The University of Montpellier and the Research Institute for Development sign a cooperation agreement for the pooling of 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 joint commitment to pooling the infrastructure and expertise essential to cutting-edge equipment and technologies for research and researcher support. Backed by the Meso@LR mesocenter and the UM Institute of Data Sciences, this agreement contributes to the dynamic structuring of the site and promotes the construction of a first-rate environment around the challenges of "data" in the national scientific landscape.
Pooling resources is essential for scientific and technological progress
A crucial issue of our time, the massification of data and the rise in its exploitation, particularly through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, open up immense prospects for scientific and technological advances, particularly in areas where Montpellier excels and in its partnerships with scientific communities in the South. At the regional level, this pooling of resources is supported by equipment financed under the 2015-2020 CPER (State-Region Partnership Contract) 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 essential for scientific progress, data and data cross-referencing 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 coming to fruition, made possible 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. Pooling efforts allows for economies of scale that make it possible to build competitive state solutions (storage is offered at costs comparable to those of GAFAM).
Specific skills and support
The effective use of tools, methods, and data requires dedicated support and environments that can currently only be built through a collaborative effort based on joint reflection. Therefore, in order for each partner institution to benefit from and contribute to the maintenance and technical and economic sustainability of the solution, around 40 people worked on the various stages of specifying requirements and defining the technical architecture for the governance models to be implemented.
Based on a common, understandable, and accessible offering, the storage space will be directly linked to IRD equipment hosted at CINES in order to best serve the needs of laboratories. Beyond the economies of scale enabled by mutualization
, this research data "drive" aims to host UMR data in sovereign and secure environments, in line with national guidelines 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 joint research units (UMRs), in line with the institutional digital strategy set out in the organization's Digital Master Plan. Indeed, a large proportion of users in the units are located at IRD sites in Occitanie. The regional offering enhances 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 being developed. These skills will enable it to roll out solutions in the IRD's areas of intervention in the South. The signing of the agreement will make it possible to extend the capacity of the mass storage offering currently in service for some twenty IRD joint research units.
"The signing of this collaboration agreement on digital services for research formalizes a shared commitment to serving laboratories and promoting scientific progress and interdisciplinarity. It represents a commitment to pooling infrastructure and expertise. This agreement extends the site's structural priorities to meet the needs of data science and open science shared with the Global South," explains Valérie Verdie, CEO of IRD.