Inria’s DNA is based on world-class research, technological innovation and entrepreneurial risk, exploring new avenues to meet ambitious challenges.
Inria is coordinating the deployment of SLICES-RI, which has been recorded in the ESFRI roadmap since 2021, through various digital projects, including SLICES-PP.
Researchers from 16 European countries are building an innovative research infrastructure to experiment on the full IoT/cellular-edge-cloud continuum, empowering scientists with a valuable tool to prototype tomorrow’s solutions.
Meeting the needs of the digital revolution
Networking, digital, and distributed computing technologies are evolving rapidly. They must satisfy numerous constraints, such as efficiently computing for the Internet of Things with minimal computational resources and optimising energy consumption.
These technologies utilise a wide range of solutions proposed by a large ecosystem, encompassing issues of communication, networking, management, and data intelligence.
To meet these innovation challenges, scientists are utilising experimentation extensively to test new systems and architectures. SLICES aims to provide them with the resources to design, experiment, operate, and automate the full lifecycle management of digital infrastructure, data, applications, and services, ensuring the reliability and reproducibility of their experimental results.
Objectives of the SLICES project
SLICES-RI aims to provide the following digital sciences and technology services (without limitation):
- End-to-end experimentation on the full data continuum, including data capture, processing and storage, for a holistic assessment of performance across a wide range of heterogeneous equipment.
- Resource monitoring (energy, storage, CPU, network).
- On-the-fly reconfiguration.
- Bare metal programming.
- Reproducible, multi-site, multi-resource experiments.
- Large-scale experiments (several hundred to several thousand resources at European scale).
- Unified authentication for all types of resources and remote access.
- Ready-to-use, monitored semi-permanent services for rapid prototyping of complex architectures linking different heterogeneous resources.
