The Blue-Cloud project is federating distributed marine data resources, computing platforms, and analytical services to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability. In order to do so, a “Blue-Cloud technical framework” has been set-up, where leading marine data management infrastructures are federated with horizontal e-infrastructures to maximise the exploitation of data resources available from different sources.
The Blue-Cloud framework consists of two major technical components: a Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service to serve federated discovery and access to blue data infrastructures, and a Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to provide computing platforms and analytical services facilitating the collaboration between researchers.
Each Blue-Cloud VRE includes services that facilitate collaboration between users, services supporting the execution of analytical tasks embedded in a distributed computing infrastructure, as well as services enabling the co-creation of entire Virtual Laboratories, aimed at realising open science-friendly working environments.
The Blue-Cloud VREs are developed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR), built on the D4Science infrastructure and the gCube open source technology, and offered via the Blue-Cloud Gateway which makes the services and Virtual Laboratories available. Thanks to Blue-Cloud, scientists and practitioners are able not only to easily access different sets of marine data but also to process and experiment with them via the analytical and visual tools made available by each demonstrator.