Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SLICES - SC (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies – Starting Community)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-03-01 bis 2022-08-31
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. Research Infrastructures (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 aims at providing 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 aspire 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 constitutes an important component on the journey to ESFRI SLICES full operation as a service. It complements other actions that are more focused on the infrastructure or governance. SLICES-SC is also a playground to test some of our assumptions regarding SLICES as a service, main technologies, and access. SLICES-SC is an important playground to act as a catalyst for mobilizing our community as well as preparing the deployment and future operations. Ultimately, we aim at providing unified access that will smoothly transition to the expected ESFRI SLICES solution.
SLICES Research Infrastructure aims at providing 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 aspire 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 constitutes an important component on the journey to ESFRI SLICES full operation as a service. It complements other actions that are more focused on the infrastructure or governance. SLICES-SC is also a playground to test some of our assumptions regarding SLICES as a service, main technologies, and access. SLICES-SC is an important playground to act as a catalyst for mobilizing our community as well as preparing the deployment and future operations. Ultimately, we aim at providing unified access that will smoothly transition to the expected ESFRI SLICES solution.
During the first reporting period of the project, key actions towards these objectives have been carried out as described below.
SLICES-SC has organised and engaged the community through a set of actions:
• Organised and developed the user community with a community of 2500 people, 3 workshops (together with SLICES-DS), 1 summer school with more than 50 participants, 19 presentations in third-party events, 3 journal papers, and 5 conference papers, social media presence on Twitter and LinkedIn, creation of the slack channel, 16,337 website visitors, while 12,684 unique page views (On 31 Aug. 2022), 4 blog posts, and 2 roll-ups created and used in physical presence events. SLICES-SC uptake the organisation of theNetworkingChannel enhancing the community and the dissemination channels and tools.
• Raised the awareness of the industrial players and promoted the usage of the infrastructure with 1 Industry Day with more than 50 participants and the national info days (within the process of a national roadshow – see below) where industrial players have been involved, 1 exhibition organised in Finland with the 6G Flagship Program where industrial stakeholders were involved, creation of the Industrial Advisory Board.
• Started the preparation of joint training programmes through a survey about the training material and events at the institution and testbed levels, preparing the SLICES Academy, the inclusion of SLICES-RI as co-organiser of the educational community on networking research, The Networking Channel, and the organisation of the content of the summer school.
• Supported the sustainability and exploitation potential of the SLICES-RI by engaging the stakeholders at all levels through direct contacts by the partners with their Ministries and through a SLICES national roadshow through Europe (already 5 countries visited: France, Germany, Hungary, and Spain during the first reporting period and a 6th event already took place in Switzerland at the beginning of the second reporting period), in relation with the other actions of 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 first access for driving experiments, with the integration of several different experimental islands, offering experimentation with cutting-edge equipment have been to a single SLICES-SC facility, with experiments being able to be executed through a portal. The resources integrated into the facility so far are provided by SU, UTH, EURECOM, PSNC, OULU, IMDEA, COSMOTE, IMEC, and SZTAKI testbeds. The SLICES-SC portal offers generic access to these testbeds, and experiments can be scheduled over their offered infrastructure.
• Enabled virtually anywhere access to the SLICES infrastructure, making available the infrastructure described above to first open call experimenters, 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, with previous experiments that have been published and are repeatable experiments, 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.
SLICES-SC has organised and engaged the community through a set of actions:
• Organised and developed the user community with a community of 2500 people, 3 workshops (together with SLICES-DS), 1 summer school with more than 50 participants, 19 presentations in third-party events, 3 journal papers, and 5 conference papers, social media presence on Twitter and LinkedIn, creation of the slack channel, 16,337 website visitors, while 12,684 unique page views (On 31 Aug. 2022), 4 blog posts, and 2 roll-ups created and used in physical presence events. SLICES-SC uptake the organisation of theNetworkingChannel enhancing the community and the dissemination channels and tools.
• Raised the awareness of the industrial players and promoted the usage of the infrastructure with 1 Industry Day with more than 50 participants and the national info days (within the process of a national roadshow – see below) where industrial players have been involved, 1 exhibition organised in Finland with the 6G Flagship Program where industrial stakeholders were involved, creation of the Industrial Advisory Board.
• Started the preparation of joint training programmes through a survey about the training material and events at the institution and testbed levels, preparing the SLICES Academy, the inclusion of SLICES-RI as co-organiser of the educational community on networking research, The Networking Channel, and the organisation of the content of the summer school.
• Supported the sustainability and exploitation potential of the SLICES-RI by engaging the stakeholders at all levels through direct contacts by the partners with their Ministries and through a SLICES national roadshow through Europe (already 5 countries visited: France, Germany, Hungary, and Spain during the first reporting period and a 6th event already took place in Switzerland at the beginning of the second reporting period), in relation with the other actions of 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 first access for driving experiments, with the integration of several different experimental islands, offering experimentation with cutting-edge equipment have been to a single SLICES-SC facility, with experiments being able to be executed through a portal. The resources integrated into the facility so far are provided by SU, UTH, EURECOM, PSNC, OULU, IMDEA, COSMOTE, IMEC, and SZTAKI testbeds. The SLICES-SC portal offers generic access to these testbeds, and experiments can be scheduled over their offered infrastructure.
• Enabled virtually anywhere access to the SLICES infrastructure, making available the infrastructure described above to first open call experimenters, 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, with previous experiments that have been published and are repeatable experiments, 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.
During the first reporting period, the SLICES-SC project successfully expanded its community and attractivity, prepared the technical framework, and launched the first Open call with the selection of the first experimenters. The second reporting period will allow for accelerating these actions, with the launch of a new permanent Open Call, the virtual access activities, the researchers’ mobilities, and the SLICES Academy, among others, to fully reach the Starting Community objectives. These actions are carried out in strong relation with the other SLICES family projects, notably the SLICES-DS project that ended in August 2022 and the SLICES-PP project that started in September 2022.