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ETAIS and eInfraCentral

National & European approach for offering e-Infrastructure services Page 8

e-IRG – Magazine

Highlights from the delegates meetingsSince the publishing of the previous edition of this Magazine, there were two delegates meetings.

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GO FAIR initiative

Key to create implementation networks for stewardship of dataPage 22

Interview European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel

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European Commission to adopt Implementation Roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud

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Magazine Spring 2018

e-IRG Workshop TallinnThe public open e-IRG Workshop under the auspices of the Estonian EU Presidency of the European Union took place at the Tallinn University Campus in the Astra building on 3-4 October 2017.

The main objective of the workshop was the contribution towards some main directions in the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Key areas that were explored include governance, funding, services and data-related aspects. Sustainability was a cross-cutting theme. Special attention was given on the national perspectives on EOSC development.

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e-IRG Workshop and Regional Conference May 14-16, 2018, Sofia, Bulgaria

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The EOSC Stakeholder Forum - Shaping the future of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

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Interoperable data & Cloud using EUDAT & EGI

From 22 to 25 January 2018, Porto hosted over 230 participants of EUDAT's Conference

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e-IRG Workshop Programme 14-15 May 2018, Sofia

Overview of the preliminary programme. Please consult the workshop web site for a detailed up to date programme.

14 May 2018

Session 1: Opening and European Future & Emerging Technologies (FET) initiatives

Welcome and European FET Initiatives, Chair : Gabriele von Voigt

• Opening and Welcome - Gabriele von Voigt, e-IRG Chair on behalf of e-IRG and Aneta Karaivanova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), on behalf of local organiser

• Keynote: Digital Connectivity, EU and Western Balkans - Priorities of the Bulgarian EU presidency, Ivan Dimov, Deputy Minister of Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science

• Quantum Computing - Dr. László Bacsárdi, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BTE)

• Human Brain Project and FENIX, Prof Colin McMurtrie, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)

Session 2: Challenges Data and HPC

Chair : Peter Broennimann, Swiss Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI)

• The European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC) - Marcin Ostasz, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC)

• The Big Data Value Association - Yannick Legré (EGI Foundation, Member of the BDVA Board)

• The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) - Dr. Peter Bauer, Deputy Director of Research, ECMWF

Panel Discussion - Data and HPC challenges for e-Infrastructures and related policy issues

15 May 2018

Session 3: The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) - Progress and National Views

Chair : Aneta Karaivanova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

• The EOSC Implementation Roadmap, Patrick Brenier, Open Data Policy and Science Cloud Unit (A6), Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD), European Commission (EC)

• The EOSCpilot project - Matthew Dovey, JISC

• EOSC-hub project - Yannick Legré, EGI Foundation

• The FAIR Data Action Plan - Françoise Genova, CNRS/MESRI

Session 4: European Structure and Investment Funds and their use for e-Infrastructures

Chair : Prof. Kostadinov, Adviser of the Minister of Education and Science, Bulgaria

ESIF funding for national e-Infrastructures and EU RIs - The South-East European case . Country presentations from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania.!

Detailed programme and information:

http://e-irg.eu/e-irg-workshop-may-2018

e-IRG Workshop and Regional ConferenceMay 14-16, 2018, Sofia, Bulgaria

The 2018 first Open e-IRG Workshop under Bulgarian EU Presidency will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 14-15 May 2018 in the Grand Hotel Sofia, focusing on EuroHPC and the development of e-Infrastructures in the South-Eastern European (SEE) and Eastern-Mediterranean (EM) region.

The workshop programme will be divided in two main parts: In the first part, the EuroHPC ecosystem will be presented, including presentations about HPC-specific issues: microelectronics, supercomputer applications, user perspectives, policy issues. In the second part, the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) opportunities for national e-Infrastructures and European Research Infrastructures - with emphasis on South East Europe and Eastern Mediterranean countries, along with European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) national views will be presented.

The workshop will be an excellent opportunity to discuss the current status and perspectives of Pan-European e-Infrastructure initiatives, and to see a clear picture of the achievements and challenges of the countries in the region of SEE and EM.

The e-IRG Workshop will be followed by the Regional Conference on “e-Infrastructures for excellent science in Southeast Europe and

Eastern Mediterranean”, starting in the afternoon of 15 May 2018 in Grand Hotel Sofia and continuing on 16 May in Best Western Expo Hotel. The conference will be a unique opportunity for regional scientists to showcase their work in selected research fields relevant for the region, as well as for presenting the latest achievements resulting from the collaboration of countries in the region of Southeast Europe and Eastern Mediterranean in the area of e-Infrastructures and their use. The conference programme will gather e-Infrastructure providers, scientists and researchers, and the policy makers from the region and beyond. !


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November 2017 saw the very first European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Stakeholder Forum in Brussels. organized by the EOSCpilot project, the event gave over 300 participants the opportunity to learn about and contribute to shaping the future of the EOSC.

The EOSC will offer 1,7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science and technology a virtual environment with open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data.In his keynote speech, Jean-David Malo, DG Research & Innovation, European Commission, identified the EOSC as an essential tool to foster Open Science. The EOSCpilot project represents the first targeted funding that the European Commission (EC) has given in what is a longer series of projects and future calls to achieve the EOSC.Juan Bicarregui, STFC and EOSCpilot coordinator said: “EOSC is all about enabling the sharing of technology, resources and data across different disciplines. To do that you need to collect the views of all different communities and service providers in order to bring together the key building blocks. Gradually and incrementally these can be brought together to create the EOSC.”Demonstrating the value of EOSCUsers should see the EOSC as a one-stop-shop to find, access, and use research data and services from multiple disciplines and platforms. Services and functionalities need to be user-driven and determined by clear use cases. This is exactly what the EOSCpilot project is addressing through 15 high-profile pilot science demonstrators across a range of research domains including Life Sciences, Humanities and Physics. EOSCpilot is investigating policy issues which may present hurdles to the development and use of the EOSC.As EOSCpilot moves into its second year, these issues will be addressed. “EOSCpilot has already identified principles on data cataloguing and how data will be exchanged between data catalogues and how they will be exposed to EOSC services”, commented Carole Goble, ELIXIR-UK Head of Node during an interview. She continued: “In the next year, four demonstrators will show how simple, small interventions and leveraging existing practices will ensure that communities can join the EOSC.”

Stakeholder-driven resultsResearch infrastructures, e-Infrastructures and research communities clearly have a role to play in addressing these challenges. The event gave voice to these and other stakeholders such as intermediary users and other brokers of end-users demands (e.g. IT departments, umbrella associations, community networks) who should assist data scientists and ICT specialists in the identification of key requirements for EOSC services.Similarly, governments, funders and industry have a role to play. Clear stakeholder engagement principles were a key component both of the event and also of future actions. There was consensus from all stakeholder groups on the need to think globally but to act locally with Research Communities. With the EOSCpilot, the very first step of an ambitious and long-term plan towards the EOSC, there is an inevitable sense of uncertainty among stakeholders regarding the complexities and diversity of target communities. It is important to shield researchers from underlying infrastructure as at the end of the day scientists just want to do science, and not worry about the complexity of the infrastructure.

A lightweight but effective governance frameworkWith so many scientific communities and stakeholders, the event highlighted how the EOSCpilot addresses cultural changes by proposing a governance framework for the EOSC which contributes to the development of European Open Science policy. What is clear is that this needs to be capable of supporting the definition, management and coordination of its many components without imposing a strict hierarchical model or supply chain.Matthew Dovey from Jisc and EOSCpilot commented that “EOSCpilot is developing a proposal for a lightweight but effective governance framework for the EOSC which puts the research communities and the researchers in the driving seat, whilst enabling national decision makers to prioritise the strategic objectives based on this strong steer.” He continued: “A key component of this is a stakeholder forum in which the stakeholder groups involved in supplying to and using the EOSC will engage in further developing what EOSC needs, in order to

deliver and provide feedback on how it is performing.”Developing the necessary skills and capabilities to enable the scientific community to take full advantage of the EOSC is key to creating wider awareness and bringing the opportunities offered by the adoption of Open Science to researchers. Kevin Ashley, University of Edinburgh, explained: “Building upon existing work, EOSCpilot is establishing a skills framework that will help infrastructures, institutions, and other stakeholders to find, access and benefit from relevant skill developments. EOSC can play a key role in raising awareness in the scientific community of the benefits of FAIR data. Researchers in particular need better education and guidance on Open Data and in particular the different initiatives and practices.”A system of systemsUnder this stakeholder-driven governance model are the actual services. EOSC is envisaged as a distributed, de-centralised system-of-systems based on components independently provided and managed by different organisations. EOSCpilot is developing an architectural framework for tools to work together with open interfaces between them to provide a comprehensive and evolving set of services.Donatella Castelli, CNR-ISTI & EOSCpilot explained: “Defining the EOSC system architecture is complex and we are following an iterative process which takes into account the better understanding of the open science approach, the related policy evolution, and the new technological developments that will be progressively achieved. What we presented at the event was a state-of-the-art view and will now map this model into the services that existing and emerging ‘systems’ (e.g. e-Infrastructures and repositories) will provide to EOSC.”This will support an open knowledge production lifecycle where outputs of the research process can be created, deposited, analysed, published and preserved, and discovered, accessed and reused. Furthermore, the EOSC service portfolio can grow incrementally according to stakeholder-defined principles and user needs. More incentives are required in various areas, to support FAIR data principles. The EOSC Governance Framework can play a role in fostering coordination of national-level policies. !

The EOSC Stakeholder Forum Shaping the future of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)


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Highlights from the delegates meetingsFour times a year, the e-IRG delegates, representing their countries gather for a working meeting. These meetings are organised in the country that at that moment holds the Presidency of the European Union. Since the publishing of the previous edition of this Magazine, there were two meetings - in Estonia and Brussels (because of other conferences in the same city) - from which the minutes are already available. Although the meetings are only open for delegates to attend, there are public minutes published of each meeting.

These are available on the e-IRG web site. Because these delegates meetings are typical working meetings, a lot consists of reporting and discussing ongoing work. Hence when one meeting is finished, the results of the previous meetings are not that interesting anymore, as work has progressed. Here, we will summarise the highlights of the Estonian/Brussels delegates meetings.

50th Delegates MeetingThe 50th Delegates Meeting was held in Tallinn, Estonia, October 4-5, 2017, at Tallinn University. The main points that were discussed during the meeting were the draft Work Programme 2018-2020 under H2020, the next e-IRG support programme and the new role of e-IRG including collaboration with ESFRI, liaison with RDA and participation in both EOSC governance and EuroHPC governance.

The e-IRG Chair Gabriele von Voigt, Germany, opened the meeting. She welcomed the delegates. The Chair presented the new nominations of e-IRG delegations: Christian Panigl for Austria, Gilles Massen and Robert Kerger for Luxembourg, and Furkan Uysal for Turkey. The Chair also welcomed the observers: Carmela Asero from the European Commission, Matthew Dovey from the UK, Todor Gurov from Bulgaria, and Federico Ruggieri from Italy. The agenda was approved. The Chair summarised the main decisions and actions from the previous meeting. The minutes of the 49th meeting in Malta in March were approved.

From DG RTD, Carmela Asero, Data, Open Access and Foresight, was present. She reported about the EOSC activities. The EOSC Summit took place on 12 June 2017 where all categories of stakeholders were

represented. The feedback received was very positive. The outcome is included in the EOSC declaration. It has been published online. Robert-Jan Smits sent an e-mail to all the participants for endorsements and already there are 38 endorsements, mainly from organisations and projects including EOSCpilot and EOSC hub. Although there are a few countries which sent their endorsements, Member States feedback will be channeled via the European Research Area Committee (ERAC) standing Working Group on Open Science and Innovation. Regarding the commitment part of the EOSC Declaration, the idea is to enable all stakeholders to work on the areas they are interested in so as to achieve the common objectives.

The next steps were the meeting with ERAC delegates at the end of October 2017, the EOSCpilot stakeholder event on 28-29 November 2017 in Brussels, and the Info Day on WP2018-2020 with both Research Infrastructure and e-Infra topics on 30 November 2017 in Brussels. The WP would be published on 27 October 2017. The EOSC Roadmap would be available towards the end of the year taking into account all the feedback.

The representative of ESFRI in e-IRG Yannis Ioannidis gave a report on the ESFRI developments. The deadline for proposals for the ESFRI 2018 Roadmap update was August 31, 2017. Twelve proposals were received and all eligible. The evaluation in the corresponding SWGs and IG have started. e-IRG representatives are also included. There is a tedious process with many steps and the final ESFRI 2018 Roadmap update should be announced in Vienna during the ICRI2018 conference after its approval by the ESFRI Forum. One of 12 proposals is related to ICT. A new Strategy Working Group was created to evaluate and support the e-Infrastructure-related proposal. The new ESFRI group is called Strategy Working Group on Data, Computing and Digital Research Infrastructures (SWG DIGIT). The 5 e-IRG SWG members are members of the new group. Another 9 new members will be nominated. However, the landscape analysis in the area of e-Infrastructures remains in the realm of e-IRG.

