Invited stakeholders gather in Krakow, March 11-13, 2025, to advance the concept of EOSC Pilot
Updated 15/10/2025
First report of the technical integration of the EOSC Beyond Pilot Nodes
The release of EOSC Beyond Deliverable D15.2, the "First report of the technical integration of the EOSC Beyond Pilot Nodes," is a major milestone in our contribution to building a live, federated European Open Science Cloud. This document provides a comprehensive overview of the substantial progress made by our network of Pilot Nodes in creating a distributed, interoperable research infrastructure.
This report showcases how national, thematic and e-infrastructure pilot nodes are moving from standalone infrastructures to a cohesive federation. By leveraging the EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox and its Federating Capabilities, the Pilot Nodes are solving domain-specific challenges while simultaneously addressing common integration hurdles, paving the way for broader adoption across the EOSC ecosystem.
A Foundation of Collaboration and Real-World Science
Our work began by identifying concrete scientific needs and developing technical integration plans in close collaboration with end-users and Node service providers. This user-centric approach ensures that the federated infrastructure we are building directly addresses the real-world requirements of researchers.
The EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox has been instrumental in this process, providing a safe environment for Pilot Nodes to test integrations with core services, such as AAI and Helpdesk federation, and to validate them against actual scientific user stories.
Cross-Node Research in Action
The most compelling evidence of our progress comes from the implementation of cross-Node use cases, which are already delivering tangible results. These collaborations demonstrate the practical value of a federated EOSC:
- CESSDA and INSTRUCT-ERIC demonstrated how social scientists could discover and book structural biology instruments with SSO.
- METROFOOD-RI and CESSDA combined food composition and socio-economic data with Helpdesk mediation.
- INSTRUCT-ERIC and EGI showed how storage brokering at the point of experiment supports long-term data retention.
- NFDI, LifeWatch and EGI enabled compute close to data by staging datasets through machine-actionable DOIs.
- ENES and EGI demonstrated advanced computational and machine learning environments supported by AAI cross-node federation.
- CNB-CSIC leveraged computational resources from the e-INFRA CZ Node to simplify complex validation workflows.
- NI4OS-Europe: Achieved out-of-the-box interoperability by deploying a dedicated Service Catalogue instance that connects seamlessly with the Sandbox.
"This first integration report marks a critical shift from theory to practice. The successful demonstrations by the Pilot Nodes provide a blueprint for how a federated EOSC can directly accelerate scientific discovery by connecting resources across disciplines and borders." – Katarzyna Lechowska-Winiarz, CYFRONET, WP15 Leader
Towards a dynamic EOSC Federation
The achievements documented in this report lay a solid foundation for the second half of the EOSC Beyond project. Our efforts will now focus on further enhancing the Pilot Nodes as the primary entry point for users executing cross-Node research and on expanding the portfolio of supported user stories with new, innovative integrations.
Discover the technical details and the full scope of the Pilot Nodes' integration progress.
