Concept and Project Objectives. The aim of e-ScienceTalk is to build on the significant achievements of the “GridTalk: co-ordinating grid reporting across Europe” project in bringing the success stories of Europe’s e-Infrastructure to policy makers in government and business, to the broader scientific community and to the general public. The key challenges will be to work with the emerging European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) ecosystem as it becomes established, to maintain and enhance the high quality of the existing GridTalk outputs, to report on the interactions of grid computing with other e-Infrastructures, such as cloud computing and supercomputing and to explore the long-term sustainability of e-ScienceTalk’s products. Background to the project Over the last 10 years, the European Commission and governments across Europe have invested hundreds of millions of Euros in scientific grid computing and e-Infrastructures. European scientists now have access to state-of-the-art computational and data resources located around the globe, putting European research into a world-leading position. These grid and interacting e-Infrastructures allow Europe to benefit from research that addresses the greatest challenges facing the planet today, such as climate change, pandemics and sustainable energy. Grid infrastructures are now moving towards a sustainable and more user-centric model through the European Grid Infrastructure, which will integrate national operations at a European level. During this transition, it is essential to keep the achievements and impact of grid, distributed and high performance computing at the forefront of people’s minds, through dissemination projects that cross national and even international boundaries. While the first phase of GridTalk focused principally on communicating the benefits, success stories and challenges of grid computing, e-ScienceTalk will expand its focus outwards from a central core of grid computing to cover the interactions and offerings from other e-Infrastructures, such as cloud computing, the supercomputing networks of DEISA and PRACE and the networking layer of GÉANT. This blurring of boundaries is being increasingly driven by the needs of users, such as the life sciences and fusion communities, and the future users represented by the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) projects. By broadening its approach in this way, e-ScienceTalk will increase its relevance to the general public, policy makers and the broader scientific...
Concept and Project Objectives. B.1.2.1. Project objectives The primary objectives of CRYSTAL2PLATE are:
Concept and Project Objectives. Main Idea 1 Embedded systems are essential to ensuring a leading position for Europe in key industrial sectors services. This is well-recognized in the ICT FP7 priorities, and through the ARTEMIS ETP under construction. About Embedded Systems Embedded Systems are components integrating software and hardware jointly and specifically designed to provide given functionalities. These components may be used in many different types of applications, including transport (avionics, space, automotive, trains), electrical and electronic appliances (cameras, toys, television, washers, dryers, audio systems, and cellular phones), power distribution, and factory automation systems. The extensive use of embedded systems and their integration in everyday products marks a significant evolution in information science and technology. An important requirement for their proliferation is seamless integration with their environment while respecting real-world constraints such as hard deadlines, reliability, availability, robustness, power consumption, and cost. Embedded systems are deployed in the physical environment, and as such they have a continuous interaction with it. This gives rise to a number of specific characteristics, which play a role in structuring the technical domain, and for determining the relevant areas of research and industrial development: Economic Stakes for Europe Embedded systems are of strategic importance in modern economies. They are used in mass-market products and services, where value is created by supplying either functionality or quality. Functionality is defined as the service rendered to the user. Quality for a given functionality characterizes extra-functional properties of the product or service, such as performance, or dependability. For instance, a cellular phone offers functionality for mobile communication, while quality is characterized by audio fidelity, battery life, and durability. Embedded technologies confer advantages to system and service developers, in generating added value and enhancing competitivity. The relative weight of software in the value of embedded systems is constantly increasing. Software allows new, complementary services, and differentiation, which brings competitive advantages. Embedded technologies are the fastest growing sector in Information Technologies. Europe currently has leading positions in sectors where embedded technologies are central to growth. These sectors currently include avionics, automotive, s...
Concept and Project Objectives. The network aims at a deeper understanding of properties of strongly interacting matter. This is primarily done by means of numerical simulations of QCD on supercomputers (Lattice QCD). Working Group Convening Participant Project Area WG 1 UREG Hardware Development WG 2 UEDIN Software Development and Optimisation WG 3 U WUPPERTAL Algorithmic Innovation WG 4 UNIPR Lattice Perturbation Theory WG 5 TCD Hadron Spectroscopy and Strong Decays WG 6 UCY Hadron Structure WG 7 UNIBI QCD in Extreme Conditions WG 8 CSIC The QCD Vacuum Table 1: Working groups. Figure 1: Geographical distribution of the Working Groups. The network’s activities are organised into eight inter-related project areas which are addressed by Working Groups (WGs) that are overlapping in terms of the participating teams, ensuring close com- munication, see Table 1. Each WG is convened by the team shown in the table. These convening teams are indicated in bold type in Section B.1.3 below. A geographical representation of the Work- ing Groups is displayed in Figure 1. WGs 1-4 develop the “tools” that are used by WGs 4-8. The research is of a multi-disciplinary character, involving interlinked projects from the areas of hardware development and software design, computational algorithms and numerical simulations of quantities that are important in hadron and particle physics phenomenology and to advance our un- derstanding of quantum field theories.
