7 July 2021, 11:00-12:00
SURF is the collaborative ICT organisation for Dutch education and research, which supports research through the services they offer, including ICT facilities and consultancy. In this presentation an overview of recent developments on SURF infrastructure and services available to researchers will be given, with a focus on Earth Observation (EO).
In recent years an increased number of EO projects request IT resources and expertise at SURF. These projects, although typically pursuing different scientific goals, often at a higher-level share common issues concerning data, network, and compute. A new focus group formed at SURF aims to find out the needs of the EO community in the Netherlands and how SURF can best assist this community in achieving its goals.
We are curious to hear from ITC what your biggest challenges are and what you need most.
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Questions and Answers
Is SURF planning to provide a centralised data storage and access facility with ready to use EO data? We recognize the need for commonly used data sets such as the ERA5. Indeed, now the users uploading their own copies of the data sets to the different SURF services, so from that point of view SURF is wasting storage space. This is something we would like to improve but there are a few difficulties such as dealing with the licensing of the data sets.
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Since SURF is seeking user feedback regarding the needs of EO community, how should they contact SURF to express their opinions? You can always email annette.langedijk@surf.nl and ander.astudillo@surf.nl to communicate your ideas. Also, there will be a symposium in October, 2021 for the c-scale project. We plan to allocate time specifically for hearing from the community.
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It was mentioned that SURF provides advisors for research projects, what solutions can the advisor bring and does the project have to pay for the services? Yes, SURF does offer such a service and the advisors can help with the technical aspects of the project. Researchers can apply for limited amounts of computing time, data services, and support directly via SURF. This applies to cloud and cluster computing on HPC Cloud, Lisa, Cartesius Supercomputer, and Data Processing (Grid/Spider). Large scale research projects need to apply via NWO. Costs for tailor made solutions are discussed on a per project basis. More detailed information can be found at https://www.surf.nl/en/access-to-compute-services
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