Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the Human Brain Project

Project Information

ICEI

Grant agreement ID: 800858

DOI

10.3030/800858

Project closed

EC signature date 16 July 2018

Start date 1 January 2018

End date 30 September 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Research Infrastructures

Total cost

€ 50 075 048,75

EU contribution

€ 24 999 873,90

Coordinated by

EBRAINS
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ICEI (Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the Human Brain Project)

Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ICEI (Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the Human Brain Project) was an EU-funded project under the Framework Partnership Agreement of the Human Brain Project (HBP). Five leading European Supercomputing Centres worked together to develop a set of computing and data services that were provided in a federated manner to build the foundation of the Fenix Infrastructure. The centres (BSC, CEA, CINECA, ETHZ-CSCS and JUELICH-JSC) committed to perform a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services to realize elements of this e-infrastructure. The distinguishing characteristic of this e-infrastructure was that data repositories and scalable supercomputing systems were in close proximity and well integrated.
The Fenix Infrastructure delivered federated computing and data services to European researchers by aggregating capacity from multiple resource providers and enabling access from existing community platforms, like for the HBP (https://wiki.humanbrainproject.eu). User access was granted via a peer-review based process. The HBP was the initial prime and lead user community, guiding the infrastructure development in a use-case driven co-design approach. Access for other science and engineering communities was provided through PRACE.
The project succeeded in providing a set of computing, cloud and storage resources and services based on the requirements of the neuroscience community, which significantly advanced research projects not only of the neuroscience community, but also of other scientific communities (e.g. life science, astrophysics, material science, computational chemistry). Most neuroscientists were not taking advantage of services offered at Supercomputing Centres when the project started, but ICEI paved the way for the neuroscience community to make use of such services. Importantly, ICEI provided its users the opportunity to apply for access to scalable/interactive computing, cloud and storage resources at different European Supercomputing Centres within a single project proposal, a major advantage as compared to other access mechanisms for computing resources in Europe. Moreover, ICEI resources have been granted not only to large-scale projects but also to medium-scale and small ones, such as for example for workshops, trainings and courses, in relation to the PIs requirements.

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

The initial phase of the project focused on defining the technical requirements for the ICEI Infrastructure that provide a basis for the preparation of the coordinated procurement of equipment, licences for software components, and R&D services.
During the second phase of the project, all tenders for equipment were successfully completed, all equipment was deployed and made available to users. The Fenix User Forum was successfully established and other efforts for attracting, informing and training users continued. The project addressed various ethics questions and, in particular, has set up procedures that enable the processing of a certain type of personal data, which is called pseudonymised data.
In the third reporting period, all tenders for R&D services were successfully completed and the related contracts were executed. All of the services are at production level and deployed at most of the centres. The HBP-ICEI and PRACE-ICEI mechanisms for excellence-driven access to the ICEI resources continued smooth operations. Since the second phase of the project, the HBP-ICEI mechanism is handled in the JARDS service, which significantly improved the efficacy and which was developed as an in-kind contribution during the second reporting period.
Summary of results:
- Based on technical requirements defined in the first phase of the ICEI project, 12 procurements were awarded for equipment and R&D services that were put into production at most of the different participating European Supercomputing Centres.
- The provided resources and services at the different centres were widely disseminated to the neuroscience and other scientific communities at events, trainings, workshops organized either by the communities or by the ICEI project and promoted in the media. Dissemination activities included presentations and articles prepared by users of ICEI resources and the organisation of a webinar series (22 webinars in total).
- Overall 12 PRACE-ICEI calls were run with a total of 106 project proposals received from applicants in 18 different European countries and via the HBP-ICEI resource allocation mechanism 102 project proposals were received from applicants in 11 different European countries by the end of August 2023. In total there were 186 projects granted that made use of the procured equipment and R&D services to leverage their research. Details on the user communities, their feedback on the provided services and lessons learned were published by the ICEI project in a White Paper in March 2023 (https://fenix-ri.eu/news/lessons-learned-hpc-services-provisioning).
- Results from the R&D service procurements were disseminated at community-specific conferences and workshops, introduced and promoted in dedicated news articles and webinars and will be further exploited after the end of the project.

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)

The ICEI project has laid the basis for expanding the e-infrastructure service portfolio beyond what is offered by European Supercomputing Centres today. While the focus of these centres was so far on providing scalable computing capabilities, ICEI expands this by providing the opportunity to use tightly integrated servers interactively, e.g. for data pre- and post-processing and visualisation. Users are also able to deploy services in virtual machines. This, for instance, allows deploying science domain-specific gateways, i.e. web-based interfaces for providing a variety of IT resources and services to researchers of a particular science domain. Furthermore, data repositories with different characteristics are being provided, which allow sharing data, hold extreme-scale data volumes and/or have high-performance access to data. ICEI is not only progressing beyond the state-of-the-art by expanding the service portfolio but also by federating these services. Users can therefore not only flexibly combine services at different locations but can also more easily collaborate within their respective science communities.
Enabling new forms of collaborative research using modern computational and data science methods will allow advancing different science areas with high societal impact. Examples are neuroscience research resulting in new approaches to treat brain diseases, materials science resulting in the discovery and design of new materials that are key for industrial innovation and competitiveness (for details on scientific projects that used ICEI resources to leverage their research see success stories published on Fenix website: https://fenix-ri.eu/infrastructures/success-stories).

Illustration of architectural concept and service provisioning within the Fenix Infrastructure