Description of the RI

The Agency’s e-infrastructure for research and education complies with European standards and demands by offering a complex portfolio of services, extensive connection to approximately 40 National Research and Education Network e-infrastructures in Europe (NRENs), and indirect connection to an additional 60 or so non-European NRENs. The e-infrastructure covers all internationally accepted functions of ICT-based communication and cooperation, information processing and data storage, by providing all research areas with e-infrastructure.

The e-infrastructure, as part of the GÉANT infrastructure, the European backbone network connecting the NRENs and supporting the ICT infrastructure for research and education in Europe, and also PRACE and EuroHPC, the pan-European supercomputing infrastructures, offers, among other services, multimedia information processing, resource- and service virtualisations, federated authentication and provides stable and full-featured connection and cooperation possibilities. The e-infrastructure enables access to all research institutions and researchers in Europe, including all major European research infrastructures (ESFRI, ERIC and others).

Owing to its widespread domestic and international network of developers, service providers and users, the Agency has a vast array of cooperation partners; partnerships with more than 500 institutions in Hungary and thousands of scientific entities active in various science domains across Europe and globally have been established. Research- and education communities in Hungary can enjoy the benefits of these communities to further develop their relationships and networks.

In addition to serving institutions and researchers, the Agency cooperates with key players of research in Hungary by the way of research- and development agreements in order to allow cutting-edge technologies to be tested on an experimental basis at Hungary's most significant e-infrastructure.

Activities and Services

The Agency’s e-infrastructure connects more than 1.7 million domestic users with a highest-speed, low latency network to the international education- and research network at speeds of up to 500 Gbps. The HPC operated by the Agency with more than 327 TFlops (6000 CPU cores + 252 GPUs) and 2 PB disk space is complemented by the C4E cloud system, serving the Hungarian research- and education community with more than 5700 cores and 17 PB storage space. HPC capacity expansion is being upgraded to more than 5PFlops. These capacities allow researchers of any science domain to run scientific applications that require various computing capabilities on a regular and ad hoc basis and to store and manage scientific data in accordance with the Open Science and FAIR principles as part of the EOSC collaboration. In addition, the Agency is responsible for the operation and development of the educational and research identification and authorization management system in Hungary (eduroam, eduID, eduGAIN, eduTEAMS). The Agency additionally provides a comprehensive portfolio of services to support education and research with multimedia (VoIP, video conferencing, webinars, knowledge-sharing multimedia repository), to help research workflows move toward open science (research notebooks, archiving repositories). and to endorse learning infrastructures (Learning Management Systems, educational repository).

The Agency has been actively participating in several international projects (Horizon Europe, H2020, etc.) to improve services and strengthen collaboration among partners.