INDIGO: Better Software for Better Science

By developing a data and computing platform specifically for scientific communities, the EU-funded INDIGODATACLOUD project is helping European researchers benefit from cloud computing. Within much of the public and private sectors, cloud computing is now ubiquitous, an integrated part of today’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). However, its use has not yet been fully embraced by the scientific community, particularly at the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) levels. Seeing that this community could benefit from cloud computing, the INDIGO-DATACLOUD-INtegrating Distributed data Infrastructures for Global ExplOitation (https://www .indigo-datacloud.eu) project developed a data and computing platform specifically for scientific communities. ‘‘The goal of this project was to provide the European scientific community with the tools they need to do research more effectively,’’ says project coordinator Davide Salomoni. ‘‘To do this, we developed a platform able to simultaneously respond to the calculation, processing and data storage needs of researchers from very different disciplines.’’