The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) is the United States national observatory for ground-based nighttime ultraviolet-optical-infrared (OUVIR) astronomy. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds NOAO to provide forefront astronomical research facilities for US astronomers. However, professional astronomers from any country in the world may apply to use the telescopes operated by NOAO under the NSF's "open skies" policy. Astronomers submit proposals for peer review to gain access to the telescopes which are scheduled every night of the year for observations. The combination of truly open access and the merit based science proposal process makes NOAO unique in the world.
The Greek Research and Technology Network or GRNET is the national research and education network of Greece. GRNET S.A. provides Internet connectivity, high-quality e-Infrastructures and advanced services to the Greek Educational, Academic and Research community, aiming at minimizing the digital divide and at ensuring equal participation of its members in the global Society of Knowledge. Additionally, GRNET develops digital applications that ensure resource optimization for the Greek State, modernize public functional structures and procedures, and introduce new models of cooperation between public bodies, research and education communities, citizens and businesses. GRnet's executives have been contributors of or occupied board positions in organisations including GÉANT, TERENA, DANTE,GR-IX, Euro-IX,, RIPE NCC. GRNET provides advanced services to the following sectors: Education, Research, Health, Culture. GRNET supports all Universities, Technological Education Institutes, Research Centers and over 9,500 schools via the Greek School Network a population of more than one million people. Video presentations of some of the services are available in Pyxida.
The next-generation network (NGN) is a body of key architectural changes in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind the NGN is that one network transports all information and services by encapsulating these into IP packets, similar to those used on the Internet. NGNs are commonly built around the Internet Protocol, and therefore the term all IP is also sometimes used to describe the transformation of formerly telephone-centric networks toward NGN.
The Space Telescope – European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) was an institution which provided a number of support and service functions primarily for European observers of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It was established in 1984 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and was located at the ESO headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. The ST-ECF ceased operations on 31 December 2010.
Paolo Padovani is an Italian astronomer working at the European Southern Observatory, specializing in the study of Active galactic nuclei including the study of quasars and blazars, evolution and multifrequency studies and extragalactic backgrounds. In 2004 he and several other astronomers discovered 30 supermassive blackholes at the European Astrophysical Virtual Observatory using pioneering techniques.
GIOVE [ˈdʒɔve], or Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element, is the name for two satellites built for the European Space Agency (ESA) to test technology in orbit for the Galileo positioning system.
Astrovirtel is a data archive used as virtual astronomical observatory. The project was funded from 2000 until 2003 and supported by the European Commission's Access to Research Infrastructures action of the Improving Human Potential Programme and managed by the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) on behalf of European Space Agency and European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance or IVOA is a worldwide scientific organisation formed in June 2002. Its mission is to facilitate international coordination and collaboration necessary for enabling global and integrated access to data gathered by astronomical observatories. An information system allowing such an access is called a Virtual Observatory. The main task of the organisation so far has focused on defining standards to ensure interoperability of the different virtual observatory projects already existing or in development.
The US National Virtual Observatory'-NVO- was conceived to allow scientists to access data from multiple astronomical observatories, including ground and space-based facilities, through a single portal. Originally, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the information technology research that created the basic NVO infrastructure through a multi-organization collaborative effort. The NVO was more than a “digital library”; it was a vibrant, growing online research facility akin to a bricks-and-mortar observatory for professional astronomers.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are online services that provide high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V, LXD, runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.
Virtual machine lifecycle management is the class of management that looks at the life cycle of a virtual machine from the viewpoint of the application vs one focused on roles within an organization. A number of major software vendors, including Microsoft and Novell, have begun to release software products aiming at simplifying the administration of larger virtual machine deployments.
The Nordic Data Grid Facility, or NDGF, is a common e-Science infrastructure provided by the Nordic countries for scientific computing and data storage. It is the first and so far only internationally distributed WLCG Tier1 center, providing computing and storage services to experiments at CERN.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app.
Tuenti Technologies, S.L.U is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), that operates with the Tuenti brand, owned by Telefónica. It is a Spain-based tech company, that focuses in providing a cloud experience through its own application and its website to their customers.
SESAR Joint Undertaking is the European public-private partnership that is managing the development phase of the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) Programme that will give Europe a high-performance Air Traffic Management infrastructure which will enable the safe and environmentally friendly development of air transport.
The Virtual Observatory India (VO-India) project is a collaboration between two participating institutes. i.e. Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune. This project is supported by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India.
European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory (EMSO) is a large-scale European distributed Research Infrastructure (RI) for ocean observation, enabling real-time interactive long term monitoring of ocean processes. EMSO allows study of the interaction between the geosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, and the lithosphere; including natural hazards, climate change, and marine ecosystems. EMSO nodes have been deployed at key sites in European seas, starting from the Arctic, through the Atlantic and Mediterranean, to the Black Sea.
The Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Programme is the European Space Agency's initiative designed to support Europe's independent space access and utilization through the timely and accurate information delivery regarding the space environment, and particularly hazards to both in orbit and ground infrastructure. The SSA programme is split into three main segments:
