To the next generation of spatial data infrastructures.
A new vision to the production, management and distribution of spatial data where cloud technology joins geographical data inventory and query systems, carried out collaboratively with best-known open source projects.

Terradue works to exploit and strengthen best practices in distributed data processing, archiving and discovery for Earth sciences. We focus our activities on the use of web services, GRID and Cloud technologies to support distributed spatial data management, and high performance computing applications in collaborative digital environments. Our emphasis is on the immediate delivery of robust operational systems while keeping a concrete roadmap to build the next generation data processing and storage systems.

The sixth edition of the UK-ITALY Business Awards was held on 24 January 2013 in Milan at the Italian Stock Exchange, in the presence of the British Minister for Business and Innovation Michael Fallon, and the British Ambassador in Italy Christopher Prentice.

The British Government and UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) recognized Italian companies who have chosen the United Kingdom as a destination for their business development and internationalization. "We are all committed at Terradue to contribute novel solutions to the Space market. Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics are key technologies to boost innovation in Climate Change research and applications" said Fabrice Brito, Terradue's CEO.

Terradue won the Space Innovation prize, awarded from the category dedicated to young, fast moving companies who are setting new standards of excellence and innovation in their respective fields. Hervé Caumont, Terradue's Program Manager received the prize from the hands of HM Ambassador to Italy. Hervé commented at the event: "Terradue UK was incorporated in June 2011, with offices at the European Space Agency (ESA) Business Incubation Centre (BIC) in Harwell, a focal point for the UK’s growing high-tech space community, and for our skills in Earth Observations data management".

During the official ceremony, Michael Fallon, Minister of State for Business and Enterprise underlined “The reasons for which Italian investment is so highly sought after can be summed up in one word, which has been aptly chosen as the underlying theme for this year’s UK-ITALY Business Awards: innovation”.

Closing the event, UK Trade & Investment and Borsa Italiana jointly announced a new collaboration in promoting the "Elite" project, a groundbreaking portfolio of tools and services for growth and internationalization, designed to boost Italian SMEs visibility and attractiveness to potential investors.

UK in ITALY Press Release

Today a consortium of leading IT providers and three of Europe’s biggest research centres (CERN, EMBL and ESA) announced a partnership to launch a European cloud computing platform. ‘Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud’, will support the massive IT requirements of European scientists, and become available to governmental organisations and industry after an initial pilot phase. The partnership is working to establish a sustainable European cloud computing infrastructure, supported by industrial partners, which will provide stable computing capacities and services that elastically meet demand.

This pan-European partnership across academia and industry is in line with the Digital Agenda of the European Commission and will foster innovation for science and create new commercial markets.

During a two-year pilot phase, Helix Nebula will be deployed and tested based on three flagship projects proposed by CERN, EMBL and ESA: to accelerate the search for the elusive Higgs particle, to boost large-scale genomic analyses in biomedical research, and support research into natural disasters.

First, CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, will have access to more computing power to process data from the international ATLAS experiment at its Large Hadron Collider accelerator. "CERN's computing capacity needs to keep-up with the enormous amount of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider and we see Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud as a great way of working with industry to meet this challenge", said Frederic Hemmer, head of CERN's IT department.

Second, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is setting up a new service to simplify the analysis of large genomes, such as those from mammals, allowing a deeper insight into evolution and biodiversity across a range of organisms. “The quantities of genomic sequence data are vast and the needs for high performance computing infrastructures and bioinformatics expertise to analyse these data pose a challenge for many laboratories. EMBL’s novel cloud-based whole-genome-assembly and annotation pipeline involves expertise from the Genomics Core facility in Germany, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, and EMBL Heidelberg's IT Services. It will allow scientists, at EMBL and around the world, to overcome these hurdles and provide the right infrastructure on demand,” said Rupert Lueck, head of IT services at EMBL.

Third, the European Space Agency (ESA), in partnership with the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is collaborating with the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, to create an Earth observation platform focusing on earthquake and volcano research.
This undertaking is done in the framework of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a voluntary partnership of governments and international organisations. Volker Liebig, ESA Director for Earth observation programmes, said, “Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud is a partnership with the potential to support an utmost exploitation of ESA satellite data, as well as to bring other communities on board to better understand the geophysical phenomena of our planet.”

