Scientific research e-Infrastructures initiatives and projects

National and international initiatives have been launched in several countries for the introduction of scientific e-Infrastructures.

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has presented the first European roadmap for new, large-scale Research Infrastructures. In it, Research Infrastructures are modelled as layered systems of hardware and software which support sharing of a wide spectrum of resources, from networks, storage, computing resources, and system-level middleware software, to structured information within collections, archives, and databases.

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) envisions e-Infrastructures where the principles of global collaboration and shared resources, postulated by the Grid and e-Science communities, are intended to encompass the sharing needs of all research activities. Within the infrastructural scope fall all ICT based resource needs of researchers: powerful networks and computers, content resources which are easily discoverable and accessible, the “middleware” applications which control the use of these resources and, crucially, the support and advisory services that enable the infrastructure to be effectively used.

In the framework of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) e-infrastructure programme, e-Infrastructures are defined in terms of the integration of networks, grids, data centres and collaborative environments, and can include supporting operations centres, service registries, credential delegation services, certificate authorities, training and help-desk services. They are built upon a lower-level infrastructure of grid middleware that can provide researchers with shared access to large data collections, advanced ICT tools for data analysis, large-scale computing resources, and high-performance visualisation resources.

The “Cyberinfrastructure programme” introduced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in US, plans to develop new research environments in which advanced computational, collaborative, data acquisition and management services are made available to researchers connected by high-performance networks. The NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery intends to pursue this objective by “catalysing the development of system of science and engineering data collection that is open, extensible and evolvable” and by “supporting the development of new generation of tools and services for data discovery, integration, visualization, analysis and preservation”. From the architectural perspective, it envisions a data framework that provides specific functionality “possibly using a web or grid service distributed environment.

The initiatives listed above may differ in the perception of requirements, scope, enabling mechanisms, prospective architectures, and application scenarios. Common to all of them, however, is the strong characterisation of e-Infrastructures in terms of support for effective consumption of shared resources. Moreover, all of them endorse a holistic approach to resource sharing within e-Infrastructures, where the spectrum of shareable resources includes hardware-bound resources (i.e. networks, storage, instruments, and computational resources), system-level software resources (i.e. basic middleware services), and application-level software resources (i.e. domain-level information and services). Finally, the mechanisms which support this holistic approach are expected to be distributed across layered infrastructures, where the range of shareable resources increases in number and degree of abstraction from layer to layer: from connectivity infrastructures for sharing high-bandwidth and low-latency networks; to computational infrastructures of system-level middleware for sharing computational resources and unstructured data; to higher-level infrastructures of domain-level middleware for sharing application services, structured information, and knowledge.