The official launch of the EOSC EU Node brought FileSender as close as possible to every representative of the European research and education community. As of now, all of them – students, academic staff and researchers – are only ever a few clicks away from gaining access to a FileSender service (as well as 5 other EOSC pilot services). Access to the EOSC EU Node platform is immediate: it takes no more than an authentication through eduGAIN inter-federation. This is a fantastic expansion of the footprint of the FileSender software, as it is now part of the blueprint for the future EOSC Federation, reaching millions of users; just the number of full-time academic researchers in Europe is estimated at 2M+ and this isn’t counting the number of students and PhDs who’ll gain access.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed service enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any other person or machine. FileSender explicitly targets mass usage and is built to service the 99% of users who would rather spend their time on other things than figuring out how to perform large file transfers.
On October 22, 2024 the European Commission announced the official launch of the EOSC EU Node services, marking a critical milestone in its goal to accelerate the adoption of Open Science. Serving as a connection point to the emerging EOSC ecosystem, the EOSC EU Node is both a platform as well as an information gateway helping to bring together digital research infrastructure across Europe.
The full deployment of the EOSC EU Node includes a robust set of services that address key challenges in modern research workflows, allowing users to operate efficiently within data-intensive environments. The following 6 services are now live:
- File Sync & Share (ownCloud) – enable automatic file syncing and secure sharing across locations and teams;
- Interactive Notebooks (JupyterHub) – create and share documents that include live code in programming languages (e.g., R and Python), mathematical equations, visualisations, and explanatory text;
- Large File Transfer (FileSender) – streamline large file transfers online with added security and integrity;
- Virtual Machines (OpenStack) – researchers are provided compute resources to launch their own Virtual Machines to create isolated environments for experimenting with different configurations, software setups, or algorithms;
- Cloud Container Platform (OKD – OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution) – deploy cloud-native containerised applications that can easily scale;
- Bulk Data Transfer (FTS – File Transfer Service) – simplifies the migration, automation, and monitoring of data transfer workflows while preserving existing client-side configurations for authentication, access, and firewalls at origin.
These services not only facilitate collaboration across borders, but also enable researchers to work with large-scale data, develop advanced simulations, and execute complex computations – all within a secure and highly integrated environment.
The EOSC EU Node User Access Policy sets out who’s eligible, what usage is permitted, and how much service is to be provided to particular individuals. The latter is administered through the allocation and spending of Credits, and this is distributed as such:
- students and faculty staff (100 Credits);
- researchers (500 Credits).
These Credits are virtual, that is to say, they cannot be converted to any monetary value. Credits are spend on the various services at rates displayed in the EOSC EU Node portal. Spent Credits are replenished at the end of every three-month (i.e., 90 days) period, at which point they are topped up to the level of the default allocation.
To gain access to the above services, users need to be able to authenticate through the eduGAIN inter-federation. As this is an EU provided service, access can only be gained through the Identity Providers of a restricted set of countries, these being the EU27 countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden) as well as the Horizon Europe Associated Countries.
So, if you are from the R&E community in any of these countries – take the opportunity to start using FileSender now! If you happen to be a member of staff of the European Commission or any of its agencies, you’re also in luck: that category is also eligible. You can start using FileSender, unlocking new opportunities for yourself too!
We are proud of the NREN community which supported FileSender development and contributed it to EOSC EU Node services. We are grateful to AARNet (Australia), ACOnet (Austria), Arnes (Slovenia), Belnet (Belgium), CSC (Finland), DeiC (Denmark), GARR (Italy), HEAnet (Ireland), REANNZ (New Zealand), Switch (Switzerland) and to the German Cancer Research Center – totally 11 organisations – supporting FileSender financially with active contribution agreements, and 2 NRENs – SURF (the Netherlands) and RNP (Brazil) – supporting greatly in-kind.
Please see Support and Mailing lists to stay updated on the latest FileSender developments and important news.
