---
title: "Exoscale awarded the 10’000 CPUs phase 3 of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud"
description: "Exoscale awarded the 10’000 CPUs phase 3 of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud"
date: 2018-02-08
author: "Antoine Coetsier"
url: https://www.exoscale.com/blog/exoscale-10k-cpus/
---
# Exoscale awarded the 10’000 CPUs phase 3 of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud

The vast amount of data necessary for scientific research pose great challenges
in the fields of data ingestion, management, and processing. Over the coming
10-15 years, these challenges will grow exponentially. Europe is no stranger to
these challenges, prompting the European Commission, in April this year, to
launch the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The vision of the EOSC is to
offer Europe’s 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology
professionals a virtual environment with open and seamless services for
storage, management, analysis, and re-use of research data across borders and
scientific disciplines.

![Exoscale awarded the 10’000 CPUs phase 3 of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/exoscale-10k-cpus/cover.jpg)  

This is why in 2016 ten of Europe’s leading public
research organisations led by CERN - with co-funding from the European
Commission - launched the Helix Nebula Science Cloud ([HNSciCloud][])
Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP). The goal of the HNSciCloud €5.3 million joint
PCP tender is to establish a European hybrid cloud platform that will support
the high-performance, data-intensive scientific use-cases of these ten
procurers and of the research sector at large. 

HNSciCloud introduces an
innovative hybrid model that brings together public research organizations and
their ICT internal teams with commercial cloud suppliers to offer
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Europe’s research communities in order to
help them cost-effectively manage the expected growth in both data and
processing requirements.  

Following successful completion of the competitive
Design and Prototype Phases, Exoscale, part of the RHEA Group led consortium
has been awarded one of two Pilot Phase contracts.  Along with technology
partners like [SixSQ][] which enables the platform to implement complex automation
and cloud orchestration schemes, Exoscale will provide up to 10’000 CPUs and 1
PB of [storage][] for the next 9 months. 

The award ceremony took place on February
6th, 2018, at INFN in Bologna, Italy. Community and user focused events will be
held throughout the duration of the project at the member premises to showcase
the technology and achievements, the first of which will be held at ESRF in
April. The other procurers are German DESY, EMBL, French CNRS, Spanish IFAE,
UK’s STFC, Dutch KIT, EGI and Surf Sara.  

*About RHEA Group - Engineering
specialist with headquarters in Belgium and operating for over 25 years, it
employs more than 350 people in nine countries in Europe and Canada.*

 [HNSciCloud]: http://www.helix-nebula.eu/
 [SixSQ]: https://sixsq.com/
 [storage]: /object-storage/