Read about the development of the Italian Research Infrastructure and the ongoing initiatives supporting it
The Framework
Large-scale e-infrastructures have been built in Italy in the last decades to support the activities of Italian research institutions and universities at both national and international levels. Among them, it is worth mentioning GARR-T, the network infrastructure operated by the Italian NREN (GARR), PRACE-Italy, the HPC infrastructure operated by CINECA and HPC-BD-AI, a cloud-edge distributed computing infrastructure, capable of managing high-performance computing resources, big data and artificial intelligence applications, led by INFN.
These e-infrastructures, which are part of or interconnected to the corresponding international e-infrastructures, have been built, in some cases, for the needs of specific scientific areas (as an example, HPC-BD-AI was set up by INFN for the computing and storage needs of High Energy Physics experiments). However, they have gradually become available to a vast range of scientific domains thanks to funding opportunities from projects at the national, regional, and European levels. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), part of the Next Generation EU framework program, represents an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen and further improve the existing infrastructures in Italy. Its main goal is to increase the growth and productivity of the country through innovation, digitalisation and investments in human capital; boosting scientific research will be an important outcome.
The Ongoing Initiatives
The TeRABIT (Terabit Network for Research and Academic Big Data in Italy) project, funded with 41 M€, aims to integrate and strengthen the three mentioned research e-infrastructures, which are part of the strategic infrastructures identified by the Ministry of University and Research in the National Research Infrastructure Plan 2021-2027.
The GARR-T infrastructure will be strengthened with connections with capacities up to Terabit/s, including the connection to Sardinia, where the Italian candidate site to host the Einstein Telescope is located.
PRACE-Italy will upgrade its Tier-1 category HPC system, developing a hybrid architecture and connecting it to other EuroHPC Exascale centres such as Leonardo at CINECA.
HPC-BD-AI will extend the existing infrastructure with smaller HPC systems (called HPC Bubbles), made available according to the edge-computing paradigm.
These activities complement those of the National Center for High-Performance Computing, Big Data, and Quantum Computing (ICSC) and will be carried out in close synergy.
ICSC, funded with 320 M€, is one of the five National Centres established by the NRRP and covers designated strategic sectors for the development of the country, i.e.: simulations, advanced methods for numerical applications, software tools to integrate computing, simulation, collection and analysis of data of interest for research and industry for the benefit of society. Half of the budget is devoted to upgrading the national computing infrastructures, in particular those operated by GARR, CINECA, INFN, and CMCC, aiming to create a national cloud-based data lake. The rest of the budget is devoted to technological research in the fields of HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, and to the support of several application fields, spanning from basic research to computing sciences for climate, the environment, and space; from the study of matter and life to medicine; from technologies of materials to information systems and devices.
ICSC is a public-private partnership among 25 universities, 12 research institutions and 14 strategic private partners. It is structured in 11 spokes of which Spoke 0 is dedicated to the Supercomputing Cloud infrastructure while the remaining 10 focus on distinct scientific areas.
Several other projects led by INFN, such as ETIC (Einstein Telescope Infrastructure Consortium), IRIS (Innovative Research Infrastructure for Superconductivity), LNGS-Future (Gran Sasso National Laboratory upgrade), are being funded by NRRP; there are many more which are led by other research institutions or universities.
All these projects aim to leverage the achievements of previous activities carried out by all partners involved in order to strengthen and expand them for the benefit of research and society. For INFN this means that there is a strong synergy with the activities of INFN Datacloud, the INFN national Cloud and Data infrastructure, the participation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Association, EGI Foundation and Federation, and several EOSC-related projects INFN contributes to.
Most of the partners involved in these projects are also members of ICDI, the Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure, a forum created by representatives of the major Italian Research Infrastructures and e-infrastructures. The aim of the forum is to promote synergies at the national level and optimise Italian participation in European and global challenges in this field, including the EOSC, the European Data Infrastructure (EDI), and HPC.
ICDI has a prominent role in supporting the implementation of the National Plan for Open Science through the participation of some of its members in a specific advisory group set up by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR). It has also established a Competence Center, which is part of a broader context of European initiatives to foster Open Science, promote the FAIR principles, and participate in EOSC.
