We had the privilege of sitting down with Bartosz Belter, Head of Network R&D at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in Poland, to delve into the exciting world of the SLICES Project. As a leading figure in the development of this groundbreaking initiative, Bartosz shared his insights on the added value that SLICES brings to the scientific community and Europe. In particular, we explored the progress made at the Polish node, shedding light on the cutting-edge advancements and transformative potential of this innovative endeavor.

• What is your role in SLICES?

I am a manager of the Polish SLICES node. I coordinate our activities and contribute to supporting projects (SLICES-DS, SLICES-SC and SLICES-PP).

• Why is SLICES important for you?

SLICES creates unique opportunities for us to design, build and maintain a new scientific instrument in Europe – the ICT-based Research Infrastructure. The uniqueness comes from the fact, that so far such infrastructures on a planned scale do not exist. We pioneer in this field and this is very important for me personally, but also very important for our Polish research communities.

• What are the recent developments at the level of the Polish node?

Our Polish node is being realized as part of national projects from Polish Roadmap of Research Infrastructures. All our infrastructures, developed as a distributed effort in consortia from 6 partners up to 21 partners in one case, are currently being deployed. We plan to finalize our work within next six months, till the end of 2023, and from then we will be able to offer it as part of the bigger umbrella project, SLICES.

• What can SLICES offer to researchers and academia?

SLICES is a scientific instrument. It is designed to serve research and academia as a priority task. I would like to see SLICES as a first stop for scientific researchers ordering research services spanning multiple countries, working in a fully virtualized network environment. The uniqueness of SLCIES is through its diversity. We will offer services and resources to network experts, but also provide cloud and edge computing facilities for application developers or IoT distributed environments to IoT engineers. SLICES can be seen as a single point of contact for researchers and scientists willing to provide hands-on experiments in a close-to-real network environment.

• Why is SLICES important for the research community and for Europe?

I think SLICES is important for research communities in Europe, because till now nobody was able to deliver complex research services at the scale SLICES does. As United States, China, Japan or Korea have already established such research infrastructures for their researchers, Europe was lacking such efforts. Prior to the SLICES project, there was a risk that European scientists would seek research infrastructure outside of Europe, thus undermining our local research capacity.

• What are your future plans and what should we be looking forward to?

My plans for the future mainly concern the finalization of work on the Polish node (through currently implemented projects). Obviously, there are important tasks in SLICES, which also require attention, in particular the establishment of the SLICES legal entity or development of the coordinated plans for future implementation of SLICES at the European scale. I think currently we are in very interesting and busy period, but once the work is done, we will be satisfied and glad we participated in such ambitious initiative with friendly colleagues from 15 countries in Europe!

My plans for the future mainly concern the finalization of work on the Polish node (through currently implemented projects). Of course, there are important tasks within SLICES that also require attention, in particular the establishment of a SLICES legal entity or the development of coordinated plans for the future implementation of SLICES on a European scale. I think that we are currently in a very interesting and busy period, but after the end of work, we will be satisfied and happy that we participated in such an ambitious initiative together with friends from fifteen European countries!