The need to provide the updated landscape analysis was also brought forward. The e-IRG overarching WG - e-IRG members on ESFRI SWGs+IG - would undertake to update the e-Infra landscape analysis of the ESFRI Roadmap. Rosette Vandenbroucke continues to work as editor.

News from the countries

National delegates reported on developments in their countries. In Malta it was already announced that Belgium signed the EuroHPC declaration. Now there is a

discussion how much it will cost and how much Belgium can do. There are also discussions about EOSC and whether Belgium will join Go-FAIR.

A new Research Infrastructure (RI) Roadmap has been approved in Bulgaria by the Council of Ministers. There is also a consortium agreement. Funding will come from structural funds, some 150 million euro for 4 big RIs and 8 smaller regional ones.

In Croatia, a new minister has been appointed. She is an e-Infra-oriented person with interest in data and analytics. The state secretary is also an e-Infra person. This is a good occasion to promote e-Infrastructures using more funding from structural funds: 40 million euro will go to the centres of excellence.

In Estonia, there has been an upgrade of EENET, the National Research and Education Network (NREN). The equipment will be deployed at 100 Gbps. An Estonian Cloud for government and research has been established. Ilja Livenson reported about these activities at the e-IRG workshop. The national expert group on Open Science approved policy recommendations for Estonia.

In Finland, there is a new development programme for Data Management and Computing at the state level. The duration is from 2017 to 2021 with a budget of 33 million euro. The main purpose is to further develop Cloud, HPC and Data Management solutions. An interesting point is that the funding goes through the state steering committee with representatives from different ministries, responsible for health, culture, industry, universities, etc. This will result in an upgrade of the CSC data and computing infrastructure.

France is updating its national RI Roadmap in parallel with the ESFRI process. There are also questions regarding data and computing asked to the proposers. The questions were slightly changed and became more detailed and precise. As they are very different from field to field, optimization was needed. The proposers were also asked to provide complete costs structures. The SILECS proposal that was submitted to the ESFRI 2018 Roadmap update process is led by France and deals with e-Infrastructure - Infrastructure for Large-scale Experimental Computer Science. It was in fact the one that triggered the creation of the new ESFRI DIGIT SWG.

In Germany, a new research institute was launched called "Deutsches Internet-Institut" following a competitive procedure. The winning consortium is led by "Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung" (Berlin Scientific Centre for Social Sciences) composed of several other


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universities and research centres, namely FU Berlin, HU Berlin, TU Berlin, UdK Berlin, Universität Potsdam and Fraunhofer-Institut. The budget will be 50 million euro for the next 5 years. Germany had elections and there were changes in the support of different parties. It will probably take a while until a new government is settled.

In Greece, at the government level the new Ministry of Digital Government, Telecom and Information is expected to take under its auspices all activities related to applied ICT. Basic research remains with the Ministry of Education. Through this ministry, 18 million euro will be assigned to GRNET to upgrade the access networks of universities and research centres.

In Hungary, the Schoolnet has been integrated into the joint e-Infra activities in the country, upgrading equipment and connectivity. More than 4000 primary and secondary schools are connected. There is a strong move towards higher education and research organisations in the country. Bottom-up approaches are under consideration. In the next months there will be dedicated workshops. Satisfaction surveys will be collected and evaluated as a basis for the next years' developments.

In Italy, there was a bottom-up initiative launched for the coordination of e-infrastructures and RIs coordinated by Federico Ruggieri and Massico Cocco, Geophysics. Two meetings were organised on 2 July and 22 September 2017. An inventory is planned that will also include a list of RI e-Infra requirements. They are coordinated with the Ministry of Research and Education. There is also a plan to set up a coordination activity in view of the upcoming EOSC and e-infrastructure developments in the next Framework Programme.

In Lithuania, the Guidelines on the Open Access to Scientific Publications and Data have been approved.

SURF in the Netherlands has now a role in the RI process to advise the projects on e-needs, as RIs need to express their e-needs in the application. Those e-needs will be evaluated. The National Research Council (NWO) will send a report on national digital infrastructures to the Ministries of Education, Culture and Science and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The ICT commission advises to invest 25 million euro per year extra in the digital infrastructures, including eScience). New ministers have been appointed.

In Norway, the Council discussed the EOSC declaration. HPC and data storage have been upgraded. The first part of the upgrade was done and inaugurated in May 2017. Application-based funding has been granted at the Research Council. At the National Centre, the second phase of upgrade has been performed. One has provided guidelines for Data Management Plan requirements for projects.

In Poland, the National RI Roadmap was defined in 2013 and budget was allocated to the list of projects. This is the largest list in Europe: 53 projects are following the ESFRI categories. The difference with the rest of the national roadmaps is that in Poland one has to refer to industrial use of the projects: 60% is provided for research and at least 40% for industrial use. Early October 2017, the second call for 300 million euro for proposals closed. The first call was in 2016. Two to three projects are related to e-Infrastructure: one on Data Management, one on HPC, and one on Network Services. A call was also announced for Cloud computing services. The aim is to have a closed list of computing infrastructures that can offer services to the centres of the Ministry. Institutes can request for data and computing services, not hardware. The list of services is open for industry. The Ministry of Digital Affairs will build a network for schools and also a Cloud infrastructure. On a related question how the commercial use can be more than the 30% EU regulation from structural funds, it was answered that there is a mix of funding sources and this is possible. In Poznan, it is 80%-20%, but for national RIs it is 60% for research and 40% for industry.

The 2nd World Open Education Resources Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has resulted in an Action Plan and ministerial statement. Strategy for open access has been accepted. Researchers who want to be funded can apply. In Sweden, there has been a round of applications for RIs and the decision was announced. A significant amount of money for SNIC for HPC/computing/data storage has been reserved: 10 million euro per year for 5 years. An equally significant amount has also been granted for a national data

initiative. Similar to the Netherlands, RIs have to declare their e-needs in the applications. The Research Council will look into a joint e-Infrastructure for Sweden merging all networking, computing, and data, such as an EOSC-national node, similar to the Danish DeIC. At the Nordic level, there is a new group for RI cooperation: 5 persons are responsible for RIs.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded to, among others, a Swiss scientist, Jacques Dubochet, for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution. In Turkey, 5 million euro in HPC and 5 million euro next year for the upgrade of infrastructure have been reserved. The country is also working on Data Management requirements for national projects, based on the FAIR principles. Open Access guidelines are ready since last year.

The United Kingdom Department for Exiting the EU (DEXEU) published a White paper on the United Kingdom's exit from and the new partnership with the European Union. The UK wants to form a new partnership with Europe and shape a brighter future for UK's next generations. For Research & Innovation, the country will seek to agree a close relationship with the European Union, for the benefit of both the EU and UK. Restructuring Research Councils will include a roadmap on RIs and e-RIs. This has been started, with a review in 2019 and implementation in 2021.

A new Working Group (WG), composed of Lajos Balint, Matthew Dovey, Erik Fledderus, Konstantin Hirsch, Leif Laaksonen, Ivan Maric, Federico Ruggieri, and Gabriele von Voigt, was created, tasked to work on the new role of e-IRG. At its first meeting, the WG decided that it should propose to e-IRG to deal with both the short-term and the long-term issues: short-term, with regards to the current developments around EOSC/EDI, including the connection to the Member States and Associated Countries, and the European Commission (EC) - both DG Connect and DG RTD - and whether e-IRG should be producing a new paper, i.e. positioning on these developments; long-term, in terms of policy outlook for e-infrastructures for the next 5-10 years, including a long-term vision and a roadmap for the next Framework Programme.

In the discussion these points were raised:

The EOSC - which would better be called European Open Science Commons - was based on the e-IRG e-Infrastructure Commons and this was not publicly recognised.

On the other hand, when the EC asks for advice on e-Infrastructures, it does not look at e-IRG; this means that there is a disconnect.


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The results are not comparable with ESFRI, although ESFRI has a different and specific scope with the process of the ESFRI Roadmap projects, that are supported financially by the EC in their preparatory phases.

The e-Infrastructure landscape is difficult to shape towards a vision as it is already formulated in a specific way and difficult to change.

Still, the long-term policy vision for e-Infrastructures (5-10 years) may be indeed dealt with by e-IRG, although unknown technology changes may affect the policies. There is already some work by the EC that can act as a basis.

On the other hand, there are also short-term goals that need to be set to fix the fragmented e-Infrastructure landscape.

Collaboration with ESFRI

The Chair introduced the topic of collaboration with ESFRI, reminding of the development of the new ESFRI DIGIT Strategy Working Group.

The e-IRG working group on the relation with ESFRI had a call on 29 September 2017. The main points were summarised from the e-IRG Working Group on the ESFRI relation.

It was proposed that one of the next workshops is devoted to the relationship with other major stakeholders, including the EC, ESFRI, advisory bodies, and ministerial level people, and exchange practices of how the cooperation at the national level works. However, it was agreed that the priority now is for e-IRG to position itself vis-à-vis the developments.

Participation in EOSC governance

During this period of changes towards EOSC there are opportunities, and reflections for the e-Infra area are needed. It was generally agreed that good input was given by e-IRG during the EOSCpilot workshop and that providing further input from e-IRG would be appreciated. It was stated that EOSCpilot will come up with a draft EOSC Governance Framework Document. Other groups are also writing papers. The Science Business think tank position paper was also mentioned. The idea of e-IRG acting as a clearing house for collecting all these papers around EOSC and its governance was brought up. In addition, it was stated that the EC has an aggressive timeline with the upcoming WP2018-2020 calls. Another possible role for e-IRG can be that they act as intermediates between EOSC and their countries to get views from the national stakeholders. Synthesizing the national views and echoing them towards the EU stakeholders would also be useful, especially if there can be a joint message. However, it was

admitted that it may be difficult to agree on sharp messages or a single message as e-IRG, given the diversity of the Member States and the Associated Countries. e-IRG can also act as an evaluator of the initial EOSC Governance structure, as this will be reviewed after a couple of years. It was also noted that keeping strong links and being aligned with the Research Infrastructure Programme Committee national representatives is also crucial, so that the same messages go through.

Participation in EuroHPC governance

The Chair reminded that the EuroHPC governance structure foresees two seats for e-IRG members. However, no recent news has been received.

e-IRG Policy Documents

The Chair stated that there is currently one policy document being prepared, i.e. the Long-Term Preservation of Research Data (LTP-RD), but e-IRG is busy with all the discussions about its updated role and the EOSC developments. Delegates stated that the document has remained in the agenda for a significant period and the quality is not yet good, including the national contributions. It was reminded that this document is supposed to act as a Guidelines document for Research Infrastructures, since it was initiated at an ESFRI Forum in Brussels where Rosette Vandenbroucke presented e-IRG and its policy documents.

e-IRG came up with the Commons idea, now acting as the basis for EOSC, although not acknowledged. How can e-IRG come up with schemas for strong national nodes? How is that done? This would be a good topic for e-IRG. This would be directed towards the ministries also. ood follow-up from previous papers.

Laurent Crouzet stated that a paper on the connection to the Research Infrastructures is also important, especially the ESFRIs. There is also large call with a lot of money for ESFRI clusters and it would be important to discuss how to deal with that and optimise the integration of ESFRIs within EOSC and provide a set of recommendations. It was stated that the national nodes for EOSC may also include the ESFRI connections. On the other hand, it was stated that the ESFRI clusters are thematic rather than national.

Ivan Maric stated that the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) and its sub-scores on connectivity and other areas were brought up and that low or also high rankings may act as incentives for the countries to become more competitive. In this wavelength, an e-Infrastructure maturity map in the Member States for e-Infra Commons can be also considered as a sort of Key Performance Indicator.

A paper on EOSC governance was not considered urgent, especially given the on-going activities of other initiatives. No position paper on EOSC declaration was deemed crucial either, based on the fast pace of developments. A paper on Member State views towards EOSC was deemed more important. ! http://e-irg.eu/e-irg-meeting-oct-2017

51th Delegates MeetingEuropean Open Science Cloud and Go-FAIR highlighted, and new role of e-IRG analysed during interactive breakout sessions

The 51st e-IRG delegates’ meeting under Estonian EU Presidency was held on 27 November 2017 at the Estonian Liaison Office for EU RTD in Brussels, Belgium. The European Commission gave presentations about the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and EuroHPC. An update was given on Go-FAIR by one of the e-IRG delegates. A large part of the meeting was spent on the discussion on the role of e-IRG with a short presentation and three breakout sessions on e-Infrastructure directions. There was a discussion on the update of the e-IRG bylaws for the extension of the Executive Board, and also the status of e-IRG policy documents. The countries reported important national news and the next activities under Bulgarian and Austrian EU Presidency were presented.

The e-IRG Chair Gabriele von Voigt, Germany, opened the meeting. Next, Carmela Asero, DG RTD talked about EC and EOSC developments.

