The Hungarian node is the SZTAKI site of the national research cloud system called as ELKH Cloud. ELKH Cloud is a federation of currently two cloud sites: SZTAKI site and Wigner Data Centre site both located in Budapest. The main objective of ELKH Cloud is to provide cloud computing and storage capacity for the Hungarian researchers either coming from the ELKH research network or universities or companies. It was decided from the very beginning that both clouds should be built on the same cloud technology (Openstack was selected) and keep their technological similarities as much as possible. Nevertheless, some differences in various fields like the applied security concept, authentication mechanism, the size of the resources have been tolerated. We developed a common web page for the two sites and the policy of accessing the resources and supporting the user communities were managed by the two sites in the same way.

The cloud was established in 2016 and since that time it hes been working in a very reliable way with full satisfaction of the research communities. However, by the end of 2019 it was clear that the current cloud capacity is not enough to serve the ever growing needs of the Hungarian scientists. By that time more than 120 projects were run on the cloud and the cloud resources were fully used up. In September 2019 the leadership of ELKH (Eötvös Loránd Research Network) recognizing this situation decided to further develop the cloud and substantially extend its capacity towards even new directions like big data and AI activity support. As a result, on the 1st of July 2020 a one-year project started to realize this planned enhancement of the cloud infrastructure. The planned capacity of ELKH Cloud in every resource category will be at least 3 times bigger than it was earlier and several of them will be augmented by 1 or even 2 orders of magnitude especially those which are needed for big data, AI, data transfer and storage support.