BlueCloud - Piloting Innovative Services for Marine Research & the Blue Economy, is a new European Project, funded under the H2020 programme, that kicked-off its activities on October 1, 2019. In thirty-six months BlueCloud aims to address the need to build and demonstrate the Pilot Blue Cloud as a thematic EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) to support research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five compelling pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators. Moreover, it seeks to capitalize on what exists already and to develop and deploy, though a pragmatic work plan, the Pilot Blue Cloud as a cyber-platform bringing together and providing access to: (a) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, (b) analytical tools, and (c) computing facilities essential for key blue science use cases. Led by a consortium of experienced and complementary partners, the project maintains a practical approach to address the potential of cloud-based open science to achieve a set of services identifying also longer terms challenges that will provide the basis for a Blue-Cloud Roadmap to serve the wider community. The technological backbone of BlueCloud project is composed of: (a) Virtual Research Environments, (b) Data Access and Discovery services, (c) technical architecture interface with EOSC, and (d) federation of more than 13 infrastructures for data provision and processing.

A video presenting the initiation of BlueCloud activities (prepared during the project Kick-Off meeting) is available at https://youtu.be/DE0AqgDsxXk

Scientific Responsible for FORTH: Prof. Yannis Tzitzikas