ESG4Stars, Sustainable Scientific Workflows for Research Infrastructures, is a Horizon Europe project bringing together 14 partners from nine countries. Its aim is to reduce the ecological footprint of scientific computing and data analysis, building on the Galaxy network established by the earlier EuroScienceGateway project.

The project will collect and publish data on the energy and resources used by scientific computing jobs. This will help to identify tools, workflows and file formats with the greatest potential for improvement across bioinformatics, bioimaging and cheminformatics. ESG4Stars will develop solutions to reduce data transfer and storage, avoid repeated computations and improve the allocation of computing resources, without compromising scientific throughput or reproducibility. Combined with training, creating user awareness, and sharing best practices for scientists and research infrastructure operators, the project will provide sustainable solutions that are transferable across Science Clusters for reducing the energy consumption of European Research Infrastructure. 

ELIXIR Belgium is taking the lead in WP6: Foundational Data Optimization and it contributes significantly to WP5: EOSC Onboarding, Sustainability & Ecosystem Uptake, WP7: Advanced Data Integration, WP8: Compute Optimisation & Scaling, and WP9: Smart Compute Orchestration.