The inaugural event of the European SPECTRUM project, which aims to develop a sustainable strategy for collecting and processing data from research in high-energy physics and radio astronomy, has been recently held in Amsterdam. The project goal is to address the issue of sustainability of scientific computing, since the amount of data collected, shared and processed in frontier research is expected to increase rapidly in the next decade, leading to unprecedented needs for data processing, simulation and analysis.
In particular, particle physics and radio astronomy are preparing cutting-edge tools that require computing infrastructures many times larger than current capabilities. In this context, SPECTRUM aims to develop a Strategic Research, Innovation and Deployment Agenda (SRIDA) outliningsolutions that are sustainable both financially and in terms of environmental impact.
Funded within the framework of the Horizon Europe programme, SPECTRUM brings together the key players involved in scientific computing and the largest European computing centres. Italy greatly contributes to the project thanks to the participation of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and CINECA, which will be supported by the computational infrastructure of ICSC, the Italian National Research Centre on HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing.
“Today we are seeing an increasing use of systems in which the use of data and high-performance computing are increasingly interconnected. This dynamic requires special attention in the design and development strategies that can adapt to different and specific user use cases. In this context, SPECTRUM represents an extraordinary opportunity,” said Fabio Affinito, CINECA Head of Specialist Support and R&D.
According to Tommaso Boccali, researcher at the Pisa Section of INFN, the project will provide the opportunity for an open and constructive dialogue between users and large computing infrastructures, thus leading to a next generation of infrastructures that will be easier to use for the scientific communities. This activity will be greatly supported by the ICSC National Centre through the distributed infrastructure it intends to build by federating and enhancing HPC and big data resources nationwide through a data lake open for research purposes to scientific communities and industry.
