The Helix Nebula Open Day event as part of the 7th Helix Nebula General Assembly will be hosted by EMBL in Heidelberg on 20 January 2016.
The Helix Nebula initiative has come a long way since its creation in 2011. Driven by a strategic plan for scientific cloud computing, a series of flagship applications from diverse research communities have been deployed by a range of service providers.
A hybrid cloud model has been adopted and progressively expanded to combine commercial cloud service providers with publicly funded e-infrastructures and in-house resources. Key technical, financial, procurement, legal and governance issues have been tackled so that a European-scale cloud can grow with investments and benefits for stakeholders from the public and private sectors.
Cloud computing, innovation and open science have become European priorities and now is the time to turn political will into functioning services. Many stakeholder groups can contribute to this goal and so the theme of this Helix Nebula Open Day event will be to converge on a model for the European open science cloud that can be widely accepted by research infrastructures and their user communities (from the public and private sectors) and value chains, the long tail of science, service providers and funding agencies.
