Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SLICES-PP (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies - Preparatory Phase)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-08-31
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 enormous 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), which was recently included in the 2021 ESFRI roadmap, 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 is 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 will also settle the final technical architecture design for implementation. It will position SLICES as an impactful instrument to support European advanced research, industrial competitiveness and societal impact in the digital era.
The overall objective of SLICES-PP is 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 will also settle the final technical architecture design for implementation. It will position SLICES as an impactful instrument to support European advanced research, industrial competitiveness and societal impact in the digital era.
At the end of the first reporting period, several achievements have been reached over different dimensions : legal, financial, member states commitments and technicals. Regarding the legal dimension, the consortium has reached a consensus on the decision to establish an ERIC structure and has collectively prepared the set up of the interim supervisory board in charge of its creation. An increasing number of member states have committed in supporting SLICES-RI, as demonstrated by the nomination of a representative to the ISB and by registering their SLICES national node on their national roadmaps. Regarding the financial dimension, a 5-year budget could have been established for each involved country. Finally, discussions on defining long term vision and final architecture are converging to a global consensus.
SLICES-PP is 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.