Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies – Starting Community

Project Information

SLICES - SC

Grant agreement ID: 101008468

DOI

10.3030/101008468

Project closed

EC signature date 12 March 2021

Start date 1 March 2021

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Research Infrastructures

Total cost

€ 4 998 986,25

EU contribution

€ 4 998 986,25

Coordinated by

SORBONNE UNIVERSITE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SLICES - SC (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies – Starting Community)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Digital transformation of our society is happening at an unprecedented pace, with the community constantly researching new solutions to support this transformation with ample computational power and connectivity. This is vital for our societies as a driver for capacity building, industrial competitiveness and sovereignty.

The design complexity of such infrastructures requires the usage of sophisticated instruments in order to explore their design space, vulnerabilities, scaling capabilities, agility and security. The size and diversity of systems call for an unprecedent community effort that can be sustained only at the European scale. Research Infrastructures (RI) designed as a Scientific Instrument as defined and monitored by ESFRI (European Scientific Forum for research Infrastructures) is definitely the appropriate approach to follow.

A suitable RI should emerge, with a mission that differs from off-the-shelf commercial solutions: 1) Full control over the parameters of an experiment, 2) Repeatable experiments regardless of the physical infrastructure, 3) Valid experimental results, which are easy to cross-reference and replicate.

SLICES Research Infrastructure (SLICES-RI) aims to provide high-quality experimentation services with emerging technologies covering the area of digital infrastructures (5G/6G, NFV, IoT, and Cloud Computing), at scale. With SLICES-SC, we aspired to foster the community of researchers around this ecosystem, create and strengthen necessary links with relevant industrial stakeholders for the exploitation of the infrastructure, advance existing methods for research reproducibility and experiment repeatability, and design and deploy the necessary solutions for providing SLICES-RI with an easy to access scheme for users from different domains. A set of detailed research activities has been designed to materialize these efforts with tools for providing transnational (remote and physical) access to the facility, as well as virtual access to the data produced over the facilities.

SLICES-SC has constituted an important component on the journey to ESFRI SLICES full operation as a service. It has complemented other actions that were more focused on the infrastructure or governance. SLICES-SC was also a playground to test some of our assumptions regarding SLICES as a service, main technologies, and access. SLICES-SC has been an important playground to act as a catalyst for mobilizing our community as well as preparing the deployment and future operations. The SLICES-SC consortium released its portal that aims at providing unified access and that is smoothly transitioning to the future ESFRI SLICES solution. It was an important tool supporting the launch of the SLICES blueprint paving the way to the future of the SLICES-RI.

Last but not least, SLICES-SC set up the basis of the SLICES Summer School and the SLICES Academy. Both activities are essential for the long-term strategy of SLICES-RI in the field of education, life-long learning and building the community at large.

Entering its pre-operation phase, SLICES-RI has benefited from the work achieved in SLICES-SC and is now highly visible at the international level with a huge potential for impact.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

SLICES-SC has organised and engaged the community through a set of actions:
•Organised and developed the user community with a community of 2000 people, 8 workshops, 3 summer schools, 5 coding events, 8 journal papers, etc. SLICES-SC uptake the organisation of theNetworkingChannel. Thanks to its large and diverse audience. this is featuring first-class researchers, major industrial players as well as inclusiveness and education.
•Raised the awareness of the industrial players and promoted the usage of the RI (e.g. 3 Industry Days and the national info days), creation of the Industrial Advisory Board.
•Joint training and mobility programmes: launch of the SLICES Academy and set of a researchers’ mobility programme (26 grants provided to participants of SLICES Summer Schools and TNA applicants).
•Open call: 4 rounds of open calls were organised providing the selected users (12) transnational access to the SLICES-SC testbeds. The feedback of the users was useful to improve and adapt SLICES services the demand’s needs.
•Supported the sustainability and exploitation potential of the SLICES-RI by engaging the stakeholders at all levels (e.g. Ministries, local level) and promoting the SLICES family projects related to the design and preparation of the governance and funding.

SLICES-SC has also addressed the important issue of access, as well as the case for managing the full research life-cycle:
•Provided access for driving experiments, with the integration of several different experimental islands with experiments being able to be executed through a portal. The SLICES-SC portal (https://portal.slices-sc.eu/) offers generic access to these testbeds, and experiments can be scheduled over their offered infrastructure.
•Enabled virtually anywhere access to the SLICES RI offering transnational access. This was done notably through the establishment of a portal with a common API for reserving and accessing the equipment with single sign-in credentials.
•Provided first common experiment descriptions for cross-disciplinary domains, including several experiments over several domains such as the case of IoT experimentation and overall network management of multiple IoT clusters.
•Started to provide the needed framework to ensure repeatable and reproducible experimentation and validation of novel protocols, notably through the provision of a CKAN server and a GitLab server for the usage by the different testbeds of the SLICES RI, that can host the different sorts of documents, including digital objects, and data generated by the project and by the experiments.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

During the SLICES-SC duration, the consortium achieved significant milestones, expanding the SLICES community and increasing its appeal. It established the technical framework and launched several initiatives, including the Open Call for experimenters, virtual access activities, researcher mobilities, and the SLICES Academy, all aimed at fully meeting the Starting Community objectives. These actions were closely coordinated with other SLICES projects, particularly SLICES-DS (which concluded in August 2022) and SLICES-PP (which began in September 2022).

Thanks to these efforts, the research community has advanced in designing RI, understanding and developing the open research data framework, and managing the entire research life cycle. This sophisticated platform will significantly accelerate scientific progress and deepen understanding. It also provides critical insights for refining scientific methodologies and practices, enabling researchers to measure their study subjects reliably and accurately—a considerable benefit for our relatively young research community.

A key outcome is that SLICES has established itself as a leading global RI, highly competitive with similar initiatives in regions like the USA and China. Its openness fosters collaboration, with established partnerships in the USA, Japan, Brazil, and Africa.

The socio-economic impact of SLICES is promising, given the significance of the field in the innovation triangle (research, education, and innovation). The societal impact is also noteworthy, as the rapid growth of this domain raises important concerns, such as carbon footprint and equal access.

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