She remarked that the EOSC governance is still not finalized. Regarding the EOSC funding sources, Carmela Asero added that for the next three years the funding will come mainly


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from H2020. More funding can be accommodated via an amendment of the Work Programme in 2018-19. The funding is estimated currently around 270 million euro that can go up to 300 million euro. Carmela Asero stated that the EC didn’t want to ask the Member States for extra funding at this phase and that later on this may be possible. There are also Member States coming up with national tables on e-Infrastructure funding in an effort to understand how funding is structured. Examples of such countries are France, Italy, Lithuania and Spain, possibly others.

Erik Fledderus gave an update on the Go-FAIR initiative. He stated that this is an update following the presentation at the e-IRG workshop in Malta. Go-FAIR intends to stimulate and align discussions between “government” - policy and funders, “users” - very diverse, sometimes organised in communities, national and cross-border, and “e-infrastructures” - hardware, software, support, e-science, etc. at the local, national and international level. Such a “triangle” of stakeholders is important. National nodes in France, Germany and the Netherlands are being or will be set up. There is already a virtual international office with one team and at the moment two locations.

The Go-FAIR nodes act as a platform to bring forward the Go-FAIR aim. They are not centres, rather platforms. Representatives from all three groups of the “triangle” are present in the meetings. It is not a top-down approach.

Regarding the funding sources of Go-FAIR, it was stated that in the Netherlands the national platform for Open Science consists only of volunteers from their respective organisations, while in Germany there is also a funded effort for the new office covered by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). France also wants to establish one.

The future role of e-IRG

Three parallel sessions were organised. The main points from the three sessions were summarised:

e-IRG should be dealing with both short- and long-term issues of e-Infrastructure policies.

e-IRG should be synthesizing and analysing national views and providing recommendations on EOSC policies and sustainability to the European Commission and the Member States & Associated Countries, and checking the fulfilment of such views. e-IRG should keep its neutral position and not go into a steering-executive role in governance, it should rather aim for an advisory role. e-IRG should also be sharing information about developments within the countries.

e-IRG should be more active in the data world; balanced expertise in e-IRG representations including data is essential as well as liaising with relevant initiatives and groups in the data world.

e-IRG should work closely with the Member States and Associated Countries, exchanging best practices and experiences including failures, in user needs, EOSC national nodes, and national roadmaps. e-IRG delegates can provide advice towards the Member States and Associated Countries when asked.

e-IRG should continue to play a role for HPC.

e-IRG should continue to work together with ESFRI. e-IRG should also continue to get input from ESFRI projects, e.g. during e-IRG workshops.

e-IRG should include in its role a Roadmap for Framework Programme 9. e-IRG should strive to have influence in the development of Framework Programme and Work Programmes.

e-IRG Policy Documents

e-IRG’s highest priority should be given to a document dealing with the views from the Member States (MS) and Associated Countries (AC) on national infrastructures. Then the following points should be dealt with: Go-INFRA, Research Infrastructures and e-Infrastructures, MS-AC answer towards EOSC, and update of experiences from e-IRG-ESFRI collaboration. The group on the new policy document will be extended with Aneta Karaivanova from Bulgaria. Ivan Maric will be contacted whether he can contribute to the document. The group should come with a plan for the next meeting.

Rosette Vandenbroucke gave a presentation about the status of the document on the Long-term Preservation of Research Data. She reminded that the document was initiated at an ESFRI Forum in Brussels where she presented e-IRG, and that it was conceived as a Guidelines document for Research Infrastructures. She presented a new plan for the document after studying the state-of-the-art with the help of the support project. It was agreed to continue with the document in a new shape, acting as a guide for the target groups. Rosette Vandenbroucke proposed to reuse the national contributions, but adapt the paper scope.

The landscape presenting Member States and European Union perspectives will be first updated, followed by an analysis and contribution to the sections on policy, FAIR, costs, legal and technical aspects, concluding with recommendations. The Long-Term Preservation on Research Data document will be updated as outlined and a new version of the document would be presented at the

March 2018 meeting in Sofia by Rosette Vandenbroucke.

Activities during the Bulgarian and Austrian EU Presidency

Aneta Karaivanova reported on the activities during the Bulgarian presidency. The e-IRG delegates meeting would take place at the Best Western Expo Hotel on 20 March 2018. The GEANT General Assembly has been moved to Sofia, taking place on 21-22 March, so that it is combined with the delegates meeting and the Research Infrastructure conference on 22-23 March. The ESFRI Forum meeting would take place on 21 March.

The e-IRG workshop under the Bulgarian EU presidency will take place at the Grand Hotel Sofia on 14-15 May 2018. The delegates meeting will take place on 16 May in the same venue.

A regional workshop, on South Eastern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean will take place on 15-17 May after the e-IRG workshop focusing on policy aspects, including EU Structural Funds for building Infrastructures.

Paolo Budroni presented the following initial plans on events that will take place during the Austrian presidency:

September 2018:

• The International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI 2018), 12-14 Sep. 2018, Vienna, Austria Center

• ESFRI Forum meeting, 10 Sep. 2018

• ESFRI Roadmap 2018 Launch event, 11 September 2018

• Possible dates of e-IRG delegates meeting: 10-11 September 2018

October 2018:

• EOSC Conference, 30 October 2018 at the University of Vienna, under the title “The European Open Science Cloud: Austria takes initiative”

November 2018:

• EOSC Stakeholder Forum, November 2018, Vienna

• The e-IRG workshop and second delegates meeting can be organised in the framework of one of the two events, possibly the third week of November combined with the EOSC Stakeholder Forum. This has to be discussed also internally and with the European Commission. !

http://e-irg.eu/e-irg-meeting-nov-2017


8 Spring 2018

ETAIS and eInfraCentrala national and a European approach for offering e-Infrastructure services

At the open e-IRG Workshop, held 3-4 October 2017 at Tallinn University in Estonia, we had the opportunity to talk with Ilja Livenson, an IT specialist working on the Estonian Scientific Computing Infrastructure (ETAIS) project, and George Papastefanatos, a senior researcher and project manager at the ATHENA Research Centre and research associate with the University of Athens, about national and European e-Infrastructure catalogue approaches.

Ilja Livenson explained that ETAIS is a national Estonian initiative to provide a marketplace and e-Services to research-related entities. including research communities, students and R&D companies. George Papastefanatos is working for the eInfraCentral project. This new European Union-funded project started in January 2017. It concerns the building of a service catalogue for the overall infrastructure in Europe and the creation of a platform for accessing and browsing the catalogue.

The basic problem that you both addressed in your presentations at the e-IRG Workshop, but from a different point of view, is that there are a lot of e-Infrastructures like networks, computing centres and services providing software, and on the other hand there are a lot of potential users. These things are also changing over time. This means that you get new users and new services. How do you bring these two together? This is what

you are both addressing but Ilja, you do it more from a national perspective. Can you tell a little bit more about that?

Ilja Livenson: In the case of Estonia, the national perspective is a small perspective which is regional. This is an area where people mostly know each other. We approach the matter from the needs of the users and we try to present services that satisfy their needs. As a national body, we are doing the selection of services that the end users would use. Naturally, this is a limited choice.

However, we are presenting an added value of an e-Infrastructural knowhow to provide the most fitting solutions for the end user needs. In Estonia, there are not so many research infrastructures. We do have an issue of integration with the European ones as you mentioned, for the choice becomes much wider and the stability becomes much smaller. There are users coming and going. All this needs better handling.

In our view, we will still maintain the principle that the infrastructure at the national level should be the one to do the pre-filtering for the majority of the customers - let's say, the smaller and medium ones. The bigger ones should be able to do this for themselves. Our approach on the national level is to help the end users to select the best and the most fitting services from the national level.

The more demanding users then are turning to international infrastructures like EGI,

PRACE or GÉANT. They should turn to your catalogue, George, when it is ready?

George Papastefanatos: I don't think these are two competitive approaches. They could also go to a pan-European network and through this network select some more national-wide specific services. Maybe they are more suitable for them, maybe they are offered for this institution in this country. Our approach in eInfraCentral is a more top-down than bottom-up approach. So far, we have five major infrastructures as partners. They

provide us with pan-European level services that are offered. We try to harmonize the service descriptions and the different aspects of the services into a common catalogue that could be accessed and browsed by the users. In this respect, many of the services could be offered at the national level, for instance by Estonian infrastructures that are part of a broader or a wider European infrastructure. We think that the route or the path for consuming a service, for accessing a service could be top-bottom as well.

This means that if people go to the eInfraCentral catalogue, they could end up with using a service which is provided in Estonia. It is not like whether you would start with five pan-European e-Infrastructures or with one supercomputer and one network. There are already collections of services available.


Spring 2018 9

George Papastefanatos: Exactly. There is also the regional aspect. This will be presented within our platform. As a national service provider or an institution, one could also provide a service, describe the service within a common format and be part of this platform. We don't expect that only European infrastructures will offer services but also at different levels, there could be other service providers as long as they describe their services and are trying to reach the right users. We can have service provisioning at different levels, including regional, national and European levels.

Do you provide some kind of portal for your users, Ilja?

Ilja Livenson: Our general approach is to minimize the human interactions or e-mail exchange. We provide a social portal through which 80 to 90 percent of the actions could be done. The portal also comes with an integrated marketplace, with an integrated service desk, an integrated team management, and a number of other things

that are required for the use of the infrastructure on a day-to-day basis. This portal has been developed within Estonia. It is open source and we are welcoming contributions to this. We also plan to integrate with the service catalogue for integration of services beyond Estonia, in order to not have to deal with this kind of service categorisation and curating which is a huge work. It would be nice if this could be done by eInfraCentral.

For us, it is important on the self-service level, to be able to also provision the service. This is a tricky topic at this moment. However, I believe this is something to aim for on the midterm, to not only have automated discovery but also automated service negotiation and provisioning.

This is something different from what you want to do, George, because you only want to do the discovery.

George Papastefanatos: Actually, we are not a marketplace in the strict sense that we would try to negotiate about the price and the options. We are actually mainly a gateway for trying to bring different service providers within a common platform or space so that users can easily navigate through different services at different levels of need and also to have a way for comparing services according to some characteristics. Then, they request the service from the service provider himself. We are not going to offer anything or try to negotiate about the services. We expect that the user in the end will find what he is interested in and what he is looking for. He can request the service either from the European infrastructure or the national infrastructure and then use the option for accessing and getting the service.

The scientist who in the end uses the service will not always go to your portal, George, or to yours, Ilja. He can also go to a portal which is more domain-specific. How do you intend to integrate with that?

George Papastefanatos: I think the goal now is at the European level to give the researcher - and in general the user might be more than just a researcher - more options and a wider variety of options for the services to choose and select from. Now, we have a lot of infrastructures.

Of course, there are some which are domain-specific and some disciplines are focusing on specific services. However, we expect that this scheme can easily be seen under a uniform perspective so that researchers can easily compare and especially researchers who are not aware of what they are looking for or what the offerings are. The goal here is not to address the needs of specific disciplines for researchers who know and use specific infrastructures at the national level. We want to open up this browsing and exploring approach for service discovery to a wider range of researchers and users.

We can open up with the notion that there are less borders. We can offer services at the European level. This could also be a way for comparing the services across Europe. This is something that will be for the benefit of the researchers and also for the service providers who wish to be more attractive, more competitive, not only at the national level, but willing to offer services to other countries as well.

Ilja, your portal is already online and working for how long?

Ilja Livenson: We went live with a very initial version during the Summer of 2017. Now, there are already several service providers who have entered. By the end of 2017, we will link all the infrastructures in Estonia. There will be a process of migrating the previous users and how they are working now to the central system. This is something that we will be doing in the next year. The goal is to go in production mode by the end of 2017.

And how about the status of the eInfraCentral portal, George?

George Papastefanatos: For the development of the platform, we are now in the very first round. We are trying to offer functionality for service browsing and search. In the next phase we will try to address the need for automatic service metadata harvesting and registration as well, and to connect with more infrastructures, more than just the five partners that are within our project. We will also work on the alignment of the service description. We are now at the first version 1.1 for the service catalogue, for the service description. This will be incorporated into the next phase within the platform.

Thank you very much for this interview and looking forward to using your catalogues.

ETAIS is available at http://etais.ee eInfraCentral at http://einfracentral.eu

Ilja Livenson

George Papastefanatos


10 Spring 2018

Interoperable data & Cloud using EUDAT & EGIFrom 22 to 25 January 2018, Porto hosted over 230 participants of EUDAT's Conference "Putting the EOSC vision into practice". Attendees included policy makers, service providers and research communities representatives from 25 countries working on various data challenges and disciplines.

The conference was opened by Augusto Burgueño Arjona, Head of the eInfrastructure Unit of the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT), who presented the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as an open science instrument supporting the collaboration between e-Infrastructures & research infrastructures: "EOSC has to be an inclusive ecosystem where horizontal and thematic service providers work together to meet the user needs."

