The Gaia-X Hackathon #7 was part of the Tech-X 2024 conference that took place on May 23rd and 24th in Luxembourg. This year’s event awarded prizes to the top three teams based on their impact on the community, the adoption of Gaia-X technologies, and the quality of their presentations. The TNO/BIT/SmartSense/CoE-DSC-team was awarded the first prize with their presentation “Cloud federation with Gaia-X for SME CSPs”.
How can Gaia-X help SME Cloud Service Providers?
Many have heard that Gaia-X offers a trust framework for data sharing. But what if you want to share computing resources among each other as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)? How can Gaia-X help us there? The infrastructure layer is essential to support data sharing initiatives, as “data does not flow on rainbows”, a statement from Gaia-X CEO Ulrich Ahle.
It is a vision of an open European cloud ecosystem, where cloud (computing) services can be offered, shared, and combined in a stack that offers application providers more choice where their data is processed and stored, hence increasing digital sovereignty. These are the aims of the IPCEI-CIS initiative and ECOFED in particular as TNO. But also the goal of the Gaia-X lighthouse project Structura-X, supported by the Dutch Centre of Excellence for Data Sharing & Cloud (CoE-DSC).
Data sharing trust-issues solved
When two Cloud Service Providers want to peer their computational clusters, in order to pool their resources to accommodate a demanding computing workload for example, how can they find each other in an open ecosystem? And more importantly, how are they able to trust each other at a distance to peer their infrastructures?
During the two days of the Hackathon, the TNO/BIT/Smartsense/CoE-DSC-team looked at how a digital contract between two CSPs could be operationalized. By using semantic technologies, the team ensured compliance of legal contracts between parties wishing to peer their infrastructures. And hereby showed how data sharing trust-issues between parties could be solved.
TNO, BIT and SmartSense Hackathon winners
For this exploration during the 2024 Gaia-X Tech-X Conference & Hackathon the TNO/BIT/ SmartSense/CoE-DSC-team was awarded the first prize! Big shout out and congratulations to Giulia Biagioni, Serkan Keskin and Marko Milovanović (TNO/CoE-DSC), Lawrence Cook and Stefan Kooman (BIT) and Maharshi Suchak and Yogi Dhingani (SmartSense).
First step towards a federated European open cloud infrastructure
The winning Proof of Concept (POC) is the first step in developing the technological foundation for validating and verifying (legal) requirements for the exchange of cloud services. And in the vision of the team this POC will help to stimulate an open European cloud ecosystem, leading to a federated open cloud infrastructure for Europe. The team will continue working on this as part of the aforementioned IPCEI-CIS ECOFED project, as well as the Structura-X project.
Do you want to learn more or participate?
Follow the journey on www.CoE-DSC.nl, www.Gaia-X.nl or even better: do you want to contribute to this endeavour? Please reach out via info@CoE-DSC.nl
Watch the video recording of the hackathon presentation: https://youtu.be/hhFeU2NLKfM
