Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DARE (Delivering Agile Research Excellence on European e-Infrastructures)
Période du rapport: 2019-07-01 au 2020-12-31
DARE is an ambitious project that aims to provide novel approaches for creating and using data-powered methods at the frontiers of today’s research and innovation. DARE’s central goal is to support research developers – domain-expert software developers – to transparently make use of European e-infrastructures, research infrastructures and other platforms and software in order to create maintainable and highly customised applications targeting domain users. This requires a tightly knit technological core - the DARE platform - that offers and itself exploits semantics, optimisation, abstraction and automation regarding data and computation on diverse European e-infrastructures.
Meeting its objectives, DARE can increase the utilisation and impact of e-infrastructures and shield end-users from potential underlying technological changes or disruptions. Moreover, it leads to manageable and user-friendly applications addressing high-impact societal challenges. DARE is aligned with EOSC developments.
The DARE project has met its main objective. More specifically it has:
1. Pioneered the DARE platform, an integrated development and delivery hyper-platform for creating, refining and running abstract methods.
2. Provided an integrated set of tools for examining and managing methods, search and visualise provenance records, etc.
3. Delivered demonstrations of the sustainability and productivity gains provided by DARE and its scalable constituent technologies when dealing with extreme data and computation boundaries.
4. Organised training and dissemination events to increase update by interested communities and gain feedback.
Meeting its objectives, DARE can increase the utilisation and impact of e-infrastructures and shield end-users from potential underlying technological changes or disruptions. Moreover, it leads to manageable and user-friendly applications addressing high-impact societal challenges. DARE is aligned with EOSC developments.
The DARE project has met its main objective. More specifically it has:
1. Pioneered the DARE platform, an integrated development and delivery hyper-platform for creating, refining and running abstract methods.
2. Provided an integrated set of tools for examining and managing methods, search and visualise provenance records, etc.
3. Delivered demonstrations of the sustainability and productivity gains provided by DARE and its scalable constituent technologies when dealing with extreme data and computation boundaries.
4. Organised training and dissemination events to increase update by interested communities and gain feedback.
All activities of DARE culminate to the design, implementation and usage of the main outcome of the project, the DARE platform. Its architecture is defined in the context of WP2 and it is the first pillar that establishes the basic principles of its implementation. The second pillar is the set of requirements for the DARE pilots (WP6 and WP7), and their distillation into concrete user stories (WP3). The individual components that are integrated in the platform are developed and updated in the contexts of WP3 and WP4. WP5 is responsible for the realisation of the integrated platform, as it provides and manages the operational and testing environments for deploying and using the platform.
The DARE goals are generally met in line with the Description of the Action (DoA). In summary DARE achievements are summarised as follows:
1. A reference architecture has been specified. The architecture prototypes a unifying concepts knowledge base that could drive future implementations.
2. The DARE platform has customised and integrated tools for monitoring long campaigns as well as for recording and retrieving data provenance information. Further, the DARE platform is well documented in order to help potential users install and use it on local machinery.
3. Demonstrable and documented use-case implementations addressing requirements of the EPOS and IS-ENES communities. In addition to the original use-case, DARE has implemented two more in the fields of volcanology (WP6) and cyclone-tracking (WP7).
4. DARE has completed a number of dissemination and training events. These include the organisation of e-infrastructure workshops (July 2019, Athens and September 2019, San Diego), volcanology training event (July 2020) and webinars. The DARE platform has been experienced by participants and evaluated favourably. Last, DARE has presented and published related technical progress at a number of high-impact conferences, such as the AGU fall meeting and the IEEE eScience conference.
The DARE goals are generally met in line with the Description of the Action (DoA). In summary DARE achievements are summarised as follows:
1. A reference architecture has been specified. The architecture prototypes a unifying concepts knowledge base that could drive future implementations.
2. The DARE platform has customised and integrated tools for monitoring long campaigns as well as for recording and retrieving data provenance information. Further, the DARE platform is well documented in order to help potential users install and use it on local machinery.
3. Demonstrable and documented use-case implementations addressing requirements of the EPOS and IS-ENES communities. In addition to the original use-case, DARE has implemented two more in the fields of volcanology (WP6) and cyclone-tracking (WP7).
