Community Program of OpenWebSearch.EU Project: 3rd Open Call for the Third-Parties "Data Centre on-boarding"

Description

Call #3 particularly addresses computing and data centers to join our network of infrastructure organisations and host parts of the OWSAI infrastructure. We aim to on-board more data centers as a proof-of-concept for the developed technology and engage in discussions on creating a sustainable future infrastructure. Projects are expected to implement the following activities: Proof-of-concept of federation and cooperation with the other participating data centres, particularly LRZ, IT4I, CSC, DLR and CERN; Provision of storage infrastructure using iRoDS and S3 compliant data stores; Provision of compute infrastructure for running (parts of) our technology stack, which includes: Apache Storm-based Crawling Infrastructure, Apache Spark-based Preprocessing and Indexing Infrastructure, GPU-capacity for AI-training and inferencing. Willingness and legal capacity to align with the project's governance and data policies in contractual form and contribute to the discussions on a joint, federated governance model, sustainability of the infrastructure as well as ethical and legal aspects. Applicants should clearly describe their own infrastructure which is planned for the third-party project, and, indicate to which quantity will it be made available to the consortium, including storage, CPUs, GPUs and bandwidth. Additional emphasis placed on a green computing strategy and on solid security as related infrastructure will be of advantage. The OpenWebSearch.EU project consortium is eager to on-board new third-party project teams in OpenWebSearch.eu landscape and integrate them in the future activities for sustainable Research and Development. Therefore, the candidate third-party project should probe the closely related topics addressed in the project and should aim at widening and enriching the existing R&D activities as well as suggesting new ones which are complementary to the project goals and aims. Activities should involve research, development and, particularly, engineering, and must align with the project’s goals. Results achieved must be made available as Open Source and/or Open Data, with documentations or experimental work published through Open Access, aligned with the general practices used in the project.

Beneficiary & submission

The applicants have to submit their appropriately formatted proposal by email to the call management (call3@openwebsearch.eu) by the given deadline. The proposal template is available for the applicants via OpenWebSearch.eu website (under Community Programme). Note that applicant(s) can submit at most one application per call and multiple submissions of the same project are not accepted. English is the main language for communication with the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium, and all submitted documents must be written in English. The submission will be acknowledged by the call management, and, only after the confirmation, the proposal can be considered as being submitted. It is advised not to wait till the last moment with submission. If the submission is not confirmed within max. 2 days, and provided the call deadline has not yet passed, you may contact the Grantor, at call3@openwebsearch.eu to request the information and ask for re-submission. Topical fit and contribution to the project has been set as the key criteria for the selected third-party projects. Thus, the call addresses specific questions in the project raised by the consortium members. Also, the evaluation procedure strives for a well-balanced mix of project-external assessment and quality control combined with expertise and knowledge on the project-internal demands. We established the following evaluation procedure. The evaluation will be jointly conducted by the external experts in cooperation with the members of the project consortium. Proposals will be evaluated according to the following categories and sub-categories: Relevance of the resources for the Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure (OWSAI) in terms of quantity and quality of services offered, and on how the proposed work contributes in the pilot infrastructure of the project; Experience in providing scalable infrastructure, and with the technology stack used in the project; Contribution to the goals of the OpenWebSearch.eu project, and how well the third-party project contributes to the infrastructure providers strategy; Support concept and reachability offered to the OpenWebSearch.eu project; Expected impact for Open Search in general (also beyond the pilot infrastructure); Contributions in governance and sustainability, on the conceptual level; Feasibility, i.e., whether availability and security can be provided to a sufficient level, whether the planned outcome is realistic, whether the provided resources are appropriate for achieving the planned outputs and outcomes, whether the envisioned target community / ecosystem is addressed, sufficient past expertise of the applicants for carrying out the proposed work.   In total 100 points will be distributed among the categories 1-7. Besides the above listed criteria, formal eligibility criteria in accordance with the grant agreement and European Regulations must be fulfilled, particularly on the target group and official funding criteria.

Further information

Details on this call see here Details on the OpenWebSearch Community Programme https://openwebsearch.eu/community/ Project website https://openwebsearch.eu/ More information about the Next Generation Internet https://www.ngi.eu/