SLICES-IP · Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/ Communication Experimental Studies – Implementation Phase

The digital infrastructures research community continues to face numerous new challenges towards the design of the Next Generation Internet. This is an extremely complex ecosystem encompassing communication, networking, data management and data intelligence issues, supported by established and emerging technologies such as IoT, 5G/6G, cloud-to-edge computing. Coupled with the enormous amount of data generated and exchanged over the network, this calls for incremental and radically new infrastructure design paradigms. Experimentally driven research is becoming worldwide a standard, which has to be supported by large-scale research infrastructures to make results trusted, repeatable and accessible to the research communities. SLICES-RI (Research Infrastructure), which has been included in the 2021 ESFRI Roadmap, aims to answer these problems by building a large infrastructure needed for the experimental research on various aspects of the continuum IoT-edge-Cloud. It will provide the necessary resources to continuously design, experiment, operate and automate the full lifecycle management of digital infrastructures, data, applications, and services. Based on the three preceeding projects within SLICES-RI, SLICES-DS (Design Study), SLICES-SC (Starting Community) and SLICES-PP (Preparatory Phase), the SLICES-IP project will validate the requirements to engage in the operation phase of the RI lifecycle. It will complete the last step towards the creation of an ERIC as legal structure, strengthen the actions to engage more Member States and other stakeholders, secure their commitment and funding needed for the platform to operate. SLICES-IP will lead the definition of the implementation of the final architecture and common services. It will position SLICES as an impactful instrument to support advanced European research, industrial competitiveness and societal impact in the digital era.