Interoperable access policies: analysis and recommendations
The access policies of 20 European e-infrastructures for HPC, high-throughput computing, cloud and data, compared with the needs of high energy physics and radio astronomy, with recommendations on how they should evolve.
- Number
- D5.2
- Published
- June 2025
Lead partner: FZJ
This deliverable:
- Contains an analysis of access policies of 20 European e-Infrastructures in the areas of High-Performance Computing, High-Throughput Computing, Cloud Computing, and Data, which are open for use by European scientists
- Comparation and contrasts them with the requirements of European research communities with a focus on the High-Energy Physics and Radio Astronomy fields and the use cases described in SPECTRUM Deliverable D5.1 (Representative use cases: analysis and alignment)
- Contains recommendations for the future evolution of the access policies to meet the current and future needs of European researchers
Background and Relevance
Deliverable D5.2 offers a detailed assessment of current access policies in European HPC, HTC, cloud, and data e- Infrastructures. This work is essential for disciplines like radio astronomy and high-energy physics, where secure, efficient, and remote access to computational resources is critical to processing vast amounts of real-time data. The document also cross-references these systems with use cases identified in Deliverable D5.1
Project Recommendations
SPECTRUM D5.2 provides a clear comparative analysis and actionable recommendations to move toward policy interoperability. Key recommendations include:
- Adopt long-term, flexible resource allocation processes.
- Enable e-Infrastructure-wide use of resource allocations and quotas.
- Extend scheduling/orchestration to support interactive compute use cases.
- Introduce high-level general and domain-specific user interfaces.
- Introduce common AAI services across European e-Infrastructures.
- Ensure Reliable and Unattended execution of long-running workflows.
- Provision efficient standard, low-level SW interfaces.
- Establish feedback/improvement/planning loops for research communities and e-Infrastructures.
The deliverable will serve as one of the inputs to the second phase of SPECTRUM (months 16-30) and eventually for the SRIDA and Technical Blueprint, to be delivered at the end of the project.
Broader Impact
Implementing the recommendations from D5.2 will boost European leadership in data-intensive science and heterogeneous resource federation models, including large-scale compute and storage capacity to be procured and made accessible at the pan-European level. Harmonized policies will:
- Improve efficiency of distributed HPC and data resources.
- Strengthen cross-disciplinary collaborations (e.g., climate science, medicine, AI).
- Accelerate FAIR data adoption and open science initiatives.
- Build a robust and future-proof European scientific infrastructure ecosystem.
