FileSender will be part of the EOSC EU Node for the next 3 years. Being deployed in a very visible spot in the European research infrastructure landscape for 2024-2026, FileSender begins to play an important role as one of the application services of the EOSC EU Node as a Managed Large File Transfer service for end-users. The managed services of the EOSC EU Node constitute a European level multi-disciplinary and multi-national scientific data/service portfolio for all research users and citizen scientists.
On November 24, 2023, the results of the European Commission’s EOSC procurement were officially announced. The procurement has been structured into 3 areas, referred to as Lots:
- Lot 1 – Core Federation Services for the EOSC EU Node;
- Lot 2 – Exchange Infrastructure Services for the EOSC EU Node;
- Lot 3 – Exchange Application Services for the EOSC EU Node.
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to achieve a federation of infrastructures providing seamless access to interoperable research objects and value-added services for the whole research data cycle, from discovery to storage, management, analysis, and reuse. The EOSC Procurement is to build and deploy an operational, secure, cloud-based EOSC EU Node, that includes both the core and exchange service components, offering high quality managed services and superior user experience for a large number of users, with the functionalities available 24/7. The procurement also covers operations, maintenance, and support of the EOSC EU Node for 36 months.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed platform enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any other person or machine. FileSender explicitly targets mass usage and is built to service the 99% of users who have better things to do with their time than figuring out how to perform large file transfers.
FileSender was part of the winning bid for Lot 3 of this EOSC procurement. It was offered to cater for (and clearly satisfied!) the Managed Large File Transfer service requirement put forward for the EOSC Exchange component of the EOSC EU Node. The EOSC Exchange is EOSC’s marketplace. The EOSC EU Node aims to offer a number of common horizontal services on this marketplace for end-users to benefit from (such as: compute, containers, data transfer, notebooks, file sharing, open research data), which together with EOSC Core services are included in the procured EOSC EU Node value propositions.
FileSender is a useful service, broadly carried and cheap to run, which makes it a valuable component that all the R&E community agree on to begin building a federated EOSC on. At the organizational level, Lot 3 will be built by a group of subcontractors led by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) as the principal contractor. The subcontractor building the FileSender service will be NORDUnet representing the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Sikt). At the technical level, it will be a beautiful testimonial for the FileSender collaborative software development effort.
The EOSC EU Node has an open concept and is envisioned as the first node of many to make up the EOSC Federation. National, regional and/or thematic service providers as well as autonomous EOSC Nodes are anticipated to connect to this EOSC Federation via the established interoperability frameworks and policies, with the EU Node acting as a reference node. Through the EOSC EU Node the European R&E community has an additional pathway to benefit from FileSender functionality but now in the context of the fledgling EOSC Federation. It also clearly showcases what is expected of other EOSC Nodes, offering an open source online service that provides a secure, trustworthy and transparent way for sharing large files.
“The real challenge here is to see how to use this opportunity to broaden the FileSender feature portfolio. The federative aspect offers plenty of room for improvement and relevance. An immediately obvious one is to make it possible for uploaders to nominate particular institutional destinations (‘recipients’) instead of natural-person recipients. If we manage, we turn FileSender into a ‘generic uploading / data movement frontend’ that any research infrastructure could use (instead of inventing its own)” – Guido Aben, member of the FileSender Board, International Strategy Officer, SUNET, Sweden
If you have any questions regarding the FileSender new role in EOSC, join us at the upcoming FileSender Online Infoshare on February 29, 2024, where other topics also will be covered, such as the current status of the new user interface implementation, recent releases and plans for the software, priorities and the future roadmap.
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