Towards a Strategy for Future Research Infrastructures

The amount of data gathered, shared and analysed in frontier research is set to increase dramatically in the coming decade, leading to unprecedented data processing, simulation/prediction and analysis needs. As prime examples, the High Energy Physics and Radio Astronomy communities are gearing up to operate groundbreaking instruments such as the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) , which will need data and compute capabilities many times larger than the currently available resources. Given the data volumes produced by these instruments, the size of the associated scientific communities and the scale of the analysis and computation problems, it is clear that distributed infrastructures integrating Edge, Cloud and large HPC/AI centres into a data and compute continuum will be required.

Such digital infrastructures take a long time to establish and require significant capital investment; in addition, operational costs and the environmental footprint need to be considered. On the user side, the specific requirements of the target scientific communities have to be assessed, and they must be supported in an effective and efficient way. Hence, there is the urgent need to start designing and planning these ExaByte-scale research infrastructures today, starting with a comprehensive study of the scientific community needs and plans, a reflection on how the current and short-term planned infrastructures support these, and a strategy to close the gaps to become able to tackle the challenges from most relevant data-intensive scientific collaborations.

This BoF will bring together top-level domain expert representatives from the High Energy Physics and Radio Astronomy domains and top-tier High Performance Computing infrastructure representatives across Europe and the US. Feedback from ISC community will be fed into the technical blueprint of the capabilities of the future infrastructure together with its roadmap for research, innovation and deployment of the future infrastructure

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Organizers:

• Sergio Andreozzi
• Maria Girone
• Chiara Ferrari
• Hans-Christian Hoppe
• Xavier Salazar