The commercial partners are Atos, Capgemini, CloudSigma, Interoute, Logica, Orange Business Services, SAP, SixSq, Telefonica, Terradue, Thales, The Server Labs and TSystems, along with the Cloud Security Alliance, the OpenNebula Project and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI.eu). They are working together to establish a federated and secure high-performance computing cloud platform. More scientific organisations and service providers are welcome to join Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud. For more details and updates about Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud, please visit us on Facebook, follow-us on Twitter or send an email to contact@helix-nebula.eu

About CERN
CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Its headquarters are in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to membership. The European Commission, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, UNESCO and the United States of America, all have Observer status.
Press contact:

CERN Press Office
press.office (at) cern.ch
+41 (0)22 767 34 32
+41 (0)22 767 21 41

About EMBL
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is a basic research institute sponsored by public research funding from 20 member states (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) and associate member state Australia. Research at EMBL is conducted by approximately 85 independent groups covering molecular biology. The laboratory has five units: the main laboratory in Heidelberg, outstations in Hinxton (the European Bioinformatics Institute), Grenoble, Hamburg, and Monterotondo near Rome. The cornerstones of EMBL’s mission are: to perform basic research in molecular biology; to train scientists, students and visitors at all levels; to offer vital services to scientists in Member States; to develop new instruments and methods in the life sciences, and to actively engage in technology transfer activities. Around 190 students are enrolled in EMBL’s International PhD programme. Additionally, the laboratory offers a platform for dialogue with the general public through various science communication activities such as lecture series, visitor programmes and the dissemination of scientific achievements.
Press contact:

Lena Raditsch
Head of Communications and Public Relations
+49 62213878125
lena.raditsch (at) embl.de

About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. ESA is an international organisation with 19 Member States. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programmes and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country. ESA’s job is to draw up the European space programme and carry it through. ESA's programmes are designed to find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System and the Universe, as well as to develop satellite?based technologies and services, and to promote European industries. ESA also works closely with space organisations outside Europe.
Press contact:

Dr. Maryline Lengert Senior Advisor
+39 06 941 80430
maryline.lengert (at) esa.int

About Terradue
Terradue works to exploit and strengthen best practices in distributed data processing, archiving and discovery for Earth sciences. We focus our activities on the use of web services, GRID and Cloud technologies to support distributed spatial data management, and high performance computing applications in collaborative digital environments. Our emphasis is on the immediate delivery of robust operational systems while keeping a concrete roadmap to build the next generation data processing and storage systems.
Press contact:

Fabrice Brito, Terradue's CEO
+39 0680368952
fabrice.brito (at) terradue.com

Terradue is providing the Cloud virtual archive for the biggest ESA SAR data repatriation! This virtual archive represents ESA contribution to the supersites initiative. This huge amount of SAR data (over than ten thousand images) will then be accessible to science communities dealing with interferometry, landslide and change detection. In the last 20 years, scientists have ordered ERS-1/2 and Envisat data from ESA. Now, they can ship this data to UNAVCO that deals with the upload to the virtual archive. Coupled with state-of-the-art data discovery mechanisms, it has never been easier to discover and access the repatriated SAR data. The virtual archive is a Cloud solution provided Storage-as-a-Service for storing the data and is coupled with complementary services:

• User authentication and authorization
• Data discovery implementing simple interfaces such as OpenSearch and results in Atom, RDF and KML format
• Data access via common web protocols such as HTTP

The virtual archive is also packed with the ability to host virtual images to process the SAR data available.

On May 20, 2008, a deck of clouds over the Pacific Ocean provided an optical display for the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite. The ring-shaped, rainbow-like phenomenon, known as a glory, appears through the length of the left of this image.

The most obvious ring is about 60 kilometers wide in its center; the red and orange wavelengths are most visible. A glory is caused by the scattering of sunlight by a cloud made of water droplets that are all roughly the same size. It always appears in the spot directly opposite the Sun, from the perspective of the viewer; imagine a line connecting the Sun, the viewer, and the spot where the glory appears. This spot is called the anti-solar point. Since the anti-solar point is also where the shadow of a viewer would appear, people have observed glories that have the shadow of an airplane, a hot air balloon, or even their own giant shadows in the center. In the case of this image, the Aqua satellite, which orbits more than 700 kilometers above the Earth, is too far away to cast a detectable shadow.
Another interesting feature in the scene is the yin-yang-shaped vortices at the upper right of the image. These vortices, properly known as Von Karman Vortices, appear downwind of islands that perturb the flow of air like a boulder creates an eddy downstream in a river. The large image shows the islands, and farther northeast, part of the Baja California Peninsula.

Terradue has expertise in the successful development and integration of geospatial and Earth observation services for operational settings. From global environmental analysis using massive amounts of Earth observation data, to regional land change detection with complex third party algorithms, Terradue has delivered GRID services that are currently used by the global research community.

image credits: NASA