The discussion on how to put the EOSC vision into practice was addressed with a set of breakout sessions themed around the creation of a thriving data economy. The topics approached were in the range of: interoperability of services, the role of research infrastructures as thematic service providers, business models and sustainability of data infrastructures, legal issues.One of the sessions was dedicated to the results accomplished by the collaboration between EGI and EUDAT for the implementation of a production cross-infrastructure offering seamless access to data and high-throughput computing resources. The work of the collaboration involved concrete user communities in the design process. This helped both EGI and EUDAT to better shape their services so as to match real needs of their users.

Two major use cases were brought in by the ICOS and ENES research communities.The ICOS use case focused on the new web-based service offered on the ICOS Carbon Portal to perform 3-dimensional Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (STILT) atmospheric transport model calculations. The input data consists of meteorological air transport data (from ECMWF), data on greenhouse gas emissions (from EDGAR), and atmospheric observations (from ICOS and other sources). The output data shows time series of concentrations of greenhouse gases and their resulting footprints at selected

locations. The data was successfully handled via a combination of EUDAT B2STAGE and B2SAFE services and other network file management systems, while the production model was visualised using EGI on-demand computing services.

The ENES use case addressed the volume increase of the climate data archive by employing the EUDAT General Execution Framework (GEF) Workflow API, in combination with EUDAT B2 services, and interfacing with the EGI Federated Cloud. Post-processing results - e.g. data on carbon gas emissions - are sent back to be displayed and further processed at the IS-ENES platform.

They can also be downloaded in different common data formats as tailored products via a simple website interface. The input data - typically Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5/6 (CMIP5/CMIP6) data - is now being downloaded locally by climate impact researchers and makes room for a more sustainable data workflow.

To conclude, the session at the EUDAT conference was a great opportunity to present examples of the collaboration between EGI & EUDAT and between generic and thematic service providers in their effort to support researchers' needs. !

Sara Garavelli, Outreach Manager of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure

Impression 52nd delegates meetingProfessor Ivan Dimov, Deputy Minister of Ministry of Education and Science, Bulgaria opened the 52nd e-IRG delegates meeting in Sofia, 20 March, 2018

The 52nd closed e-IRG delegate meeting was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 20 March 2018. The meeting was opened by the Deputy Minister of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science Prof. Ivan Dimov. He stated that in the last two decades there is a governmental support for the development of e-Infrastructures and that Bulgaria is one of the leading countries in the South-east European (SEE) regional e-Infrastructure projects.

He also pointed out that Bulgaria is a natural hub in information and communication technologies, that the most powerful supercomputer in Southeastern Europe "Avitohol" is installed in Sofia, and that last year Bulgaria signed the EuroHPC declaration (October 2017). "Digital connectivity is among the top priorities of the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union", stated Prof. Ivan Dimov. He noted the good cooperation in this direction between

the Ministry of Education and Science and the Commissioner for Digital Economy and Digital Society Mariya Gabriel.The e-IRG meeting continued according to its agenda with discussions, information, brain storming, exchange of experience and best practices between Member States. The programme for the e-IRG workshop on 14-15 May in Sofia was discussed and approved. The plan for e-IRG activities and document production was updated. !


Spring 2018 11

Around EuropeCountry newsCountry descriptions can be found in the e-IRG Knowledge Base. The country description in the e-IRG Knowledge Base has been actualized and updated with new information on the national infrastructure, policy and documents.

http://knowledgebase.e-irg.eu/countries

CroatiaStructural fund project: HR-ZOO

The Croatian scientific and educational cloud - HR-ZOO project’s final documentation has been prepared by the Project Coordinator, the University of Zagreb University Computing Centre - SRCE, on behalf of a consortium whose partners consist of 4 major universities in Croatia, the largest institute in Croatia - The Ruđer Bošković Institute and the national research and education network – CARNet. The Project goal is to build a national e-infrastructure to support research and education in all scientific fields. HR-ZOO is designed as a common distributed infrastructure consisting of:

1. HR-ZOO e-infrastructure sites (data centres) in four major university cities: Osijek, Rijeka, Split and Zagreb

2. Advanced computing resources for : High Throughput Computing (HTC); High Performance Computing (HPC); and Computing for general purposes (Cloud)

3. Advanced storage resources: Storage systems for Big Data collections and data repositories

4. High-speed backbone of the National Academic and Research Network - up to 100 Gbps connectivity between HR-ZOO sites/cities

5. A team of specialists for operations and user support (IT specialists and e-scientists)

Total eligible investment costs for financing from EU funds amount to around 26 million euro. Applying the co-financing rate of the relevant priority axis (85%), 22 million euro out of the total investment costs are planned to be covered with EU funds.The expected start of the project is mid-2018 and the expected duration is 36 months.

10 Centres of Research Excellence in the Republic of Croatia received 50 million euro

In October 2017 ten Centres of Research Excellence in the Republic of Croatia have received 50 million euro non-refundable fund of which 85% of the funds (about 42 million euro) are secured from the European Regional Development Fund.

The Centres of Research Excellence gather and crosslink the best scientists in a particular field at a national level who are focused on modern research topics. Each of these 10 Centres has received a grant of around 5 million euro. Projects will last for five years. More than 100 young scientists will be employed through the projects, new research equipment will be acquired and the costs of top research will be financed.

The goal of this grant is to develop cutting-edge research and strengthen the capacity of Centres of Research Excellence in the Republic of Croatia whose mission is to move the frontiers of research, knowledge and society in general through scientific research and its possible application, thereby increasing and enhancing the international visibility and recognition of the Croatian scientific community and contributing to the development of the economy and society as a whole.

3. ERA Roadmap - The Implementation Plan of the Republic of Croatia 2016-2020

In November 2017, the Ministry of Science and Education (MSE) has published the Implementation Plan of the Republic of Croatia 2016-2020 (IP) based on the already adopted ERA Roadmap.

The IP gives an overview of the national strategic framework and guidelines for further development of science and technology, as well as a brief overview of the current situation in Croatia within each of the ERA priorities - stating the objectives, measures and activities that should contribute to the development of science, as a driver of long-term economic and social development, and the objectives set out in the framework of the ERA by 2020. It covers the period from 2016 to 2020 and might, if necessary, be further revised.

More info is available at: https://ec.europa.eu/research/era/pdf/era_progress_report2016/nationalroadmaps/era_national-roadmap-2016_hr.pdf

4. Croatia officially signed the EuroHPC declaration

In November 2017, in Brussels, Blazenka Divjak, Croatian Minister for Science and Education, signed for the Republic of Croatia the Declaration Cooperation framework on High Performance Computing (EuroHPC), in the presence of Roberto Viola, Director General DG Connect; European Commission. Croatia was the 13th country joining the EuroHPC declaration.

5. CLARIN ERIC

The Ministry of Science approved the start of joining CLARIN ERIC. National consortia will be established under the coordination of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb.

ItalyOn 28 February 2018 the Ministry of Education, University and Research published a call for funding projects of empowering research infrastructures that have been prioritised in the National Programme for Research Infrastructures 2014-2020 published in 2017. The call addresses the Action II.1 of the National Operational Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020. The total available amount of the call is about 326 million euro that have to be spent mostly in the less developed regions and transition regions with a maximum of 15% in other regions. The projects should ask between 5 and 20 million euro with 100% reimbursement.

The participation is restricted to the Italian Research Organisations and Universities leading the 18 priority research infrastructures that include also ESFRI projects based in Italy or Italian chapters of ERICs:

• Aerosols Clouds and Traces gases Research Infrastructure Network (ACTRIS-RI);

• Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium, an ERIC as per EC Decision


12 Spring 2018

2014/392/UE of 24 June 2014 (CERIC-ERIC);

• Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, an ERIC as per EC Decision 2014/526/UE of 6 August 2014 (DARIAH-ERIC);

• Distributed High Throughput Computing and Storage - (DHTCS) now part of IPCEI-HPC-BDA - Important Project of Common European Interest on High Performance Computing and Big Data enabled Applications;

• European Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Laboratory Infrastructure, an ERIC as per EC Decision 2017/996/UE of 9 June 2017 (ECCSEL-ERIC);

• European Life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information (ELIXIR);

• European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC);

• European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory, an ERIC as per EC Decision 2016/1757/UE of 29 September 2016 (EMSO-ERIC);

• European Plate Observing System (EPOS);

• The European Research Infrastructure for Imaging Technologies in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (EuroBioImaging);

• Integrated Carbon Observation System, an ERIC as per EC Decision 2015/2097/UE of 26 October 2015 (ICOS-ERIC);

• European Research Infrastructure for Heritage (E-RHIS);

• Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3-NET);

• e-Science European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, an ERIC as per EC Decision 2017/499/UE of 17 March 2017 (LIFEWATCH-ERIC);

• Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso of INFN (LNGS);

• Laboratori Nazionali del Sud of INFN (LNS);

• Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT);• Southern Europe Thomson Back-

Scattering Source for Applied Research (STAR).

The Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure (ICDI) group is preparing a MoU to aggregate the participants and officialise the activity. !

GO FAIR initiative to create implementation networks for stewardship of data

During the annual SURFsara Super D Event on December 12, 2017 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, we had a conversation with Erik Schultes, International Science Coordinator at the GO FAIR International Support and Coordination Office in Leiden, the Netherlands. Erik Schultes originally comes from the United States and has worked for eight years in the Netherlands in a research group, led by Barend Mons, at the Leiden University Medical Centre. Over time, the research group developed more and more an interest in issues related to data stewardship in order to get a handle on it.

This led the research group to where it is now by opening an International Support and Coordination Office for GO FAIR. The office is based in Leiden, not necessarily associated directly with the university or the medical centre but located very close by.

To refresh our memories, what exactly is GO FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable)?

Erik Schultes: In April 2016, the European Commission announced the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative. Now that there is a very strong interest in figuring out the governance and the implementation of the EOSC, GO FAIR is a bottom-up initiative that has a mandate to coordinate the creation of a component, of an Internet that is made of FAIR data and services. It is really a fast-track implementation of EOSC. That is how it is seen in a European context but, of course, if data is really to be rendered FAIR, this is something that is global in scale. The mandate of the GO FAIR Office is international,

starting in Europe but eventually going beyond Europe.

The GO FAIR Office is a bottom-up initiative by the Netherlands, France and Germany. Should it stay with those three countries?

Erik Schultes: No. In fact, there is interest among other Member States to join GO FAIR as well. The structure of this is all being worked out, as we move along. What we envision at this point and what we see is likely to happen is that there is an international coordinating office, now located in Leiden, but there could very well be, in some cases, national-level GO FAIR offices as well, coordinating national-level activities. The idea for the GO FAIR initiative is that there are implementation networks that are created or that are spontaneously coming up from below. Each of these networks might be interested in or focused on a component of a FAIR Internet of data and services. It is the job of the GO FAIR Office to coordinate these different activities in the different implementation networks.

So, the Office itself doesn’t do anything except coordinating?

Erik Schultes: Exactly, that is a great way to put it. We like to say in the Office that we don’t do anything. It is really up to other people. The primary goal would be to avoid the reinvention of the wheel in different isolated contacts, or to avoid the adoption of conflicting standards when maybe somebody’s decisions would have been kind of arbitrary anyway. We can be there as a hub to facilitate communication between different implementation networks that may have interdependencies. This can catalyze the process of launching an Internet of FAIR data and services in that way.

How is the Office funded?Erik Schultes: The original funding for the GO FAIR Office in Leiden came from the Dutch government, from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). As of December 1, 2017, there is joined funding from the Dutch and German governments. The French government is very close to being a contributor but it is not sure whether they have yet signed on officially. There is also a list of other Member States that are ready and have been involved in discussions to join the GO FAIR initiative.

GO FAIR is just one element of the whole European Open Science Cloud initiative?

Erik Schultes: The GO FAIR approach is complementary to the EOSC pilots that are starting up now. It is different but complementary. It is seen as a launch path for EOSC, it is the main driving use case right now. In terms of the inherent international aspects of having data rendered automatically interoperable and discoverable, this is a global problem. So we can also facilitate solutions that might extend beyond Europe. !https://www.go-fair.org/

Erik Schultes


Spring 2018 13

The public open e-IRG Workshop under the auspices of the Estonian EU Presidency of the European Union took place at the Tallinn University Campus in the Astra building on 3-4 October 2017. The main objective of the workshop was the contribution towards some main directions in the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Key areas that were explored include governance, funding, services and data-related aspects. Sustainability was a cross-cutting theme. Special attention was given on the national perspectives on EOSC development.

The opening and welcome address was made by Mr. Indrek Reimand, who is the Deputy Secretary General on Higher Education and Research from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, and by the e-IRG chair Gabriele von Voigt.

The workshop was split into four main sessions:

1. EOSC status update - funding and governance - EU views. This session presented the view of the European Commission (EC) on EOSC, a short wrap-up of the EOSCpilot Governance Development Forum meeting, and a short view of the potential role e-IRG could have in EOSC Governance.

2. EOSC status update - funding and governance - National views. This session presented the national perspectives and developments in several EU countries and Japan regarding EOSC and potential ways to make EOSC sustainable.

