China Science and Technology Cloud (CSTCloud), initiated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and implemented by the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of CAS, joined the global identity federation community eduGAIN in early October.

eduGAIN is a global community which connects 69 identity federations with more than 2,800 identity providers and 5,000 service providers. Becoming a member of eduGAIN will help facilitate cross-border flow of digital resources contributed by the Chinese research community and guarantee the consolidated foundation for the connectivity between CSTCloud and other research e-infrastructures in the world.

CSTCloud is a national platform to provide scientists with efficient and integrated cloud solutions in the retrieval, access, use, transaction, delivery and other aspects of sharing scientific information and relevant services. The platform connects all the institutes in CAS, many national research institutes, scientific data centers and more than 80% national research infrastructures.

CSTCloud has been supporting over 100,000 researchers in China across disciplinary boundaries and key international research projects ranging from fusion energy research with International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and particle physics with Large Hadron Collider Open Network Environment (LHCONE) to radio telescope observations with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio telescope. These data-intensive research collaboration requires easy-to-use, secure and open access by working with global interfederation services like eduGAIN.

Previously, CSTCloud and its partners proposed the idea of Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC), which has been supported by collaborative projects of CAS and European Open Science Cloud to launch the cross-continental open science cloud demonstration test-bed.

Contributing to the eduGAIN community is one concrete step towards better interconnection and interoperability with e-infrastructures out of China to support global research cooperation and GOSC action plan.