China Science and Technology Cloud (CSTCloud), e-infrastructure for research constructed by Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), organized and participated in a series activities to keep the “Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC) Initiative” on track. With seed money provided by CAS, GOSC initiative aims to encourage cooperation, and ultimately alignment and interoperability among existed and emerging open science infrastructures to support the Decadal Program “Making Data Work for Cross Domain Grand Challenges” of Committee on Data (CODATA) for International Science Council. A CODATA and CNIC co-brand GOSC project office is also on the way to boost international alignment concerning this initiative.

  On October 22nd, the 2nd GOSC Workshop was held online. During this meeting, CNIC, EGI.eu, and CODATA carried on the GOSC dialogue, focusing on the overview of current global open science activities and exploration of better alignment in between. Prof. LI Jianhui, CAS GOSC project PI, chaired the first session and called for more collaborations of all GOSC stakeholders. Then, selected GOSC Initiative Working Groups and Case Studies representatives shared their work plans and recent work. The next session extends to further collaboration through GOSC. Experts joining this session are coming from worldwide research e-infrastructures, such as the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud, CSTCloud, Malaysia Open Science Platform (MOSP), African Open Science Platform (AOSP) and South African Open Science Cloud (SAOSC), Open Science Grid (OSG) in the US, as well as others. During the panel discussion, issues identified as priorities for the next step include building up the GOSC community, developing cloud federation technology and federated management model, exploring robust architecture for orchestration of federated services, and also bringing GOSC infrastructure and GOSC services to the complex research cloud scenarios to help validate cloud technology and support the demonstration.

  The GOSC dialogue continued during the SciDataCon 2021, a joint event held by CODATA and WDS through Oct 18 to 28, with GOSC discussion particular in the GOSC Working Group Session, the Case Studies Session, and the GORC session. Among them, an opening talk during the GOSC Case Studies session publicized the progress of the CAS (GOSC) program. This program has carried out studies and implementations in technology, testbed, demonstration, and international alignment. For example, the CSTCloud AAI alliance has been developed to facilitate better access to worldwide research resources and services between partners. A cross-continental cloud federation testbed has been successfully launched recently jointly by CNIC and EGI to support data-intensive research between China and Europe in selected scenarios, such as in space physics and life sciences.

  To make the GOSC Initiative global, this GOSC Initiative has been engaged with the CODATA Decadal program, and working groups and case studies have been established as effective approach of Initiative implementation. During the SciDataCon WG and CS sessions, each working group and case group released their work plan for the following two years, detailing missions, objectives, tasks, deliverables, timescales, milestones, impact plan, and work arrangement. Currently, experts who joins the GOSC Initiative comes from over thirty countries and regions around the world. The GOSC Steering Groups, regular meetings of every WG and CS, have been settled to guarantee the GOSC alignment between interested partners. The series of international activities on the GOSC initiative draws great potentials for in-depth collaborations among major global infrastructures.  

GOSC Overview available at: https://bit.ly/GOSC-Overview
Stay tuned via: https://bit.ly/3jwZHNg

A series of CAS GOSC talks during October meetings (sessions)

For details, please contact ZHANG Lili （zhll@cnic.cn）& HAO Meili (hml@cnic.cn)