3. EOSC Services for users. This session presented an Infrastructure Marketplace paradigm, demonstrated by the Estonian case, and the work to be performed by eInfraCentral which has been tasked to create a Service Catalogue for many European projects and initiatives.

4. Data services and FAIR data. This session presented the data services and policies in large organisations with the Swiss Data Science Center and the European Space Agency as use cases, and the service development within EOSC - both by EOSCpilot and EOSC-hub points of views.

EOSC status update - EU views

Carmela Asero from EC DG-RTD and Cristina Martinez from EC DG CONNECT presented the current support by the European Union on EOSC and that of the upcoming Work Programme 2018-2020. A vision of the future and the key roles of some initiatives including EGI, EUDAT and more, and of some relevant projects including EOSCpilot, EOSC-hub, and eInfraCentral, on the formulation of EOSC was outlined. An indicative mapping of EOSC actions in 2018-2019 was also shown. The results and highlights of the EOSC summit were given in several bullet-points. Next, the pathway of EOSC was summarized and actions such as the EOSC Declaration, EOSC Stakeholders Forum, and EOSC Roadmap were analyzed. A potential EOSC governance structure was shown and discussed. Finally, the EOSC implementation process and timeline were shown in greater detail.

Per Öster from the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC) presented a wrap-up of the EOSC Governance Development Forum (EGDF) which will enable all different stakeholders to contribute to the governance framework development. EGDF is mandated to function and support the establishment of EOSC and act as a platform for information, dialogue, and development. An overview of EGDF was given. The principles of engagement with EOSC were analyzed both from the level of individual researchers - users and providers, whether public or private. The time scale for the evaluation of the success of EOSC is 5 years (by 2022), and the role of KPIs, an ongoing activity performed both by e-IRG and eInfraCentral, on this issue was mentioned. Finally, EOSCpilot's point of view on EOSC Governance was described as providing a role on 3 stakeholder groups namely funders, Research Infrastructures and e-Infrastructures.

Gabriele von Voigt presented the four areas of key importance for EOSC where special attention is paid by e-IRG, and summarized the potential role of e-IRG in the following bullet points:

1. e-IRG can advise and give recommendations on good governance and policies towards the realization of the EOSC.

2. e-IRG can give guidance for a comprehensive service portfolio for the satisfaction of the research communities.

3. e-IRG can contribute to bilateral advocacy of e-infrastructures concerning the

e-IRG Workshop TallinnFocus on the European Open Science Cloud from EU,

national and user perspectives at the e-IRG Workshop, October 3-4, 2017 in Tallinn, Estonia


14 Spring 2018

implementation of the e-infrastructures commons.

4. e-IRG can contribute to coordination activities between all e-infrastructure policy makers and funders.

A panel discussion followed with the speakers on the "European perspective on EOSC Governance and Funding and how to make it sustainable".

EOSC status update - National views

In the second session, Ramin Yahyapour from the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures laid out the view of the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII) on what research infrastructures are and on how a national research Infrastructure must be designed and function. He mentioned the recent work of RfII on recommendations for research data infrastructures and outlined the key points and the added value of the existence of German Research Data Infrastructures. RfII plans to initiate "consortia" on a thematic or disciplinary aspect that will help communities form a critical mass and speak out collectively on a national basis and help organize competencies. Consortia will consist of university and non-university research partners along with other cultural or other public non-scientific institutions as long as they have common objectives and agreements and are will to collaborate with RfII on general topics.

Jan Bot from SURFsara presented the Dutch vision of Open Science. Open Science has indeed been important in the Agenda of the recent Dutch EU presidency. The national plan for Open Science has four major key ambitions: i) full open access to publications in 2020, ii) make research data optimally suited for reuse, iii) recognize and reward, iv) promote and support. The objectives of SURF are to address the connection between ICT and policy, ICT and users, and between various developments within the sphere of ICT. The Go FAIR initiative is also high on the Dutch agenda which is one of the leading countries. Jan Bot also explained the support Triangle that exists in the Netherlands which

is based on the collaboration of scientists, local ICT support and SURF.

Laurent Crouzet from the French Ministry of Research (MENESR) started by mentioning that France considers to structure its national e-infrastructures into a French Open Science Cloud and agrees with the EOSC Declaration sections regarding data culture and FAIR data. However, on Governance, France believes that EOSC should be endorsed by the Member States and Associated Countries through the European Research Area Committee Strategy Working Group (ERAC SWG) on Open Science and Innovation. EOSC Governance should be inspired by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) like governance structures, and although ESFRI should play a major role, scientific users needs must be gathered somehow. The view of how Governance should be addressed was further analyzed. Interoperability mechanisms that will help with sharing and transnational access issues that concern France were mentioned. Finally, since Open does not mean free by definition, France is also worried about the business model of EOSC.

Saara Kontro from the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC) began by presenting the current status in Finland on the EOSC front. Finland has had a national plan in place since 2014 that covers national obligations and methodologies even though it has a slightly different scope and coverage. The universities are highly involved. Finland welcomes the EOSC Declaration and sees a potential in it. A 45 million euro programme has already been launched which has the same elements as EOSC - FAIR principles, data management plans (DMPs), skills, training, interoperability, long term preservation and HPC. For EOSC, Finland believes that Member States need to be better informed and involved. Governance should be kept simple, flexible and clear, and existing forums and groups related to e-Infrastructures should be used rather than new ones being created. Finland sees the need for funding at the operational or governance level and calls for attention to the legal interoperability layer of EOSC. Saara Kontro also presented the current status in Finland on Open Access, rewards, FAIR standards, DMPs, and more.

Miho Funamori from the Japanese National Institute of Informatics, stated that although Japan is not part of EOSC, there is strong interest by a small community of scientists to adapt such practices. Indeed, Japan has started providing services similar to those of EOSC, but at a much smaller scale, and if these find adequate response they will grow in size and number. The approach followed is, however, quite different as Japan has not had such abstract thinking and background views from the community. The current situation was analyzed in further detail. Japan now helps financially and technically research and education institutions in having repositories, it has developed a single sign on federation service, similar to eduroam, and it endorses Open Science. It has also created a research data management platform for researchers to use which is like the European Collaborative Data Infrastructure (EUDAT), while data repositories are broken into an institutional level and every Japanese researcher can have access to it and use it.

Other countries such as Italy, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, and Turkey have expressed their own views on EOSC funding and governance. For example, in Italy the process of understanding the involvement Italy can have in EOSC is just now starting. A list of people from the existing research infrastructures is being created in order to help draft a document that can identify what will be needed in 5 or 10 years. In Hungary, there is a very positive feeling about the intention of marching together, of harmonizing activities, of cooperating, of coordinating everything, but there is also a certain level of fear about the demand towards the developers regarding these common goals. In Ukraine, there is also an open research policy, there is a scientific data archive, services associated to the data and virtual research environment for scientists. In Greece, there is a national documentation centre that publishes all doctoral dissertations. However, the general feeling is that researchers lack the motive to open up their own data to others, even if the infrastructure built is good and efficient. Turkey supports EOSC. It has already started to use data management plans in Turkish projects, and is building an open access repository.


Spring 2018 15

A panel discussion followed with the speakers on "national perspectives on EOSC governance and funding and how to make it sustainable".

EOSC Services for users.

In the third session, Ilja Livenson demonstrated the Estonian e-Infrastructure Marketplace paradigm (ETAIS). He started by briefly presenting ETAIS which is a consortium of four partners and which provides the infrastructure and support services to the researchers of Estonia. The services offered cover mostly highperformance computing (HPC) and secondary Cloud services such as computing, storage, long term storage and application and maintenance support. ETAIS customers, who engage in a contractual basis with ETAIS, help towards having a sustainable research infrastructure, by partially covering the infrastructure and services costs which are kept at very low prices. Pricing examples for cloud resources were given. The design goals of the marketplace and some examples of services provided through it were shown. The roadmap of ETAIS was also analyzed and it was obvious that it complies with EOSC.

Jorge Sanchez from JNP and George Papastefanatos from the University Of Athens presented the eInfraCentral Service Catalogue and user portal. Jorge Sanchez began by presenting what eInfraCentral is and the relation it has to eIRGSP5. The mission, core objectives and timeline were shown. The why, what, how, when, and the challenges of service catalogues alignment were explained in detail. The prior efforts made by the Catalogue of Services Working Group, the e-IRG development of KPIs, the FedSM and FitSM standards, the eInfrastructure Observatory/e-nventory and the tmforum were mentioned, followed by some results from the Survey on e-Infrastructure Service Catalogues. Then, the State of Affairs in the five major e-Infrastructures including EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, OPENAIRE, and PRACE, as well as some smaller indicative ones, was given. An overview of commercial marketplaces and the progress made on service alignment was given in more detail.

A panel discussion followed with the speakers on "EOSC Services and feedback to service catalogue and marketplace".

Data services and FAIR data.

In the fourth and last session, Olivier Verscheure from the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) started by presenting the problem that exists in the fragmented ecosystem of science. The work SDSC performs to foster the adoption of data science both in academia and industry was explained. Specifically, it was mentioned that SDSC offers excellence in academic research backed by strong industrial experience through its embedded R&D collaboration, domain-specific Insights as a Service, and Open (Data) Science. It answers researchers’ challenges and provides Renga, a highly-scalable and secure open software platform designed to foster multidisciplinary data (science) collaboration across mutually untrusted academic and industrial institutions. SDSC's Renga supports actions towards automated Open Science, and can be used almost regardless of the scientific field.

Rosemarie Leone from the European Space Agency (ESA) focused on Long Term Data Preservation and Stewardship supporting Open Science and Open Access at ESA. ESA's mandate to assure the long term preservation, sharing and exploitation of space data and its associated knowledge, as well as Open Access and Open Science developments were presented. Various use cases of earth observation, and the current space and earth science key challenges were shown in detail. Earth science Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and their services catalogues were presented. Finally, it was pointed out that ESA is looking forward for the Open Scientist in 2030.

On behalf of the SURFsara EOSCpilot, Jan Bot talked about the Architecture and Services of EOSCpilot. He began by mentioning some examples like the We-NMR - a worldwide e-infrastructure for nuclear magnetic resonance and structural biology - and MoBrain - a competence centre to serve

translational research from molecule to brain - collaboration and the reasons for reluctant adoption of e-infra services by research infrastructures. The purpose of a Service Portfolio and what the available services in a service catalogue of EOSC should look like were presented. Some EOSC portfolio principles - inclusiveness, description of service levels, implementation of light-weight portfolio management processes and flexible delivery model - were shown. To achieve what EOSC aspires to be, it is necessary to know what communities and researchers are asking for, which can be done if the service delivery triangle is set up correctly between e-infrastructure provider, end-user, and research infrastructure.

The last speaker, Per Öster from the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC), talked about EOSC-hub. He explained the mission for which it was conceived: implement and operate the EOSC, define rules of engagement, operate, integrate, and advance. An overview of the EOSC-hub project itself, and the service architecture on which it is built were given. The three ways to engage research communities - thematic service providers, early adopters, and customers - were presented. More specifically, when research communities are seen as providers of community specific services for the project service catalogue they take up the role of service provider and they integrate, train and exploit. If research communities are seen as a consumer of common e-Infrastructure services they take up the role of user (early adopter), they co-design, and pilot use. Finally, when research communities are seen as existing/prospective consumers of the service in the catalogue they take up the role of customer, they allocate credit and exploit. !

The full workshop minutes, slides and video recordings of the presentations can be found on the e-IRG website:http://e-irg.eu/e-irg-workshop-oct-2017


16 Spring 2018

InterviewPhilippe Notton The European Processor Initiative (EPI) to develop the processor that will be at the heart of the European exascale supercomputer effort

Europe has an ambitious plan to become a main player in supercomputing. The EuroHPC initiative is a joint undertaking with as one of its goals to construct an exascale supercomputer based on European technology. One of the core parts is a processor. Although there are several processor-related research projects, it is only now that an effort has started to build a production HPC processor with industry quality. This is done as part of a 120 million euro Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) that has been awarded to a consortium of 23 partners. We talked to the project coordinator Philippe Notton from Atos to learn more about the "European Processor Initiative" as the project is called.

When we understand correctly, it is a framework contract so you have to put in, additionally to the framework contract, two proposals to get real funded projects.

Philippe Notton: That is correct. We responded to a H2020 call with the deadline end of September 2017. The call name was ICT-42 for the development of low-power microprocessor technology. So we had to submit the pre-consortium. We ended up with 23 partners. By the end of November we got the feedback from the Commission that we were selected. As you can see on their website, they received three proposals. So we were invited to move to the next phase, SGA1, which is to finish the grant agreement and to give them detailed budget, detailed statement of work between the partners, and in the background, write the consortium agreement between the different partners. We have to achieve this by the end of April. The next phase SGA2 is for late 2020.

And when will the project really start? After April?

