The Helix Nebula Initiative is a partnership between industry, space and science to establish a dynamic ecosystem, benefiting from open cloud services for the seamless integration of science into a business environment.

Today, the partnership counts over 40 public and private partners.

The Helix Nebula Initiative supports Pillar III “Maximising the growth potential of the digital economy” of the European Digital Single Market: The Commission will launch a European Cloud initiative including cloud services certification, contracts, switching of cloud services providers and a research open science cloud.  # DigitalSingleMarket

The HNI Roadmap

2011-2012: Four challenging flagships using Helix Nebula boost utilisation of science data
2013-2014: A hybrid cloud model is adopted and progressively expanded to combine commercial cloud service providers with publicly funded e-infrastructures
2014: The PICSE and HNSciCloud projects co-funded by the European Commission encourage innovation in the procurement process and service development
2015: Cloud computing, innovation and open science have become European priorities
2016: Research infrastructures, their user communities and value chains, the long tail of science, service providers and funding agencies converge on a model for the European Open Science Cloud at the Helix Nebula Initiative Open Day: Towards the European Open Science Cloud

Related projects and initiatives

2016 - 2018 HNSciCloud: HNSciCloud is the European Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Programme. It aims to create a competitive marketplace of innovative cloud services serving scientific users from a wide range of domains. The marketplace builds on a hybrid cloud platform including commercial cloud service providers, publicly funded e-infrastructures and buyers' in-house resources. To achieve these objectives HNSciCloud will issue a public tender in 2016.

2014 - 2016 PICSE: PICSE is a support action funded under the first wave of H2020 1st call, started on the 1st October 2014 in the field of procurement of cloud services for the public sector.

2012 - 2014 Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud: The Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud funded project supported the massive IT requirements of European scientists. The project aimed to pave the way for the development and exploitation of a Cloud Computing Infrastructure, initially based on the needs of European IT-intense scientific research organisations, while also allowing the inclusion of other stakeholders’ needs (governments, businesses and citizens). The pan-European partnership across academia and industry worked to establish a sustainable European cloud computing infrastructure, supported by industrial partners, which will provide stable computing capacities and services that elastically meet demand. The work started by the Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud project is today continue by the Helix Nebula Initiative.