4. DARE has completed a number of dissemination and training events. These include the organisation of e-infrastructure workshops (July 2019, Athens and September 2019, San Diego), volcanology training event (July 2020) and webinars. The DARE platform has been experienced by participants and evaluated favourably. Last, DARE has presented and published related technical progress at a number of high-impact conferences, such as the AGU fall meeting and the IEEE eScience conference.
DARE is the forerunner of a methodology that will deliver the power needed to gain the benefits of the next decade’s wealth and diversity of data. It aims to be a critical asset for research, business and government as Europe addresses global societal challenges. The methodology, tools and architectures developed within DARE improve the productivity of key experts and research developers who are overwhelmed today. DARE achieves this by creating data-driven and concept-enabled technology to amplify and accelerate their work.
This delivers agility by substantially reducing time to deliver data-driven scientific methods. DARE will deliver research excellence via giving those methods much increased power in their application domain and by polishing those data-powered methods through rapid and well-targeted refinement. The two use cases, of EPOS and IS-ENES provide compelling evidence of wider applicability. DARE plans to organise webinars targeting communities outside of EPOS and IS-ENES, e.g. in Nuclear Fusion and Material Sciences.
More specifically, DARE pushes the current state-of-the-art in the following ways:
1. DARE focuses on research teams, empowering them to innovate, in a holistic, accessible and interoperable framework, without bogging them down in technical detail.
2. DARE offers a developer-friendly framework along with sophisticated tools, to allow for managing data provenance, to promote communication, transparency and reproducibility.
3. DARE’s high-level workflow abstractions allow for the near-seamless combination of Cloud, HTC and HPC platforms and services.
4. DARE methods and tools are inherently FAIR and, combined with the DARE catalogues, they will be computer-actionable.
DARE’s impact is driven by enabling research developers and domain experts to work on extremes. DARE provides the capability to engage users across e-Infrastructures, enabling DARE hyper-platform to address a large part of the European research community.
Within this large market, DARE has impact on (a) the European domain specific e-Infrastructures, which can exploit DARE in order to create new data-driven services more easily, (b) science and technology professionals that can use DARE-powered infrastructures more easily, without being concerned with technicalities, and (c) the “long tail of science”, including research institutes, research teams, individual researchers, SMEs, etc., who, due to lack of tools, methodology or resources, are unable to make the most of even today’s wealth of data, scientific advances and the power of the e-infrastructure Commons.
This delivers agility by substantially reducing time to deliver data-driven scientific methods. DARE will deliver research excellence via giving those methods much increased power in their application domain and by polishing those data-powered methods through rapid and well-targeted refinement. The two use cases, of EPOS and IS-ENES provide compelling evidence of wider applicability. DARE plans to organise webinars targeting communities outside of EPOS and IS-ENES, e.g. in Nuclear Fusion and Material Sciences.
More specifically, DARE pushes the current state-of-the-art in the following ways:
1. DARE focuses on research teams, empowering them to innovate, in a holistic, accessible and interoperable framework, without bogging them down in technical detail.
2. DARE offers a developer-friendly framework along with sophisticated tools, to allow for managing data provenance, to promote communication, transparency and reproducibility.
3. DARE’s high-level workflow abstractions allow for the near-seamless combination of Cloud, HTC and HPC platforms and services.
4. DARE methods and tools are inherently FAIR and, combined with the DARE catalogues, they will be computer-actionable.
DARE’s impact is driven by enabling research developers and domain experts to work on extremes. DARE provides the capability to engage users across e-Infrastructures, enabling DARE hyper-platform to address a large part of the European research community.
Within this large market, DARE has impact on (a) the European domain specific e-Infrastructures, which can exploit DARE in order to create new data-driven services more easily, (b) science and technology professionals that can use DARE-powered infrastructures more easily, without being concerned with technicalities, and (c) the “long tail of science”, including research institutes, research teams, individual researchers, SMEs, etc., who, due to lack of tools, methodology or resources, are unable to make the most of even today’s wealth of data, scientific advances and the power of the e-infrastructure Commons.