Philippe Notton: Yes. All the development work I expect to start mid of 2018. Now of course, we are in the preparation and documentation phase. We have started basically to do this end of last year. There is already some work involved from the different partners. And on the technical side it is much more Intellectual Property (IP) selection, negotiations with partners, potential providers, and completion of the architecture. You cannot set up and manage a consortium like this if at the beginning you do not have a clear picture about where you want to go. But in terms of technical development and heavy resources, kick off is much more mid-2018.

So the consortium started with 23 partners. Are they all in for the whole duration? For both the projects?

Philippe Notton: That is the idea. We probably have some other partners that will join during the process. So far we have 23 partners from 10 countries. I have in my records another 22 candidates who would like to join. We have some internal process of determining gaps and filling these with qualified partners to ensure that the new ones have the missing expertise, the value that we need. It is also going to help us create an ecosystem around the technology that we are going to bring to the market and disseminate it around Europe and beyond.

Is the project consortium led by Atos? Or by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)? That was not clear to us.

Philippe Notton: I am glad you raised the point. Officially, Atos is the coordinator. Atos has submitted the proposal, and BSC, which is quite strong in HPC of course, is one of the key partners. Why Atos? In the guidelines we got from the Commission it was stated that it is an industrial project. Out of this project they want to see a processor that is ready for production. That is why they want an industrial leader. The consortium of 23 partners is a mix of industrial companies, academics and research centres. It is not a pure research project.

So it is a development project. In the call it says that you should develop two types of processors. Is that correct?

Philippe Notton: There are two dimensions. It is one processor but we want also to cover some acceleration technology in it. Why? Because now in HPC, depending on the applications and the countries, it is a mix of general purpose processor and acceleration technologies. So we have to cover both with a main focus on general purpose processor and we will add the accelerator dimension. We then also create the ecosystem and IP's around it.

What will the processor look like? Do you have some more technical details already?

Philippe Notton: It is a bit early. We are stepping into a market which is very, very competitive. So we are still working on the specs, and its target in terms of Performance per Watt. Once the specs are clear, we have to look at the subset of information we are going to disclose to the public. There are multiple companies that are already in a good position in this market, which are working on this area also. Today, we are still in the early days in terms of architecture definition. We will not have a public product brief of specs before six months.

Can you tell already whether it will be something like an ARM processor?

Philippe Notton: That is also a good question. One of the new trends in HPC business is definitely ARM. What is clear also is that for the first product that should be ready in 2021, we cannot design it from scratch. We cannot create everything for this processor, so we need to leverage an existing software ecosystem, that is exascale capable. So yes, ARM is one of the candidates to start from. This time, ARM is not one of the official partners, not one of the 23 partners. We are working with ARM in some other projects, like Mont-Blanc 2020, that has officially started in January this year. They provide a compelling technology, which is proven in the market, and what we need to get a product out quickly and in time for 2021. Negotiations are on the way with ARM and others. We are talking about complex licensing terms. That's why ARM is one of the candidates but not necessarily the final one.

Is OpenPower is one of the other candidates? Or do you not know yet?

Philippe Notton: It is a sensitive topic. We have multiple candidates, and we have enough experts within the consortium to precisely define which technology is very good in terms of software ecosystem, that could be scaled within the proper silicon process and that could make sense to have in an exascale machine.

One of the goals of Europe is to create European technologies. This is also a key point for us. Because such a design cannot be 100% European in the end, since we have potential issues with the available factories for instance. We know that Europe is no longer producing memories, as another example. We are trying to bring as much European DNA as possible into the system. This makes the core selection challenging because there is no off-the-shelf core which is purely European. We have some micro-controllers technology coming from Europe but they are not powerful enough for this class of HPC design. That is why, as part of this consortium, we are going to start our own processor development which is based


Spring 2018 17

on RISC-V, and develop some IP's and ecosystem around it. We do not start from zero, because there is some instruction set and elements which are ready. Unfortunately, it is not at HPC production level yet and it will take a couple of generations.

The time schedule is quite tight.

Philippe Notton: Oh yes! We are talking about a four-year project. So we have to produce something during these four years. And during these four years if you want to reinvent everything from scratch, forget it. Especially knowing at which pace the competition is moving. So we have to catch up and we will catch up. And the only way to catch up is to start from some IP, and an ecosystem that already exists. Being fabless is also a nice feature in this case. We leverage some proven technologies and supplier channels.

Your project is about the processors only? It is not about memory or interconnect?

Philippe Notton: Memory is no longer produced in Europe. So we will reuse available and future memories. But we will have to take care of the memory controller ourselves. We have some technology for interconnect and memory controller within the partners. We do have interconnect and Network-On-Chip experts among the 23 partners. And it is also part of the value we have to create. As I said, it has to be European. So the internal NOC, the interconnect, the power management, are all key elements we need to have fully under control and we have lots of value to create around it and it is one of the corner stones for high performance computing.

But is that also part of the project?

Philippe Notton: Interconnect is outside of the EPI project but part of the Pre-Exascale and Exascale machine. What is part of the project is that we have to produce and design a chip and some IP's around it.

How does EPI relate to Mont-Blanc 2020 and other projects like the ExaNoDe family of projects that are also creating chips?

Philippe Notton: I'll comment on Mont-Blanc 2020 since Atos is involved in it and 5 other EPI partners. Mont-Blanc 2020 has seven partners. Most of the IP that will be developed as part of Mont-Blanc 2020 will be

reused and productized in EPI. In fact the IP's that will be used in the European Processor Initiative will come from Mont-Blanc 2020, will also come from the external world, and some parts will be developed within EPI, like the accelerator technology. So it is a continuous story from the early Mont-Blanc programme to Mont-Blanc 2020 which has started recently, and EPI which is a different scale in terms of budget and complexity. We will reuse what has been designed and proven before.

How is EPI embedded in the wider EuroHPC initiative?

Philippe Notton: The European Processor Initiative (EPI) is one of the components to build the EuroHPC machine. So EPI will provide the microprocessor technology for the machine. The machine will be built on top of EPI, so EPI will provide the chip technology like General Purpose Processor, accelerator, part of the low level software, like an SDK, and compilers. But in terms of middleware,

applications on top of it, this is part of the EuroHPC programme. The building of the complete machine with 10k - 50k processors, is also part of the EuroHPC programme. You can consider EPI as a prerequisite: EPI is really one of the foundations in terms of technology.

There will also be some pre-exascale demonstrator prototypes.

Philippe Notton: That is correct, we start with this before the big machine, and these will be part of the calls under discussions. We expect the chip to enter the first pre-exascale demonstrator. Part of the FPA-EPI framework is to deliver the chip, and have a couple of boards to prove that the chip is working. The demonstrator is the step after, but obviously using this new flag chip. That is the ultimate goal. So you start with the IP in the Mont-Blanc programme, you develop and bring the main chip to the market and finally you provide the full machine on top of the processors.

What is the time scale you have in mind?

Philippe Notton: The timescale that we put in the project plan is that the first demo is in 2020. We expect the chip to be alive in the second part of 2020, and ready for production in 2021, which should be in line with the pre-exascale demonstrator. I believe everything is in sync. There is a kind of global calendar from which we work. Indeed the interest of this full EuroHPC project is to use these technologies, so we must be in time. This means that the room we have for the execution of this programme, and the development of this chip is strict. We cannot waste euros in dreams, it is going to be a strong project execution.

Will this mean that EuroHPC will reach exascale by 2023?

Philippe Notton: The way I see it today, we have tough internal technical debates about exascale but it is likely to be the generation after EPI. The first chip we are going to build is much more pre-exascale class, because to be exascale in the same timeslot is likely to be

too challenging, the silicon technology not being available yet. It is a bit early to conclude because we do not have yet the forecasts in terms of performance and power. We know more in 6 months as part of the architecture study. In fact it is also a question of

budget, developing such a technology, and delivering such a node is quite expensive, and some technologies are just not ready yet. HBM3 memory is not ready today, some silicon process technologies are not mature yet. So it is a step-by-step approach. If that technology is not yet ready we have to wait for it. We are also on a learning curve. We know the stakeholders of this market. We know the competitors in this market. So we are going to catch up, and we are going to catch up fast.

We would be very happy to see this chip being used in other places than Europe. The best way to measure its success is to have a chip that is used on a world-wide basis and not only on the domestic market.

Can you tell a little bit more about the design process and the consortium?

Philippe Notton: One of the strategies we have, and this was also part of the call, is the emphasis on co-design. That is why this consortium is quite good and well balanced in


18 Spring 2018

terms of expertise. We have experts from the chip design industry; architecture experts; embedded software experts, middleware experts, and HPC application experts. We also have HPC customers in the consortium. We cover a wide range of expertise to assure in terms of co-design the chip will work well and is going to provide the best performance for what is needed. It is not a chip we want to

develop in stand-alone mode and later say, let us try to use it on an HPC system. It is really built for HPC with all the expertise in mind and with the HPC target market in mind. That is complex: we are double checking all the applications we have in mind in Europe for HPC. They each have different needs so we need to reach some convergence.

Co-design is one word, and the other is related a bit to the automotive, and the eHPC, so embedded HPC we are going to develop nearby. !

The complete interview can be found at http://primeurmagazine.com/flash/AE-PR-03-18-87.html

Collaboration Research Data Alliance, the UK Digital Curation Centre and the US National Library of Medicine The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a community-driven, interdisciplinary, international organisation dedicated to collaboratively building the social and technical infrastructure necessary for wide-scale data sharing and advancing open science initiatives. Just short of five years old, this group gathers twice a year at plenary meetings. The most recent one was held in Berlin, Germany, March 21-23, 2018. Dr. Patti Brennan, Director at the US National Library of Medicine, and Sarah Jones, Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the UK, shared their impressions about this Plenary Meeting.

These are no big-lecture, hallway-conversation meetings. As Dr. Patti Brennan discovered in Berlin, the RDA plenaries are working meetings, in the best sense of the phrase - where the work involves creating and validating the mechanisms and standards for data sharing. That work is done by volunteers from across disciplines - over 7,000 people engaged in small work groups, local activities, and conference-based sessions. These volunteers deliberate and construct standards for data sharing, and then establish strategies for testing and endorsing these standards and gaining community consensus and adoption - including partnering with notable standard-setting bodies such as ISO or IEEE.Much of the work focuses on making data and data repositories FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.But RDA espouses a broader vision than the approach the National Library of Medicine has taken so far with data. Where we provide public access to full-text articles, some of which link to associated data, RDA advocates for putting all research-generated data in domain-specific, well-curated repositories.

To achieve that vision, RDA members are working to develop the following three key elements:• a schema to link data to articles,• a mechanism for citing data extracts, and• a way to recognize high-quality data

repositories.Right now, a single publisher may have 50 or 60 different ways of linking articles to data. That means that the estimated 25,000 publishers and 5,000 repositories that manage data have potentially millions of ways of accomplishing this task. Instituting a standardized schema to link data to articles would bring significant order and discoverability to this overwhelming diversity. That consistency would yield immediate benefits, tops among them making data findable and the links interoperable.Efficient data citations will also be a boon to findability. RDA is working on developing dynamic data citations, which would provide persistent identifiers tying data extracts to their repositories and tracking different versions of the data. Machine-created and machine-readable, data citations would enhance rigour and reproducibility in research by ensuring the data generated in support of key findings remains accessible.But linking to and tracking data won’t get us far if the data itself is untrustworthy.To address that, RDA encourages well-curated repositories, but what exactly does that mean?Certification provides one way of acknowledging the quality of a repository. RDA doesn’t sponsor a certification mechanism, but it recognizes several, including the CoreTrustSeal programme. But why does all this matter to the National Institutes of Health and to the National Library of Medicine specifically?Dr. Patti Brennan came to the RDA meeting to explore complementary approaches to what the National Library of Medicine is already doing to curate and assign metadata to data. She was especially looking for guidance on how to handle new data types such as images and environmental exposures.She got some of that, but she also learned that the National Library of Medicine has much to contribute to RDA’s work.

