DICE

Brief description

DICE aimed to enable a European storage and data management infrastructure for EOSC, providing generic services and building blocks to store, find, access and process data in a consistent and persistent way. Specifically, DICE partners offered 14 state-of-the-art data management services together with more than 50 PB of storage capacity.

The service and resource provisioning was accompanied by enhancing the current service offering in order to fill the gaps still present to the support of the entire research data lifecycle; solutions were provided for increasing the quality of data and their re-usability, supporting long term preservation, managing sensitive data, and bridging between data and computing resources. All services provided via DICE were offered through the EOSC Portal and interoperable with EOSC Core via a lean interoperability layer to allow efficient resource provisioning. The partners monitored the evolution of the EOSC interoperability framework and guidelines to comply with the rules of participation to onboard services into EOSC, and the interoperability guidelines to integrate with the EOSC Core functions.

The data services offered via DICE through EOSC were designed to be agnostic to the scientific domains in order to be multidisciplinary and to fulfil the needs of different communities.

Our Role

Trust-IT services led the activities related to outreach, stakeholder engagement and service uptake, focusing on increasing awareness of the services available in DICE, and fostering the uptake of Virtual Access (VA) requests.

The overriding objective of the DICE Communication strategy was to widely promote the DICE mission, its activities and outputs with tailored and timely messages, supporting a growing community of users of the DICE data management and storage resources across international borders and domains.

Designing attractive value propositions for potential VA users was the key element to stimulate the usage of the DICE resources and services.

A series of Open Calls for Service Requests to stimulate usage of available resources and to obtain feedback on usage was launched and promoted via the EOSC Portal. The promotion of the DICE services was supported by the release of use cases per scientific discipline/user role to provide examples of demonstrating workable solutions.

Relevant events for meeting with the demand side to promote the project offer were identified to maximize the outreach of the project. This included a series of DICE Community Roadshows featuring multi-disciplinary use cases.

Other activities included the implementation of powerful communication actions to reach the target audience such as periodic newsletters, video testimonials from use cases, etc., setup of tools to streamline internal communication, and liaison with other EOSC/HPC relevant projects (particularly those of INFRAEOSC-07) to establish synergies and expand the user base.

Impact

The DICE project has improved the quality of research and innovation, in particular for large scientific projects addressing the major issues of today -- from climate change to medicine -- with data-intensive techniques.

Results

Principal results are available on the EUDAT website. However, a rich set of assets including webinar recordings and presentations are available on the project website in the Events section.

Funding

The DICE project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project call H2020-INFRAEOSC-2018-2020 under Grant Agreement no. 101017207