The European Weather Cloud is the cloud-based collaboration platform for meteorological application development and operations in Europe and enables the digital transformation of the European Meteorological Infrastructure.
Research and development (R&D) applications are open to researchers from any publically funded organisation in EUMETSAT Member States and should be submitted not later than 30 June 2023 for a project start in October 2023. The projects can have a maximum length up to three years after which continuation would require a new proposal.
Objectives
R&D projects should be scientific or technical studies to improve the use of EUMETSAT data or products. They have to provide benefits to EUMETSAT Member States through the broad applicability of the project results, and to be of interest to the general scientific community by:
The objective is in harnessing the potential of research in Member States for the improvement of EUMETSAT data and products to jointly solve known problems in the data and products, which may in case be difficult to achieve by the EUMETSAT Secretariat and SAFs alone.
The target is to foster the development of new products for existing and new applications in relevant societal domains and to support the product development of the EUMETSAT Secretariat and the SAF network, especially in the context of Member State applications.
A special focus is on the use of EWC to explore new ways of using cloud infrastructure, e.g. for distributed mass data reprocessing or the application of AI/ML methods
A special focus is on the last mile to users of EUMETSAT data in applications. The objective is to increase the use of EUMETSAT data that requires addressing specific user/customer needs e.g. in the transport/aviation sector (e.g. questions of climate change impact from sector specific emissions, safety impact from changing hazard patterns) or in the energy sector (specific applications in the renewable energy potential, availability and exploitation).
Eligibility to apply
Member States’ public institutions, i.e public services and academia, are eligible to apply for resources.
Available resources
Granted resources are solely infrastructure. Successful applicants are granted for computing infrastructure in EWC close to the EUMETSAT and ECMWF data holdings. The infrastructure includes virtual machines (VM), object storage, GPUs, and shared file system. The applications have to contain justified estimations of required resources. The projects are expected to range from 50 to 100 vCPUs, 400-800 GB of RAM, 50-100 TB of storage and 4-8 vGPUs.
Should a project exhaust its resource allocation before its end, the principal investigator can, at any time, apply for an allocation from any resources remaining in the reserve. The project application form can be used again to request additional resources, including why additional resources are being requested. To apply for additional resources, they can fill an application form provided on the EUMETSAT website with notation that additional resources are applied.
Some details about the resources to help estimating what and how much one may need:
- vCPUs are currently 2400MHz. This may change in the future.
- vGPU is counted 1/8 of NVIDIA GPU RTX A6000. Available GPU VM flavours are listed in this ECMWF Knowledge base article. When estimating GPU resources, please pay attention to the required number of vCPUs to deploy the VMs.
- Object storage (S3) is the most suitable for large datasets and when same data need to be accessed from several computing workloads (e.g. VM, containers, Jupyter notebooks). Object storage can be also used to import and export the data outside EWC. Object storage buckets do not naturally appear as traditional file system. Please consult Knowledge base articles Using S3 Buckets and Accessing S3 buckets with Python for more details.
- Shared file system (SFS) can be used to share the same directories across several VMs. SFS shares are typically mounted to VMs with NFS and appears as a typical file system. SFS shares can’t be shared outside the EWC tenancy.
- Block storage can be mounted on VMs as a local volume. It provides good performance for small datasets but can’t be shared with other VMs or outside the EWC tenancy.
Application process
An organisation or consortium represented by a Principal Investigator from the leading organisation need to submit a proposal along with an extended abstract (max 5 pages) to the EUMETSAT Secretariat via the EUMETSAT EWC call form.
Timeline of the application process
| Submission deadline |
30 June 2023 |
| Technical feasibility check by EUMETSAT (may expect interaction) |
July 2023 |
| Start of evaluation by EUMETSAT Delegate Bodies |
August 2023 |
| Decision on applications and information to applicants |
October 2023 |
Criteria for evaluating the proposals
The following generic criteria are important to guide the effort:
- Relevance to the objectives
- Scientific and technical quality
- Overall maturity of the proposal considering feasibility of successful implementation
- Justification of the resources requested including the compatibility with the planned resource
- Wide applicability of the outcome to the Member States
- Enhancement of interdisciplinary collaboration
- Use of EUMETSAT data and software will also be considered in the evaluation process.
The evaluation board consists of three representatives of the EUMETSAT Secretariat and up to three representatives from the EUMETSAT Member States. The committee will be chaired by the EUMETSAT Chief Scientist.
Fast-track for small projects
EUMETSAT reserves resources for small fast track projects which can last a maximum of one year. These resources can be applied at any time by submitting the application form along with an extended abstract. EUMETSAT Secretariat will evaluate the applications following the same criteria that is used for a normal application and makes the decision based on the evaluation and resource availability.
Fast track projects shall not exceed following resource limits:
- 50 vCPUs
- 320 GB RAM
- 10 TB Block storage (VM local volumes)
- 10 TB shared file system (NFS)
- 20 TB object storage (S3)
- 4 vGPUs (1 vGPU = 1/8 of NVIDIA GPU RTX A6000)
Project reporting
EUMETSAT expects to receive annual progress reports (except for one-year projects) by three months after each project year and a final report at the latest three months after the end of a project. The report can be submitted via the website using templates for the annual progress and the final report. All reports received will be published on the website.
Acknowledgement for using EWC resources
Project leaders and partners should acknowledge the resources provided by the European Weather Cloud in presentations and publications of project results with the following wording: "We gratefully acknowledge the use of the European Weather Cloud in the context of this research."
Acknowledgement is made for the use of European Weather Cloud computing and storage facilities in this research.
Further information and contact
Further information on the European Weather Cloud can be found on the EWC website or the Knowledge base.
For further information on this call and EUMETSAT data contact our User Service Helpdesk.