Particularly given its expertise in clinical terminologies and literature languages, the National Library of Medicine adds rich depth to the ways data and other resources can be characterized.In addition, she learned that the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health face many of the same challenges as their global partners: efficiently managing legacy data while not constraining the future to the problems of the past; fostering the adoption of common approaches and standards when the benefit to the larger scientific community may be greater than the value to the individual investigator ; coordinating a voluntary, community-led process that has mission-critical consequences; and creating a permanent home and support organisation for the wide range of standards actually needed for data-driven discovery.Finally, Dr. Patti Brennan learned that people participate in the work of RDA because it both draws on their expertise and advances their own scholarly efforts. In other words, it’s mutually beneficial. But after her time with the RDA group in Berlin, she suspects people all get more than they give. For the National Library of Medicine anyway - as the National Library of Medicine begins to implement its new strategic plan - RDA’s goal of creating a global data ecosystem of best practices, standards, and interoperable data infrastructures is encouraging and something to look forward to.It’s always a good sign when events inspire you to write, according to Sarah Jones, who coordinates work on the Digital Curation Centre’s Data Management Planning tool - DMPonline - and undertakes research on data policy and data management planning. Coming at the end of a 3-week travel tour round Germany, she expected the RDA and co-located events to be the final hurdle that she was steeling herself to face, but the meetings engaged and reinvigorated her in a way she hadn’t anticipated.The Göttingen/CODATA pre-RDA symposium on institutional Research Data Management was a triumph. The event brought together an international mix of data librarians, curators and information professionals who shared hard-won lessons learned through a series of short talks and papers. It had the feeling of the old Jisc MRD


Spring 2018 19

programme meetings where you really felt the community coming together and bonding. The keynotes - all 9 of them - were also exemplary. It’s testament to the programme committee that they managed to profile so much interesting work and provide a space that encouraged collaboration. Sarah Jones would love to see this kind of event being run as a regular pre-RDA event as she thinks it provided exactly the kind of learning experience and forum for exploration that so many participants are looking for from plenaries. But, as Dr. Patti Brennan observed in her excellent Reflections on the Work of the Research Data Alliance, the plenaries are working meetings. One needs other vehicles for taking stock of the state-of-the-art, and doing this immediately before the Plenary left participants buzzing with ideas as they boarded the trains to Berlin en-masse, ready to engage in their small, focused work groups.It was a delight to see new Secretary General, Hilary Hanahoe, open the 11th RDA plenary in Berlin with a motivational analogy of how the participants are all the components of a grand orchestra that come together to produce something multi-layered and magnificent. This really is the value of global cooperation: it is hard work and politically strenuous, but the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts so it warrants ongoing investment.The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) staff were involved in a few sessions at the RDA plenary. Jimmy Angelakos, the DCC tech lead, presented the Data Management Plan (DMP) Roadmap data model in the DMP Common Standards Working Group, Angus Whyte ran the session on Exposing DMPs, which he assured the audience was “nothing salacious - all good clean fun” and Sarah Jones co-chaired the CODATA/RDA Data Science Schools session with Rob Quick. Kevin Ashley was pretty busy too with the Council meeting, funders forum, the RDA Organisational Assembly and other RDA business. The DCC has a new role in RDA now. DCC is one of

the core partners of the RDA 4 Europe project. It is responsible for leading the following tasks and are contributing to many others:• Take-up, implementation and adoption of

RDA outputs• Growing the European national node

network• Supporting RDA global communications• Assessing impactThe role of the nodes is of particular interest to Sarah Jones. If you read her biographical information, you can easily understand why. Sarah Jones is involved in several European Commission funded projects including FOSTER+, OpenAIRE and Research Data Alliance Europe 4.0. Her work in a European context focuses primarily on training, data management planning and network building to facilitate open science. She co-chairs the RDA Active DMP Interest Group and the CODATA Working Group on Research Data Science schools. In a personal capacity, she is rapporteur on the European Commission’s FAIR Data Expert Group and a member of the Open Science Transport Research Cloud Expert Group. In her blog, she states that adoption happens on a local level, and there’s a key facilitation role for national groups to take RDA outputs and disseminate them to relevant contacts within their communities. There is also a role for RDA global and the originating chairs to communicate these outputs better and demonstrate potential applications. Sarah Jones is really pleased that the DCC will be leading the outputs adoption task in the RDA Europe project and look forward to collaborating with Anthony Juehne who holds a similar role in RDA USA.It really feels like RDA has hit a point of maturity. Outputs are being adopted - there was a great example of this from Peter Fox in Göttingen - and the dynamic between sessions chairs shows a professionalism that bodes well. Sarah Jones was particularly impressed at how the trios in the DMP Common Standards WG and the Early Career and Engagement IG divided up responsibilities and supported one another to run really successful sessions.The Early Career and Engagement Interest Group (ECEIG) is one group Sarah Jones was particularly keen to get involved in so she volunteered to be a mentor. Anyone can sign up as a mentor or mentee - one just needs to self-identify with either role and agree a few minimal ground rules about engaging. The ECEIG is intended to help point people in the right direction and support the new data generation to become the leaders of the future. With over 600 people in attendance and a slew of oddly-named BoFs, IGs and

WGs to pick from, RDA plenaries can be really hard to navigate, even for those in the know. Such big meetings are overwhelming and make it hard to discover relevant content and contacts. Once you’ve made your connections though, they can guide you to some of the best haunts in town, so it’s worth persevering. This local bar was discovered thanks to Robin Rice’s craft beer radar, and unique sense of direction.BoFs are Birds of a Feather sessions meant to test fledgling ideas and see if there is scope to propose a formal group. IGs are Interest Groups which explore broad topics of mutual interest such as libraries for research data, data rescue, national data services and active data management plans. Working Groups (WGs) are time-limited, focused groups which operate for 12-18 months and have a fixed remit to deliver a specific output. BoFs may transition into IGs and IGs may spin out into multiple WGs during their lifecycle. Groups can equally form and disband depending on community engagement. An overview of the different group types is presented on the RDA website.The ‘RDA’ acronym may well already have certain meanings for you, but Sarah Jones encourages you to explore the connotations related to the Research Data Alliance and its mission “to build the social and technical bridges to enable open data sharing”. This is at the heart of so much of what the participants all do, and engaging with RDA will not only put their work on a global stage, but the collaborations and connections that ensure will enrich the data future for all interested parties. !

Credits

More information on RDA is available at the RDA website: https://www.rd-alliance.org/Dr. Patti Brennan’s original blog post can be consulted at the website of the National Institutes of Health: https://nlmdirector.nlm.nih.gov/2018/03/27/reflections-on-the-work-of-the-research-data-alliance/Sarah Jones’ original blog post can be consulted at the website of the Digital Curation Centre: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/news/dcc-rda-acronym-soupCourtesy to Dr. Patti Brennan, Director at the US National Library of Medicine; Kathy Cravedi, Director, NLM Office of Communications and Public Liaison, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health; Sarah Jones, DCC’s Associate Director; and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh for their kind approval to publish their blog posts in the Spring 2018 edition of the e-IRG Magazine. Sarah

Jones


20 Spring 2018

Interview

Mariya GabrielCommissioner sees a growing sense of community in EuroHPC exascale initiative

At the Bulgarian Presidency event on "Shaping Europe's Digital Future - HPC for Extreme Scale Scientific and Industrial Applications" in Sofia, Bulgaria, on April 19, 2018, we had the opportunity to talk to Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, about the recent EuroHPC developments, and basically three issues in particular : 'What has been achieved during the past year?'; 'Where are we now?'; and 'Where will we be in one year?'

The first thing I would like to bring in mind is the Digital Day that took place in Rome, Italy, on March 23, 2017, where it was decided to build for the first time a European HPC community. Now, one year later, the dream is becoming reality. The European Commission has proposed a budget of 1 billion euro to finance the next developments for petaflop, pre-exascale and exascale machines: 486 million euro is coming from the European Commission; the rest is coming from the Member States that participate in EuroHPC. Today, there are 16 countries that have signed the declaration: 15 Member States and Switzerland.

The European Commission also has proposed to start a Joint Undertaking. This is a legal instrument that will allow to make public offers and have members participate by following criteria that are clear for

everyone. Currently, parallel discussions are happening both at the level of the European Council and the European Parliament. At the European Council, things are really turning out in a positive way. The Bulgarian Presidency has put the topic high on the agenda and the European Council will adopt its position accordingly. With regard to the European Parliament, there is confidence by the reporting body that it will adopt its position on a very short term.

Once the legal instrument has been put into place, it will be important to see a real investment starting to concretize itself. At that point, we can initiate a collaboration between all the participants to set up the first initiatives to build the machine and the software and to respond to the ambition to have the pre-exascale ready in 2020 and the exascale in 2023. For the exascale, we will have a

machine built with European technology and we will also build a number of petaflop machines.

So, after barely one year, we can show that the topic is high on the political agenda. To have the set ambitions fulfilled it is important to have a legal instrument in place in order to realize what has been planned. There is yet another crucial stage in the process that one might not think of spontaneously. In May 2018, we are going to have some intense debates about the budget of the next Framework Programme of the European Union. It is important and I have asked to get significant increase to be on the map worldwide and be among the three greatest powers in HPC, which is not the case today. We need to have the necessary funding to for the first time set up a dedicated digital

programme to reach specific goals based on five axes. One of these axes is high performance computing.

For the next Framework Programma, is there already an idea about the size of the budget for high performance computing?

Each person who suggests numbers at this point could find him- or herself disappointed with the final result. This is part of a central investment that clearly shows that no individual Member State alone can face this challenge. No single Member State on its own can guarantee the necessary funding and dispose of the entire HPC infrastructure and software to realize this ambition. It is a European ambition and we are taking concrete steps now. It would be a pity to not have a vision that goes beyond 2023, to have a vision that would just stop there. On the

contrary, this vision has to reach out to 2027/2028. This will allow us to create projects for the European citizen which is a priority and to sustain the industrial enterprises that are now the European champions. We do not have too many of them. We need to launch a message for the future and to the international partners that the data and the capacity to extract value out of this data has to function based on European values: that is of capital importance.

Since the countries are contributing, they, of course, also want to have their say.

That is why we have this legal instrument in which there is a Governing Board (representatives of the public members) and the Industrial and Scientific Advisory Board. The European Commission is also participating in it. The decisions will really be taken with full knowledge of the issues involved. It will be the best instrument possible.

Because it is Europe, each country has its own priorities. What are these priorities? We heard Thierry Breton who said that we need a processor because without this processor, we are lost. Other countries may think differently.

In the case of high performance computing, there is a growing sense of community. This constitutes a priority. We are conscious that


Spring 2018 21

there are components. We will not have a machine that will appear out of nowhere. That is why we have focused on the different components. The new European Processor Initiative is essential. That is why the European Commission has engaged itself to it but that is also why the Joint Undertaking has to be in place as soon as possible to support the industrial enterprises. They have the expertise and know what has to be done. The European Commission proposes to listen to them in order to take the steps towards a very clear political objective which is to build pre-exascale and exascale machines with European technology.

Within the coming year, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking should be formed as an organisation. We understand that there will be an office in Luxembourg.

We have the experience of Joint Undertakings. That is why we have chosen an instrument that we know and that is simple to put into place. We don't have any time to loose. If we were to put an instrument into place that would take us more than a year to establish, the other HPC partners in China, Japan and the United States would not wait for us in the meanwhile. That is why the European Commission has proposed to the

Member States an instrument that is really very simple and where the conditions are already functioning. There is no reason whatsoever to let it take more time than is reasonable.

When will the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking be starting?

In the positive scenario we will have the finalisation of the procedure in June 2018 and we could start in September or October 2018 with the real work for the definition of the procedures and the budgets since the criteria are very clear. At this moment, it is impossible to give more precise details. If the Council and Parliament express their final positions in June, one can start in September or October with the work.

The countries changed their policy in the sense that they adapted their politics and are very much in favour of EuroHPC. They adapted their national HPC programmes too.

Not all Member States, yet. It suffices to say that at this moment, there are 16 countries. So, we are not at 27 or 28 Member States yet. EuroHPC is now a priority for us, so it is expected that other Member States will join the initiative. Currently, there are no members that represent the Baltic states or the

countries in Northern Europe. The efforts are now centered to have these countries join as well. It is a question of having them understand that the initiative will benefit them in terms of security for example, and for their industrial enterprises tremendously. This is a challenging task.

For the Member States that have already signed up, we observe a very positive change with greater attention for the needs in research and financing, and more coordination between researchers and industry. This has a very positive impact but we still are faced with two phases: Member States that have joined and others that haven't. Joining has a concrete impact for the people and allows to create a vision that offers an advance to those that are participating. That is why I would like all Member States to join in an initiative that is so strategic for Europe. When I became European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, there were 7 Member States. Now, there are 16. We hope to reach another nine to join in the coming months. I expect to receive still other good news in the very near future to turn EuroHPC into a real European initiative. !

Thank you very much for the interview.

European Commission to adopt Implemen-tation Roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud

The European Commission adopted on 14 March 2018 the Implementation Roadmap for the European Science Cloud. Overall, the document presents the results and available evidence from an extensive and conclusive consultation process that started with the publication of the Communication: European Cloud initiative in April 2016.

The consultation upheld the intervention logic presented in the Communication, to create a fit for purpose pan-European federation of research data infrastructures, with a view to moving from the current fragmentation to a situation where data is easy to store, find, share and re-use.On the basis of the consultation, the implementation Roadmap gives an overview of six actions lines for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). These include architecture, data, services, access & interfaces, rules, and governance. Specifically regarding the latter, the Roadmap presents a governance framework and a governance structure that emerged from the consultation, as a basis for further discussion with the Member States. This was foreseen explicitly by the Communication.

The document describes the measures taken under the Horizon 2020 Work Programme to start implementing the EOSC. The financing of the EOSC is secured until 2020 through the Horizon 2020 Work Programme, including 300 million euro to support the development of the EOSC federating core and open FAIR data pilot, and based on the additional commitments of stakeholders responding to the EOSC Summit Declaration.

