The University of Montpellier and the Research Institute for Development have signed a cooperation agreement to share digital tools with joint research units
On Thursday, April 14, 2022, Valérie Verdier, President and CEO of IRD, and Philippe Augé, President ofUM a partnership agreement to formalize their shared commitment to pooling the infrastructure and expertise essential for state-of-the-art equipment and technologies in support of research and researcher support. Backed by the Meso@LR mesocenter andUM Institute of Data Sciences, this agreement contributes to the site’s development and promotes the creation of a world-class environment focused on data-related challenges within the national scientific landscape.
Collaboration is essential for making scientific and technological progress
A crucial challenge of our time, the explosion of data and the growing use of data analytics—particularly through the application of artificial intelligence algorithms—open up immense prospects for scientific and technological advancements, especially in the fields that are the strength of the Montpellier campus and in its partnerships with scientific communities in the Global South. At the regional level, this collaboration is supported by facilities funded under the 2015–2020 CPER by the Occitanie Region and Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, and strengthens the eastern operational center of the Occitanie Regional Data Center (DROcc).
“At a time when interdisciplinarity is essential for driving scientific progress, data and the integration of data sets 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 shape, made possible by the work of the ISDM and Meso@LR teams,” said Philippe Augé, President ofUM, at the signing of the agreement.
This partnership agreement betweenUM IRD follows the one recently signed with Inserm and precedes the one currently being finalized with CIRAD. Pooling our efforts creates economies of scale that make it possible to develop competitive cloud solutions (the storage service is provided at costs comparable to those of GAFAM).
Specialized expertise and support
The effective use of tools, methods, and data requires support and dedicated environments that can currently only be developed through collaborative efforts based on shared thinking. Therefore, to ensure that each partner institution can benefit from and contribute to the maintenance of the solution, as well as its technical and economic sustainability, approximately forty people worked on the various stages of requirements specification, defining the technical architecture, and establishing the governance models to be implemented.
Based on a common, understandable, and accessible offering, the storage space will be directly connected to the IRD’s equipment hosted at CINES in order to best serve the needs of the laboratories. Beyond the economies of scale enabled by shared data storage, this research data “drive” aims to host UMR data in sovereign and secure environments, in accordance with national guidelines on data protection and openness.
A key element of the IRD’s digital strategy
For IRD, the goal is to expand its range of digital services for joint research units (UMRs), in line with the institution’s digital strategy outlined in its Digital Master Plan. Indeed, a large proportion of users in these units are based at IRD sites in Occitanie. The regional offering complements the institute’s institutional digital services. This initiative will enable the IRD to strengthen its data management capabilities to support the work of researchers in the North, thanks to shared tools currently under development. These capabilities will allow the IRD to implement solutions in its operational areas in the Global South. The signing of the agreement will enable the expansion of the massive storage capacity currently in use for some twenty IRD UMRs.
“The signing of this collaboration agreement on digital services for research formalizes a shared path dedicated to supporting laboratories and promoting scientific progress and interdisciplinarity. It represents a commitment to the pooling of infrastructure and expertise. This agreement builds on the site’s structural priorities to meet the needs of data science, open science, and shared science with the Global South,” explains Valérie Verdie, CEO of the IRD.