The Université de Montpellier and the Institut de recherche pour le développement sign a cooperation agreement to share digital tools for joint research units.

On Thursday, April 14, 2022, Valérie Verdier, President and CEO of IRD, and Philippe Augé, President of UM, signed a partnership agreement to formalize their shared commitment to pooling the infrastructure and skills required for cutting-edge equipment and technologies to serve research and support researchers. Backed by the Meso@LR mesocenter and UM's Data Science Institute, this agreement contributes to the dynamic structuring of the site and helps to build a first-rate environment around the challenges of "data" in the national scientific landscape.

Pooling is essential for scientific and technological advances

A crucial issue of our time, the massification of data and the increasing power of its exploitation, notably through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, open up immense prospects for scientific and technological advances, particularly in the areas that are the strength of the Montpellier site and its partnerships with scientific communities in the South. On a regional scale, this pooling is based on equipment financed under the 2015-2020 CPER by the Occitanie Region and Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, and reinforces the Eastern operational center of the Occitanie Regional Data Center (DROcc).

"At a time when interdisciplinarity is crucial to scientific progress, data and their cross-fertilization are a real challenge. I am therefore delighted that our joint strategy in this area with the IRD, one of our closest partners, is now taking concrete form, thanks to the work of the ISDM and Meso@LR teams", said Philippe Augé, President of the UM, at the signing of the agreement.

This partnership agreement between UM and IRD follows on from the one recently signed with Inserm, and precedes the one currently being finalized with CIRAD. The pooling of efforts enables economies of scale, making it possible to build competitive state-of-the-art solutions (the storage offer is produced at costs comparable to those of GAFAM).

Specific skills and support

The effective use of tools, methods and data requires support and dedicated environments, which can currently only be built through a shared effort based on joint reflection. So that each partner institution can benefit from and contribute to the maintenance and technical and economic sustainability of the solution, some forty people worked on the various stages of specifying requirements, defining the technical architecture and the governance models to be put in place.

Based on a common, comprehensible and accessible offer, the storage space will be directly linked to IRD equipment hosted at CINES, to best serve the needs of the laboratories. Over and above the economies of scale made possible by
mutualization, this research data "drive" aims to host UMR data on sovereign and secure environments, in line with national directives on data protection and openness.

A key point in IRD's digital strategy

For the IRD, the aim is to enhance its range of digital services for UMRs, in line with the institutional digital strategy set out in the organization's Schéma Directeur du Numérique (Digital Master Plan). Indeed, a large proportion of users in the units are located on IRD sites in Occitania. The regional offering will enhance the Institute's institutional digital offering. This dynamic will enable the IRD to strengthen its data management skills to support the work of researchers in the North, thanks to the shared tools currently under construction. These skills will enable IRD to implement solutions in the countries where it operates. The signing of the agreement will extend the capacities of the massive storage facilities currently in use by some twenty IRD UMRs.

"The signing of this collaboration agreement on digital services for research formalizes a common path to serve laboratories and promote scientific advances and interdisciplinarity. It represents a commitment to sharing infrastructures and skills. This agreement is an extension of the site's structuring priorities to meet the needs of data science and open science shared with the South," explains IRD CEO Valérie Verdie.