The document also specifies the link to the European Data Infrastructure, underpinning high-capacity Cloud solutions with supercomputing capacity, as well as widening

the EOSC by gradually opening up its user base to the public sector and industry. Overall, the document will serve as a basis for further consultation with Member States, the European Parliament and other relevant stakeholders on the next steps to take. The EOSC has emerged as a clear policy priority for European research and innovation. It has been strongly supported by the European scientific community in the EOSC Summit and Declaration, by the Council in Council Conclusions in May 2016 and by a European Parliament Resolution in January 2017. !

The Implementation Roadmap for the European Science Cloud is available for download at https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/pdf/swd_2018_83_f1_staff_working_paper_en.pdf


22 Spring 2018

InterviewThomas SchulthessCombination of top-down initiatives like EuroHPC and bottom-up science driven projects make European exascale effort healthy During the annual SURFsara Super D Event on December 12, 2017 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, we had the pleasure to talk with Thomas Schulthess, Director of the Swiss Supercomputing Centre - CSCS - in Lugano, who gave a keynote presentation at Super D about the European exascale developments and the requirements to achieve this. Thomas Schulthess is a professor of Computational Physics at ETH Zurich. He leads the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and the Swiss High-Performance Computing Initiative. This is very much concerned with building applications that perform at sustained petaflop performance, up till now. Now, Thomas Schulthess and his colleagues are thinking about the future, the so-called exascale.

We observed that exascale is really been taken seriously now in Europe with the initiatives of the European Commission, the European Union and the Member States. There is also the initiative called EuroHPC of which Switzerland is also a member.

Thomas Schulthess replied that he would actually argue that supercomputing has been taken seriously in Europe for many years. Europe has some of the most performant systems on the planet, if one counts Switzerland to be a part of Europe. There is a big push all around the world to make the next steps. These next steps will be challenging because we are no longer in a time where performance increases come guaranteed. Moore's Law is stapling out and one has to deal with this reality but this also makes it interesting. There are initiatives in the US, Japan, China, and now also in Europe. The good thing about Europe is that it has a combination of a top-down initiative, where the European Commission manages the effort, but also bottom-up initiatives. Europe is rather strong in the bottom-up initiatives that are sometimes science driven. Thomas

Schulthess feels pretty good with this position.

We said that one of the goals is to go now to exascale but wanted to know what exactly is meant by exascale.

Thomas Schulthess explained that in the past one would go to petascale which meant petaflops and terascale meaning teraflops. In the last five years maybe, we have seen a disconnection between the application requirements and the requirements of peak flops. This makes it a little bit more difficult to define the goal. This is one view and, of course, there are different views. However, the view that Thomas Schulthess and some of his colleagues advocate, is that one goes after a scientific problem that is very ambitious and lies beyond the horizon for any individual group but it is a problem that represents a big value for society and then one builds systems to solve this problem. The problem Thomas Schulthess talked about in his keynote presentation is high resolution weather and climate simulation.

The idea is that you push the current simulations that have a lateral resolution of around ten kilometers to one kilometer. This is going to take about a factor 1000 more performance which is not trivial to reach but the payback is going to be tremendous because the models will resolve convective clouds which are like thunderstorms. By making the models computationally more difficult, you make them physically simpler and then, they become more predictive. This can really push the limits of what one can do in terms of prediction of weather and climate, going from days to weeks today to improving the scale of a prediction for the next season. This could have a big impact. It also allows the scientists to better understand the development of extremes and allows society to mitigate these extremes.

It is a very good subject for Europe because it is in the leading position for this. The European Centre for Mid-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is recognised as a world leader in this field. The Americans will use their forecasts when it comes to preparing for reacting or preparing for hurricanes. If you take a problem where Europe is in the lead, Europe can also define today's baseline. It is always easier to solve a problem first when you are already in the leading position. On the other side, this is not just a European problem. The weather and climate and the development of extremes, whether they are human-made or not, those are things that need to be figured out or determined. This is not a European problem, it is a global problem. Thomas Schulthess' hope is that with the combination of the know how in Europe on the model and the software side, in collaboration with system developers in the US, Japan and China, one actually will

manage to reach this scientific goal early mid next decade.

We remarked that this is one scientific goal and wondered whether there should be more or just this one, because it is already representative enough.

Thomas Schulthess thought that there are other problems that have a similar combination of a scientific challenge that is really difficult but still doable - not beyond what one can ever reach - but requires an extraordinary effort, and a value to society that merits this extraordinary effort. Thomas Schulthess is sure you could formulate similar problems in molecular biophysics, peptide simulations, drug design, and materials design. Thomas Schulthess is convinced of the fact - and he knows some of his colleagues will disagree - that one needs to have a problem that one can solve. One may need different architectures for different problems. One should not go and pick 25 different problems and say: "Now, we are going to build a machine that solves all of them." This is not going to work in the future.

We observed that this is different from what has been done until today because it was said: "Let's build a general-purpose supercomputer because it is expensive and then we can solve a lot of problems with it."

Thomas Schulthess agreed and said that one can see it with the example of MeteoSwiss and the COSMO example that he mentioned in his presentation. If one takes today's cold in a model which is well implemented, and one tries to solve a problem on a general-purpose machine, like the machines they have at the German weather service and ECMWF, the machine ends up being about a factor 10 bigger. If one refactors the software, and designs a very special computer for this particular problem, still with off-the-shelf processors but different ones, like graphic processors, one builds a machine to solve this problem, rather than taking one that is in the vendor's roadmap. One could show that the difference in efficiency is a factor 10. This means that the investment that one is putting into the software is already amortised by the fact that one buys a smaller machine. The computer vendors may not be perfectly happy but the customer is because the overall production is lower. This is a part of innovation and that is always good.

We joked that the vendors might say: "You need to buy 10 different machines for 10 different applications", and continued by asking whether it is important for Europe to be in the top 3 with European technology, like EC President Juncker stated, or is the quality of the new technology more important.

Thomas Schulthess replied that the latter is important. It makes sense for Europe to want to be in the technology game. The question is


Spring 2018 23

which top 3 are you taking. If you take the top 3 in the TOP500, then Thomas Schulthess thinks it makes no sense. If you are talking about wanting to be the top in terms of solving this weather problem, he would be more ambitious than President Juncker and say: "We just want to be the best." Where there is currently a little bit of disagreement is how do you get to European technology. Do you start from scratch or do you with the help of collaborations and slowly adopt more and more European technology? Thomas Schulthess would favour the latter approach.

The approach in EuroHPC that some promote, since they are not all in agreement, is, for example as they do in France, they want to embrace all European or all non-American technology, so they are not limited by ITA rules and so on. It is the riskier approach. In the end, it will take longer. That is why Thomas Schulthess would argue that if you take the more continuous approach where you adopt more and more European technology, you will end up building European systems faster. There is one thing you should not forget. You have to build a market and a business case around the system. It is not just enough to invest a few billion to create a one-off system, you actually want a business case. That is what makes the Americans so strong because there, everything they do is not driven by government programmes, it is driven by an economic case. The government programmes may pick some of the cherries to accomplish certain goals but the fact that the US needs Silicon Valley is not because of the US government. It is because there is an economic case for what they are doing. Then it becomes self-funded and self-sustained.

We wanted to know how the discussions that are now taking place at the governance level, at EuroHPC - and the Swiss government is part of these discussions - are now evolving.

Thomas Schulthess thought that the discussions are progressing. One is really making an effort to create the European initiatives and to also motivate other governments to invest. There are some like the German government, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) that have already invested a lot. They have a very healthy programme. Given the size of the country, Switzerland has also invested a lot and also accomplished something. There are a few places in Europe that have very substantial programmes. The EuroHPC initiative is trying to motivate others to do the same and that is a good thing. Of course, you have to find consensus with a lot of members which is not a bad idea. One is well used to such consensus-finding in Switzerland, even at a much smaller scale. This is generally healthy and good to do. It may slow you down a little bit. That is why Thomas Schulthess thinks one needs both: top-down initiatives like EuroHPC and

bottom-up science driven initiatives. With both, one will keep Europe healthy.

We summarized that Thomas Schulthess talked about the importance of having an application that is crucial for the whole world like climate research and having that as a kind of far-reaching but not unreachable goal. That is nice but how does one "get rid" of the TOP500 and HPCG benchmarks which are now kind of dominating the discussions?

Thomas Schulthess replied that you can call it the carrot of the scientific challenge. You have to think about what you need to do to reach that carrot. It is not just about building a computer. One of the most significant investments one has to make is that one has to change the way one develops software, how one implements the models. This is where in many areas of scientific computing one is out of date. One still lives in the 1980s, maybe has arrived in the 1990s. There are other areas like machine learning and data science which are emerging in 2017 and are way ahead. What Thomas Schulthess and his team have demonstrated is possible to do in the work they did with COSMO and MeteoSwiss is that they can use modern approaches to build a software framework that gives them more flexibility with the hardware.

The ideas of how they build the software framework will fix a huge problem with the productivity gap that one has today. Once that productivity gap is closed, people will suddenly realize that this approach that one has today where one builds a machine for the TOP500 and then shoehorns an application onto that machine - like is happening now with these systems in China and the Gordon Bell prizes that they receive for it but with a performance that is embarrassingly low - is not a reasonable way to do computing. If you have a very substantial alternative to the current approach that one has around the TOP500 - and Thomas Schulthess thinks weather and climate, questions of molecular dynamics and material science, all those problems have a large enough base - people will just go there and hopefully, they will ignore what Thomas Schulthess believes is not the right path. He is quite hopeful and suggested to revisit this in five or ten years.

As a last topic we wanted to know how Thomas Schulthess saw the relation with the industry in Europe relating to HPC.

Thomas Schulthess replied that there is a lot of discussion

around industry. In this case, he thought there are different models in how this relationship has to be implemented. In Switzerland and at ETH in particular, they follow a relatively liberal model, liberal in the economic sense. There are clear roles for institutions like ETH Zurich to invest in education and innovation. The federal government invests in innovation and education. There is a clear transfer step between the innovative work, creating maybe spin-offs or start-ups, but then getting spin-off or just educating people who then go into the commercial world and become productive there.

According to Thomas Schulthess, a computer centre like CSCS should work in partnership with industry to help create infrastructure like this on the industrial side. This is where Switzerland differs a little bit from some of the European approaches - not everywhere in Europe because there are many countries that have a very similar model to Switzerland, such as The Netherlands - but there is a difference in the fact that some countries think that you should use the publicly funded infrastructure to help industry more directly. Switzerland does things a bit differently. There, it is about knowledge transfer into industry and creating successful projects in partnership initially but then you want things to happen on the commercial level without subsidies. If something is successful commercially, you have to scale it, make it ten or a hundred times bigger than CSCS could ever do it.

Today, there are the implementations in the form of hyper scale Clouds. There are a lot of them in the US and in the US companies in Europe. This is the model. There is the academic world that Thomas Schulthess lives and operates in and that is more or less capped. Even the Swiss science budget is not going to go up by a factor 10 in the next five years. If there are good ideas that can be commercialized, you want them to scale by a factor 10 but if they are commercial, industry also has the capital to do it. The infrastructure of the hyper scale Clouds is in place which is quite good. !


24 Spring 2018

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About e-IRGe-IRG is a strategic body to facilitate integration in the area of European e-Infrastructures and connected services, within and between member states, at the European level and globally.

The mission of e-IRG is to support both coherent, innovative and strategic European e-Infrastructure policymaking and the development of convergent and sustainable e-Infrastructure services.

The e-IRG produces white papers, roadmaps and recommendations, and analyses the foundations of the European Open Science Cloud and European Data Infrastructure.

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In this issuee-IRG Workshop and Regional Conference 2The EOSC Stakeholder Forum 3Highlights from the delegates meetings 4ETAIS and eInfraCentral 8Interoperable data & Cloud using EUDAT & EGI 10Impression 52nd delegates meeting 10Around Europe 11GO FAIR initiative 12e-IRG Workshop Tallinn 13Interview Philippe Notton (EPI) 16Collaboration RDA, the UK DCC & US National Library of medicine 18Interview Commissioner Mariya Gabriel about EuroHPC 20European Commission to adopt Implementation Roadmap 21Interview Thomas Schulthess (CSCS) 22

Upcoming events28 May - 1 June 2018 - European HPC Summit Week 2018, Ljubljana, Sloveniahttp://www.prace-ri.eu/pracedays18

10-14 June 2018 - Terena Networking Conference - TNC18, Trondheim, Norwayhttps://tnc18.geant.org/

24-28 June 2018 - 33rd ISC High Performance Conference - ISC’18, Frankfurt, Germanyhttp://isc-hpc.com/isc-2018.html

2-4 July 2018 - Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference - PASC18, Basel, Switzerlandhttps://pasc18.pasc-conference.org/

12-14 September 2018 - 4th International Conference on Research Infrastructures - ICRI 2018, Vienna, Austriahttp://192.171.153.45/events/icri-2018

29 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2018 - 14th IEEE Conf. on eScience, Amsterdam, The Netherlandshttp://www.escience2018.com/

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