Stichting EGI

The EGI Foundation (also known as Stichting EGI and abbreviated as EGI.eu) is a not-for-profit foundation
established under the Dutch law to coordinate the EGI Federation (abbreviated as EGI), an international
collaboration that federates the digital capabilities, resources and expertise of national and international
research communities in Europe and worldwide. The main goal is to empower researchers from all disciplines to collaborate and to carry out data- and compute-intensive science and innovation.
The EGI Foundation has participants and associated participants drawn from representatives of national einfrastructure consortiums (NGIs), EIROs, ERICs, and other legal entities. These entities provide the
physical resources and shared services that enable EGI to deliver, improve and innovate services for
communities.
The EGI Foundation coordinates areas such as overseeing infrastructure operations, user community support,
contact with technology providers, strategy and policy development, flagship events and dissemination of
news and achievements. As part of its mandate, the EGI Foundation actively represents the EGI federation at
European level with policy makers and funding agencies, it provides expert advice to shape policies and
funding programs and also support the implementation of the policy priorities. In the policy area of open
science, EGI is a key stakeholder represented in and contributing to the EC Open Science Policy Platform.
The EGI Foundation holds certifications in both ISO/IEC 9000 “Quality Management” and ISO/IEC 20000
“IT Service Management”.
The EGI Foundation has experience in defining, setting-up and operating multi-level governance frameworks
suitable for coordinating and enabling service and resource provisioning across multiple stakeholders from
different countries and organizations. In addition, it has experience in legal, procurement and governance
functions in EU research infrastructures including the setting up and the establishment of a European
Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC).
The EGI federation is the largest distributed computing infrastructure in the world, and brings together
hundreds of data centres worldwide and also includes the largest community cloud federation in Europe with
tends of cloud providers across most of the European countries offering IaaS cloud and storage services. The
current federated resources represent altogether more than 350 Petabytes of online storage and 380 Petabytes
of archival storage supported by approximately 1M Cores. EGI expanded the federation of its facilities with
other non-European digital infrastructures in North America, South America, Africa-Arabia and the AsiaPacific region, as such EGI fully realises the “Open to the World” vision. In order to interoperate at
international level, EGI and its partners operate in the context of a lightweight collaboration framework
defining rules of participations via a corpus of policies and technical guidelines.
EGI offering includes a federated IaaS cloud to run compute- or data-intensive tasks and host online services
in virtual machines or docker containers on IT resources accessible via a uniform interface; high-throughput
data analysis to run compute-intensive tasks for producing and analysing large datasets and store/retrieve
research data efficiently across multiple service providers; federated operations to manage service access and
operations from heterogeneous distributed infrastructures and integrate resources from multiple independent
providers with technologies, processes and expertise offered by EGI; consultancy for user-driven innovation
to assess research computing needs and provide tailored solutions for advanced computing.
Over the last decade, EGI has built a federation of long-term distributed compute and storage infrastructures
that has delivered unprecedented data analysis capabilities to more than 60,000 researchers from many
disciplines (e.g., Medical and Health Sciences, Natural Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Agricultural
Sciences, and Art and Humanities). Examples of the supported research include the search for the Higgs
boson at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN; finding new tools to diagnose and monitor
diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and the development of complex simulations to model climate change.
The EGI Cloud Federation aggregates resources by defining a set of standard open-source interfaces and
protocols to access the different cloud functions – such as resource discovery, user authentication, compute
and data access services – in a uniform way at all the sites, enabling workloads to span and seamlessly
migrate across resource centers. Through the EGI Virtual Machine image library – the Application Database
– EGI offers the possibility to share and reuse virtual appliances and to dynamically deploy them in a
federated cloud infrastructure. Besides cloud compute and storage services, the cloud will offer the capability
of accessing open datasets of public and commercial relevance for scalable access to big research data,
fostering a culture and environment for sharing and reuse of open research data. EGI supports the
implementation and adoption of cloud open standards.
The EGI technical platforms are co-developed with research communities and technology providers. In order
to do so, EGI has established processes and technical infrastructures for requirements gathering, software
validation, verification and distribution through the Unified Middleware Distribution.
Through its services for High Throughput Computing, Cloud, Federated Operations and Community-driven
innovation and support (https://www.egi.eu/services/), EGI actively supports the European Open Science
Cloud initiative and leads the EOSC-hub project, which brings together multiple service providers to create the Hub: a single contact point for European researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a
broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research. For researchers, this will mean a broader
access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical
boundaries.
In the context of the EOSC pilot project, the EGI Foundation is one of the main contributors to the design
and definition of the EOSC architecture and the federated service management framework, and coordinates
service pilots participates by the scientific demonstrators. EGI also contributed to the definition of the
governance framework and to the works on Rules of Participation. EGI has experience in the drafting of
governing documents and policies such as intellectual property, scientific data, ERIC procurement rules,
code of conduct, voting rules and rules of procedures for assembly of members and administration and
scientific committees. VAT issues, contractual agreements, service level agreements, user agreements,
supply agreements and research collaboration agreements.
The EGI Foundation has also most of their staff members that are certified at the expert level for the FitSM
standard (http://fitsm.itemo.org/) and has contributed to the development of professional IT service
management skills in the Research e-Infrastructure community by delivering a large number of trainings.