The SLICES Roadshow: Experimental Research Infrastructures for ICT

Join us on Tuesday, January 24, 2023 (10.00-14.00) for a hybrid seminar on experimental infrastructures for ICT research. The program highlights the ESFRI infrastructure SLICES, and is part of the SLICES Roadshow. The SLICES infrastructure, which was selected for the ESFRI Roadmap 2021, is currently in its preparatory phase.

Simula Research Laboratory, being host of the national experimental infrastructure for HPC research, eX3, is the Norwegian partner in the SLICES consortium.

In addition to the overview of SLICES, there will be presentations of national research infrastructure initiatives in the areas of experimental research on HPC technologies, cyber-physical systems and wireless technologies focusing at 5G and IoT.

The physical seminar will take place at Simula Research Laboratory in downtown Oslo.

In order to attend, physically or online, you need to register. Registered participants will receive the Zoom link for online participation shortly before the event.

IMPORTANT: The registration deadline for physical attendance is Friday, January 20. Registration for online participation is accepted until EOB Monday, January 23.

Program

10:00

Welcome
Research Director Are Magnus Bruaset, Simula

An overview of the SLICES research infrastructure
Professor Serge Fdida, Sorbonne Université

Digital Infrastructures and the future Internet including 5G and beyond technologies are the main enabling factors contributing to the digital transformation of our society. The design, deployment and operation of digital infrastrucutres are critical, calling for a scientific instrument to support the research in this domain for computer science and infrastructure researchers, as well as for data driven scientific applications involving interdisciplinary aspects. The ambitions of SLICES is to become an impactful research infrastructure in Digital Sciences including concerns regarding energy consumption and the implementation of the green deal. This talk will give an overview of current state and plans for the SLICES infrastructure.

10:45
The European Open Science Cloud and FAIR data management
Senior Researcher Yuri Demchenko, University of Amsterdam

11:15
Experimental Infrastructure for Exploration of Exascale Computing (eX3)
Research Director Are Magnus Bruaset, Simula

Together with partners, Simula Research Laboratory has established eX3 to become the previously missing Norwegian resource that can prepare researchers for future high performance computing technologies, especially in the context of exascale computing. The eX3 infrastructure has been through the RCN program for national research infrastructures. The eX3 infrastructure is not an exascale computer by itself, but it is a carefully curated ecosystem of technology components that will be crucial for embracing exascale computing. It allows HPC researchers throughout Norway and their collaborators to experiment hands-on with emerging HPC technologies – hardware as well as software. This talk will give an overview of the eX3 infrastructure.

11:45
Quality control and innovation in computing and networking using the eX3 testbed
Professor Xing Cai, Simula

The current landscape of computing hardware is characterized by a rich diversity and fast innovations. In turn, this calls for performance portability of scientific computing software over different hardware architectures. The eX3 cluster is thus a perfect testbed due to the availability of cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs of various vendors and architectures. In this talk, we will start with discussing the quality control of several scientific computing codes, touching upon the topics of hardware-oriented performance modeling and automated code generation. Then, we will present innovative software developments targeting the AI-inspired Graphcore IPUs that are also available on eX3. Finally, we will report some results in adaptive routing, congestion control and in-network computing.

12:15 Lunch break

12:45
The SimulaMet Interoperability Lab (SMIL)
Chief Research Scientist Haakon Bryhni, SimulaMet

SMIL is an experimental environment for research and innovation related to wireless technologies in a multi-vendor environment with focus on 5G and IoT. In this talk Chief Research Scientist Haakon Bryhni will present the SMIL lab, its research activities and future development. This includes how the SMIL infrastructure enables research on benchmarking and improving time-sensitive networking technologies for 5G networks, studying new 5G and IoT applications enabled by edge computing, developing and improving self-driving networks for fast recovery, and understanding and improving the mechanisms required to establish robust cellular networks.

13:15
AI-driven Networked Cyber-Physical Systems
Professor Baltasar Beferull-Lozano, SimulaMet

In this talk Professor Beferull-Lozano will promote interdisciplinary competence and research in several key areas: a) cloud-to-edge-to-IoT multi-tier network, computing and sensory platform to support centralized, federated and decentralized ML, and control tasks in different applications, b) High-performance computing and dedicated hardware resources for simulation and digital twins of complex cyber-physical systems and related processes, c) inter-connected autonomous vehicles (UAVs, UGVs) and mobile robots for smart cities and defence applications, d) human-robot collaboration and remote human-to-human interaction through AI, XR, networks and haptic technologies.

13:45
Concluding remarks
Research Director Sven-Arne Reinemo, SimulaMet