SDU eScience Center becomes part of the HALRIC consortium

This consortium of 20+ members from Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Norway includes hospitals, universities, research infrastructures, regional governments as well as life science organisations working closely with industry. The consortium is led by Lund University.

– The opportunities for research and innovation using large-scale facilities are for many user communities underexploited. Especially for medical research, linking expertise to less experienced users is important to further this community. The HALRIC project is an excellent opportunity to engage new users, create critical mass and strengthen the collaborations not only between universities but also with industry, says Erik Renström, vice-chancellor of Lund University (source: press release from Lund University)

The University of Southern Denmark is part of the HALRIC consortium, where the SDU eScience Center will contribute to the development of the so-called Hanseatic Science Cloud (HSC). The ambition of HSC is to be the enabling factor that provides users from the Life Sciences, healthcare, and the tech-sector with a uniform entry point for easy and secure cross-border access to tools for the analysis of, access to, and collaboration on data.

– As a national provider for research cloud services via the DeiC Interactive HPC/UCloud service, which has more than 6000 users, the SDU eScience Center will be able to bring its expertise on the design, development and operation in production environment with thousands of users to the HALRIC project, says Claudio Pica, professor at SDU and director of the SDU eScience Center.

– In the last two years, we have designed and implemented a very advanced infrastructure for the federation of computing and data centers. This technology is today used in the DeiC Integration Portal, which connects the DeiC national HPC services. We will bring our expertise and technology to the HALRIC project as part of the HSC for the benefit of the larger health science community in the ÖKS region, he says.

Today, datasets are often analysed either at the compute resources co-located with the infrastructure or provided at the home institution of the respective user. With the HSC, the pace of innovation can be increased significantly by making compute resources and acquired datasets available regardless of their locations.

Scope of the project

The project’s total budget is 11.2 million €, which is covered by a grant of 6.6 million € from EU Interreg ÖKS, and by co-financing from all the consortium’s partners.

Other Danish participants in the HALRIC consortium include University of Copenhagen, Technical University of Denmark, Aarhus University, Rigshospitalet as well as two affiliated organisations: Danish Life Science Cluster and the Capital Region of Denmark.

Aside from the development of the Hanseatic Science Cloud (HSC), the project will facilitate up to 75 pilot collaborations for companies, hospitals, and universities with research infrastructures. The project will also develop prototype models for handling the exceptionally large amounts of data generated by such infrastructures. Thirdly, the consortium will facilitate further development of the life science ecosystems in the ÖKS region through virtual meeting places and an international strategic forum.