London UK, 12 June 2013 -http://bit.ly/1BtKagu]].

H2020 as a catalyst of the European plan for growth and jobs: Horizon 2020 encourages synergies with other European Union Funds, with appropriate provisions not to cover the same cost items[[Article 17a of the Horizon 2020 Regulation and Article 31 of the rules of participation.]]. The e-infrastructures call for 2016-2017 will promote when feasible the combined and/or the cumulative use of other funding sources as instrument to support initiatives of European interest to foster growth and jobs[["digital game-changer" on European high-performance data networks]].

The e-infrastructures call for 2016-2017 is structured along the following two themes:

Theme 1 - Integration and consolidation of e-infrastructure platforms supporting European policies and research and education communities

The integration and consolidation of e-infrastructure platforms covers the following aspects: (a) coordination of regional, national and European operations and funding (b) synergies between operational e-infrastructures (c) continuous upgrades of infrastructure without service disruption.

This theme will be covered by the topics EINFRA-11-2016 and EINFRA-12-2017 and the first point of the "Research and Education Networking - GEANT" part of GÉANT Partnership Projects (see Other actions).

The operation of e-infrastructure services will be funded by supporting the trans-national and virtual access activities provided to researchers. Those service activities shall comply with the conditions set out in Article 16.1 for trans-national access and Article 16.2 for virtual access to research infrastructures of the Model Grant Agreement[[For grants awarded under this theme capitalised and operating costs of ‘large research infrastructures’ as defined in the Article 6.2.D.4 of the Model Grant Agreement are not eligible.]].

Under theme 1, only platforms and services based on systems and technologies that have at least achieved Technology Readiness Level 8 (TRL8)[[Technology Readiness Level, See Annex G for further details.]] before the start of the project will be supported. The services offered under a project must be adequately documented in an open catalogue of services and shall be periodically assessed by an external board approved by the Commission and common to all EC funded e-infrastructure services.

The projects funded under this theme should establish links with all projects funded under the Specific Grant Agreement (a) "Research and Education Networking – GÉANT " within the GÉANT Partnership projects included under "Other actions", in order to collaborate and work on potential synergies, overlaps and gaps in the overall service offering.

Further conditions and requirements that applicants should fulfil when drafting a proposal are given in part D of the section “Specific features for Research Infrastructures”. Compliance with these provisions will be taken into account during evaluation.

Theme 2 - Prototyping innovative e-infrastructure platforms and services for research and education communities, industry and the citizens at large

e-Infrastructure platforms and services need to evolve through innovation actions to respond to the long-term needs of research and education communities, industry and the citizens at large. Innovative developments based on state-of-the-art technologies need to mature to be integrated and offered as dependable e-infrastructures. The support to e-infrastructure innovation is done by means of two types of activities: (a) Platform-driven e-infrastructure innovation (technology push, driven by the supply-side) and (b) User-driven e-infrastructure innovation (user pull, driven by the demand-side).

This theme will be covered by the topics EINFRA-21-2017 and EINFRA-22-2016, the second point of the "Research and Education Networking - GEANT" part of GÉANT Partnership Projects and the "Interactive Computing e-infrastructure for the Human Brain Project" (see Other actions).

Under theme 2, only platforms and services based on systems and technologies that have achieved at least TRL 6[[Technology Readiness Level. See Annex G for further details]] before the start of the project will be supported and it is expected that they will have achieved at least TRL 8 by the end of the project. This condition does not apply to point "EINFRA-21-2017: Platform-Driven e-infrastructure innovation (a) Support to Public Procurement of innovative HPC systems, PPI".

Further conditions and requirements that applicants should fulfil when drafting a proposal are given in part D of the section “Specific features for Research Infrastructures”. Compliance with these provisions will be taken into account during evaluation.

Support to policies and international cooperation for e-infrastructures is covered in the INFRASUPP Call.