The HiLumi LHC, the SKA Observatory and LOFAR 2.0 will take High Energy Physics (HEP) and Radio Astronomy (RA) towards exabyte-scale data within the next decade, beyond the capacity of today's infrastructure. The SPECTRUM project responded with two documents built on the same evidence. A Technical Blueprint describes a European compute and data continuum as a capability map, consolidates the gaps found in HEP, RA and related use cases, and recommends technical actions in eight areas. A Strategic Research, Innovation and Deployment Agenda (SRIDA) organises thirteen priorities in four pillars, maps them to investment areas and European funding instruments, and phases them over a roadmap set against the timelines of the three instruments. This paper, by editors and contributors of both documents, summarises them, their consultative method and the impact the SRIDA expects.
The EGI Federation has provided federated e-infrastructure services to European and global science for over 15 years. We review EGI's early experiences with AI in the interTwin and iMagine Horizon Europe projects, which built digital twins in physics and environmental sciences and an image-analysis platform for aquatic research. We then examine how the AI landscape has changed since 2023 and argue that the focus of AI in science has shifted from model training to adapting and applying AI to specific domains, projects and questions. Building on these lessons, we present the AI strategy emerging from the EGI Federation Strategy 2026-2030, organised around three enablers: (1) an AI-ready infrastructure connecting compute, data and application resources across the continuum; (2) human skills to know what is possible with AI and how to implement it; and (3) trust, to run AI with confidence even in high-risk environments. We describe the projects implementing each enabler, including federated LLM inference, AI-ready data platforms and AI competence centres, and discuss a division of labour with EuroHPC's AI Factories, RAISE, research infrastructures and EOSC, in which EGI specialises in the customisation and long-term operation of AI for research.
In a geo-distributed computing infrastructure with heterogeneous resources (HPC and HTC and possibly cloud), a key to unlock an efficient and user-friendly access to the resources is being able to offload each specific task to the best suited location. One of the most critical problems involves the logistics of wide-area, multi-stage workflows that move back and forth between multiple resource providers. We envision a model where such a challenge can be addressed enabling a “transparent offloading” of containerized payloads using the Kubernetes API primitives creating a common cloud-native interface to access any number of external hardware machines and type of backends. Thus we created the interLink project, an open source extension to the concept of Virtual-Kubelet with a design that aims for a common abstraction over heterogeneous and distributed backends. interLink is developed by INFN in the context of interTwin, an EU funded project that aims to build a digital-twin platform (Digital Twin Engine) for sciences, and the ICSC National Research Center for High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing in Italy. In this talk we first provide a comprehensive overview of the key features and the technical implementation. We showcase our major case studies, such as the scale-out of an analysis facility, and the distribution of ML training processes. We focus on the impacts of being able to seamlessly exploit world-class EuroHPC supercomputers with such a technology.
The interdependence of human, animal, plant and ecosystem health necessitates systemic, cross-domain collaboration to address global challenges, such as emerging diseases, climate change and biodiversity severe change. Through the Crete Declaration, Europe’s (e-)infrastructures, organisations and projects that focus on the functioning of our biosphere commit to jointly advancing the One Health approach. In doing so, the signatories aim to strengthen Europe’s resilience and leadership through the sharing of data and expertise, the development of innovative solutions and the promotion of evidence-based policies.
Deliverable D6.5 defines what Open Journal Platforms (OJP) and Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) partners must adopt to participate in a federated Trust & Identity (T&I) ecosystem: (i) best practices to onboard new partners to Single Sign-On (SSO), and (ii) the T&I technical architecture together with the interoperability framework and standards that OJP should implement or align to. The report is public and part of WP6: Journals’ Data Reuse and Uptake in (European Open Science Cloud) EOSC. The document first states the scope and objectives of D6.5 and positions it within CRAFT-OA’s technical work. It then sets out technical requirements for federated T&I in journal platforms, proposes a reference architecture showing the components and interfaces needed for SSO, and lists the interoperability framework and standards to ensure that platforms implement T&I consistently. Finally, it provides best-practice guidance to help new Diamond OA partners adopt SSO smoothly, alongside a conformance checklist that journals and platforms can use to verify that requirements, architecture elements, and standards are in place. Together, these elements fulfil the Grant Agreement’s success criteria for D6.5. This deliverable is currently under review by the EC.
