IPCEI project on high performance computing and Big Data enabled applications to serve as a pilot for the European Data Infrastructure

6 Apr 2016 Amsterdam - At the EGI Conference 2016 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands,Primeur Magazine had the opportunity to talk with Antonio Zoccoli from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Rome, Italy, about a new Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI), concerning high performance computing (HPC) and Big Data predictions. The project was announced in Luxembourg in December . The project will be part of the new European Strategy on Cloud computing that includes Exascale supercomputing, that will be announced next week in Brussels. Antonio Zoccoli explains that the basic idea of the project is to develop a new infrastructure which can provide services to different communities, both in research and in applications, for example public administration, smart energy, in short, different applications that are not forming part of the research feed.

According to Antonio Zoccoli, everything starts from the research infrastructure for computing, that in the last years has been the result from physics mainly. In high energy physics one has developed the WLCG infrastructure. This is a federated infrastructure, mainly from computing centres, interconnected by ultra-fast broadband. This has provided very good work and has allowed to analyze the data produced at CERN in the last years and in a very short time. In 2012, it was possible to discover the Higgs Boson using the data acquired a few months before so the performance is very well.

The idea is to start from this good infrastructure and to let it evolve to cope, both with the requirements of research and to provide services for other communities like public administration.

In order to reach this goal, there is a lot of work to do. On one side, one has to have the technological development in order to use the most advanced technologies available in high performance computing and in the data structure as to develop a new way to interconnect storage sitting in different places in Europe. The second part consists in developing and updating the infrastructure to make it more efficient and capable to be ready for different communities and make it possible to access it for different users.

The third part is to have an application. The project team has to make a use case with people from research and the private sector and seek out whether this model can work and can be implemented.

In the course of 2016, the partners will have a first draft ready to start the implementation.

The IPCEI project involves partners from Luxembourg, which are leading the project, from Italy, France, and Spain. As the project evolves, it will be open to other members of the European Community.

The budget scheme is modular. It will involve research budgets from the partners, funding from the ministerial budget, both from the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Economical Development, and structural regional funds, and finally funding that the European Commission is providing to the project.