Baseline set of e-Infrastructure services has been provided through the “e-Infrastructure services” activity: 23,694 CPU-cores, 1,166,592 GPU-cores (516 GPU cards), 20,496 Xeon Phi-core (336 Xeon Phi cards), 3,112 Grid CPU-cores, 14,152 Cloud VM-cores, and 18 PB of storage space, , with varied commitment levels around 10%.
The “Data Management Lifecycle” refined a range of services for data management. A large number of new scientific datasets have been identified, collected and pre-processed to make them suitable for uploading to the VI-SEEM repository service for the benefit of the user communities. Tools for supporting the quality control of the data sets were developed and integrated into the data set management utilities.
The activity on “Domain-specific services and support” provided a range of domain-specific services in Climatology, Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) and Life Sciences and kept maintaining the VRE environment (
http://vre.vi-seem.eu/(si apre in una nuova finestra)) listing the different service modules, workflows and software tools, community datasets and application-level services. The structure of the VRE-portal has been changed so as to provide a user-friendly environment; a Cross-disciplinary section was also introduced and direct access was provided to other VI-SEEM sites such as the training portal and the code repository. Scientific support was continuously provided by this activity to all applications regarding baseline e-Infrastructure and data services support and for porting and running of the required tools. A number of Cross-disciplinary applications were introduced. Cross-disciplinary ontological solution was also developed.
The opening up of the VRE platform was facilitated by the “Capacity building, open calls and sustainability” activity. The consortium supported overall 66 projects that used the computing and storage resources dedicated to the VI-SEEM project. In total, 41 projects requested access to the HPC CPUs, 15 to HPC GPUs, 4 to HPC Xeon Phi cards, 18 to Cloud, and 3 to Grid resources. Specifically in this second reporting period, the project supported 17 applications accepted in the 2nd call, 22 applications accepted in the 3rd call, and 6 applications accepted in the SME call for production use of resources and services.
A strong dissemination, training and marketing campaign has been continued in the second project period. The project outreach has diversified in terms of audience, reaching out the students, universities, wide research community, SMEs and industry, and the highest level of policy making environment. During the second project period 1 regional and 9 national dissemination events were organized by the project and they attracted more than 600 participants. Participation in science fairs and similar large events has further extended the outreach to many thousands. More than 300 users were trained during the 11 training events (4 regional, 7 national). Project was presented at local universities with dedicated lectures and tours. 54 scientific publications were published, outlining the publishing of two special issues of the open access scientific journals SCPE and CIT with papers presenting project results. The project also took part in large-scale popular scientific events targeting general public, where the partners presented the project and opened the doors of their centres to the visitors.
