Digital Infrastructures as the future Internet, constitute the cornerstone of the digital transformation of our society. As such, innovation in this domain represents an industrial need, a sovereignty concern, and a security threat. Without highly sophisticated and diverse Digital Infrastructures, none of the advanced services envisaged for our society is feasible. Their design, deployment, and operation are critical. In order to research and master Digital infrastructures, the research community needs to address significant challenges regarding their efficiency, trust, availability, reliability, range, end-to-end latency, security, and privacy. The stringent need for a scientific instrument to support the research in this domain is an urgent concern. SLICES ambitions to provide a European-wide test platform, providing advanced compute, storage, and network components, interconnected by dedicated high-speed links. This will be the main experimental collaborative instrument for researchers at the European level, to explore and push further, the envelope of the future digital infrastructures.
The main objective of SLICES-DS was to successfully engage in the design phase of SLICES-RI in order to fulfill the minimum key requirements to enter the Preparation phase. Our primary goal is to develop all the components necessary to design SLICES-RI, organized into five main objectives that structure the overall work plan:
1. To adequately design SLICES in order to capture the demand and strengthen the research excellence and innovation capacity of European scientists in Digital Infrastructures;
2. To accomplish preparatory work and planning of the new Research Infrastructure;
3. To define governance, management, and human resources of the new Research Infrastructure;
4. To define models for the financing of the new Research Infrastructure;
5. To define stakeholder and engagement strategy in community-based research.
SLICES-RI has produced three major outcomes during its journey: SLICES-RI was selected to join the ESFRI Roadmap on Dec. 2021, the SLICES-SC project was selected and started on Mar. 2021 to foster the community, and the SLICES-PP project was selected to carry out the next phase of Preparation of the ESFRI lifecycle and has just started at the end of the SLICES-DS project, on Sept. 2022.
The overarching objective of the SLICES-DS project has been reached, as we have tackled all the key questions necessary to prepare the SLICES Research Infrastructure. Indeed, we have reached the design of the new infrastructure, including technical, financial, legal, governance, and operation details, ready for the next steps in the cycle of pan-European research infrastructures. In particular, SLICES-RI is now widely known and started also to liaise with relevant initiatives worldwide as a community responsibility.
