Scientific large-scale infrastructure for computing/communication experimental studies – starting community
Today we are experiencing the digital transformation happening with an unprecedented pace, with the community constantly researching on new solutions to support this transformation with ample computational power and connectivity. Towards addressing such research efforts, Research Infrastructure (RI) specific to addressing Digital Sciences research efforts have been deployed worldwide, towards trying to address key aspects contrary to off-the-shelf commercial infrastructure: 1) Full control over the parameters of an experiment, 2) Repeatable experiments regardless of the physical infrastructure, 3) Valid experimental results, which are easy to cross-reference and replicate. As such, several RIs have emerged, offering experimentation services with bleeding edge resources, that otherwise are only offered only in industrial R&D laboratories, with limited functionality. Towards combating these issues, SLICES Research Infrastructure is about to be deployed, aiming to provide high quality experimentation services with emerging technologies around the area of digital sciences (5G/6G, NFV, IoT and Cloud Computing), in an Internet-scale setup. With SLICES-SC, we aspire to foster the community of researchers around this ecosystem, create and strengthen necessary links with relevant industrial stakeholders for the exploitation of the infrastructure, advance existing methods for research reproducibility and experiment repeatability, and design and deploy the necessary solutions for providing SLICES-RI with an easy to access scheme for users from different disciplines. A set of detailed research activities has been designed to materialize these efforts in tools for providing transnational (remote and physical) access to the facility, as well as virtual access to the data produced over the facilities. The respective networking activities of the project aspire in fostering the community around these infrastructures, as well as open up to new disciplines and industrial stakeholders.