Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies - Preparatory Phase

Project Information

SLICES-PP

Grant agreement ID: 101079774

DOI

10.3030/101079774

Project closed

EC signature date 25 August 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• Research infrastructures

Total cost

€ 2 999 591,25

EU contribution

€ 2 999 590,50

Coordinated by

INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE EN INFORMATIQUE ET AUTOMATIQUE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SLICES-PP (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies - Preparatory Phase)

Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The digital infrastructures research community continues to face numerous new challenges towards the design of the Next Generation Internet. This is an extremely complex ecosystem encompassing communication, networking, data-management and data-intelligence issues, supported by established and emerging technologies such as IoT, 5/6G, cloud-to-edge computing. Coupled with the huge amount of data generated and exchanged over the network, this calls for incremental as well as radically new design paradigms. Experimentally-driven research is becoming worldwide a de-facto standard, which has to be supported by large-scale research infrastructures to make results trusted, repeatable and accessible to the research communities. SLICES-RI (Research Infrastructure), included in the ESFRI roadmap since 2021, aims to answer these problems by building a large infrastructure needed for the experimental research on various aspects of distributed computing, networking, IoT and 5/6G networks. It will provide the resources needed to continuously design, experiment, operate and automate the full lifecycle management of digital infrastructures, data, applications, and services.

The overall objective of SLICES-PP has been to tackle all key questions concerning legal, financial and technical issues leading to the establishment of the new SLICES-RI and ensuring commitment of Member States/Associated Countries to its long-term operation and use in all fields of science.
It was also in charge to settle the final technical architecture design for implementation to position SLICES as an impactful instrument to support European advanced research, industrial competitiveness and societal impact in the digital era. There are thus several dimensions: legal, financial, member states commitments and technical.
Several outcomes have been achieved.

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

At the end of the project, several achievements have been reached over different dimensions : legal, financial, member states commitments and technicals.

From the legal perspective, the consortium has reached a consensus on the decision to establish an ERIC structure in December 2022 and has collectively set-up an Interim Supervisory Board (ISB) in charge of its creation since March 2024. At the date of this report, the ministries of 10 countries (Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Ireland and Switzerland) have nominated their representatives. Partners agreed on first governance rules and assessed it with the signature of a new MoU during the second period.
The statutes content and the technical and scientific description have been approved on November 25th 2024 and the financial annexes have been approved on March 26th 2025 by this ISB. This financial annexe details in particular the funding of the central hub by each country. At the date of this report, six letters of intent have been issued (France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Hungary) and four letters of commitment have been promised (France, Germany, Hungary, Italy). The ISB has scheduled to meet every two months until the ERIC is established.

To date, 6 national roadmaps include SLICES-RI: France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Switzerland. In addition, several countries have committed in the pre-ERIC CMO establishment. France has provided the funding for hiring the interim executive director and of the interim technical director (hiring in progress), a full time engineer (hiring in progress) and other engineer resources. Italy, Germany, Spain and Norway have agreed to complete the funding for hiring these key staffs from the CEO to attract top candidates. Greece provides in-kind to manage all communication aspects. Belgium and Spain commit additional technical resources to develop the basic services of the infrastructure.
Step 1 of ERIC creation is expected before summer 2026.

The implementation phase will be followed within the SLICES-IP project that will start in June 2026.

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)

SLICES-PP was in charge of preparing the deployment of SLICES-RI, a large scale open and versatile research infrastructure for all state of the art and beyond research products in all domains of computing and networking.