A Technical Services Roadmap for supporting Life Science Research in Europe

This report provides an update to the ELIXIR Technical Services Roadmap generated in Summer 2015 by the ELIXIR Compute Platform before the start of the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE project. Since then it has been used as the ‘blueprint’ for the technical activities taking place within the ELIXIR Compute Platform and to support the ELIXIR Scientific Programme 2014-2018. Within the project, the efforts are focussed on the marine metagenomics, forest and crop plants, rare disease and human data communities as well as training provision (ELIXIR-EXCELERATE WP6 to 9 and WP11). These user-facing activities were broken down into individual Technical Use Cases (TUCs) that represented ‘generic’ technical activities that could be used to demonstrate elements of the ELIXIR Compute Platform. The majority of the requirements have been captured and a set of services drawn from European e-Infrastructures and ELIXIR Nodes are now being established to meet these needs. Now, after a year of activity, the ELIXIR Technical Services Roadmap is being revised and updated to reflect the experiences of the last year and to help inform ELIXIR’s researchers and application developers of the ELIXIR Compute Platform services that will be available for them to use in the coming years. For ELIXIR Nodes and associated Infrastructure Service providers, this report identifies the technologies that should be deployed to enable ELIXIR to provide a consistent set of Infrastructure Services