BlueBRIDGE - BlueBRIDGE VREs operation activity: final report

Virtual Research Environments and Virtual Laboratories are among the key products the BlueBRIDGE project is called to develop and to deliver to serve its target communities and application scenarios. The deployment and operation of a Virtual Research Environment is a task that involves the reuse of existing technologies as well as the development of new technologies aiming at offering new facilities. The development of the technology, both the generic as well as that which is oriented to serve the specific needs of a given community/target scenario, is captured by other deliverables. This report describes the activities performed to provide the BlueBRIDGE community with the set of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and Virtual Laboratories (VLabs) hosted by the BlueBRIDGE portal during the entire duration of the project. A total of 66 VREs / VLabs have been deployed and operated, overall serving more than 3000 users across 32 countries and 124 different organizations. Such VREs / VLabs include "private" ones (66% circa), i.e. environments whose membership is by invitation only, "restricted" ones (15% circa), i.e. environments that users can request to join yet the requests have to be explicitly approved by the managers, and "open" ones (18% circa), i.e. environments that any user can request to join and no approval is needed. The 45% circa of the served users is exploiting "open" environments, the 34% circa is exploiting "private" environments, and the 19% circa is exploiting "restricted" environments. During the project, more than 980 requests for support, incident or bug have been resolved (441 requests for support and 546 requests for incidents and bugs).