Concept and Project Objectives. The objective of the BalticGrid-II project is to increase the impact, adoption and reach of the recently created e- Infrastructure in the Baltic States. Also the e-Science infrastructure of the Baltic States, needs to be much better leveraged with the European Research Area Extending the e-Infrastructure provided by the BalticGrid By extending the BalticGrid to Belarus the project will provide an extended and reinforced e-Infrastructure in the Baltic region fully interoperable with the pan-European e-Infrastructures established by EGEE and EGEE associated projects. The proposed extension of the BalticGrid into Belarus is well in line with the European Neighbourhood Policy intentions1; ”Through the European Neighbourhood Policy, we aim to avoid new dividing lines between the enlarged EU and our neighbours to the east and on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. We invite these neighbours, on the basis of a mutual commitment to common values, to move beyond existing cooperation to deeper economic and political, cultural and security cooperation - strengthening stability, security and well-being for all concerned. The new feature is that we go beyond cooperation to include economic integration, for those ready and able.” Reinforcing the impact, adoption and global relevance of the infrastructure In NA2, the Education, Training, Dissemination and Outreach activity, the impact and adoption is addressed through three to four Project Conferences, one Scientific Conference, innovative events like Grid festival, regular Grid seminars arranged by each Baltic partner, Grid Tutorials, and a Grid Summer School. In NA3 Applications Identification and Collaboration, the impact and adoption is addressed through organisational efforts to ensure the involvement of the National academies of science and governmental science funding agencies in the region. It is also addressed by supporting the collaboration within specific scientific areas, especially through the Special Interests Group portal. Support continuous consolidation and expansion In SA1 Grid Operations, expansion of the Grid infrastructure is supported by an extension to Belarus and Grid core services are established in each country for increased reliability and sustainability. More EGEE-certified sites will be added. By the end of the project the NGI-s should be self-sustainable, to be able to join a potential EGI effort Provision is made for both capability and capacity computing resources to be p...
Concept and Project Objectives. The principal ITN objective is the training of a new generation of linguistic experts able to cooperate across national boundaries on the establishment of a common language resources infrastructure and its exploitation for the construction of the next generation of language models with wide theoretical and applied significance. Specifically in the field of languages, there is a need to transfer theoretical models and approaches from one language to other languages, and to coordinate research on issues of multilinguality across boundaries, respecting the specific needs of different languages and language groups while striving for models that are applicable across boundaries in a tightly integrated European information society. Recent advances in technology and widespread research efforts have expanded both the size of corpora and the extent of their annotations, e.g. in the area of deep syntactic annotation (treebanks), semantic and pragmatic annotation, and multilingual (parallel) corpora, while also various speech and multimodal corpora are becoming available. From corpora as basic resources, other resources are being derived, e.g. lexicons, frequency lists, word nets, term banks, etc. Although a large number of language resources have been produced to date, many scientific and organizational challenges remain, including the following: ⮚ Theories and modeling approaches have not yet been applied on a wide range of languages, while some languages or language types (e.g. morphologically rich languages) may present special challenges. ⮚ Parsers and other tools tend to be language specific (English in particular) and many tools for creating modules, resources and applications impose restrictions in their further use by SMEs and researchers. ⮚ The gap between academic models and the needs of industrial actors who aim at real life applications remains to be bridged. ⮚ The standardization and compatibility of language resources is still inadequate, despite the existence of metadata and integration initiatives like IMDI and DAM-LR, coding and annotation practices like XML and the TEI guidelines and semantic interoperability initiatives like ISO TC37/SC4 and LIRICS. ⮚ There is a lack of appropriate documentation for many resources, and moreover there is no good overview of available resources for all the European languages. ⮚ Since some resources are developed for specific purposes, there is a challenge to convert them so they can be reused for other purposes. ⮚ T...
Concept and Project Objectives. Introduction In the next decade, an exponential growth of data traffic in fixed and mobile networks is expected. The major drivers for these developments are: Increasing number of internet-based services, such as community services and various kinds of interactive information and entertainment services - including bandwidth-hungry service such as HD or 3D video services (streaming, conferencing, …); Rapidly growing variety of devices, in particular mobile or portable devices such as smart phones, tablets or laptops; Intensified usage of any kind of online services, in particular by younger generations, independently of user’s locations (“always online”). Today, customers can access services via fixed line networks or via mobile networks. Fixed broadband networks in Europe are currently dominated by different flavours of ADSL technologies which provide up to 16 Mbit/s. FTTCurb with VDSL are state of the art with access speeds up to 50 Mbit/s. Fibre to the home networks (FTTH) are the next step and first deployment have been started. These networks enabling data rate capacities of several hundred Mbit/s. In the mobile area, 2G and 3G networks are widely available and in some countries the deployment of LTE technology with data rates up to 100Mbit/s has been started. The next step is LTE advanced with data rates up to 1Gbit/s. Since in the mobile area a technology evolution from one generation to a next one takes about 10 years some early “5G” oriented research has been initiated, or will start soon. Up to now, fixed and mobile access networks have been optimised and evolved independently, with partly contradicting trends (e.g. centralization of fixed networks, decentralization of mobile networks). Currently, there is a complete functional and physical separation of fixed line access/aggregation networks and mobile networks. As example, up to now the availability of locations for mobile base station sites and for fixed network central offices are not re-considered by each other for new deployments. Today, Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is mainly based on the service level with introduction of all IP services and IMS, and operators have started to build a converged service control layer. In contrast, this project focuses on the convergence of fixed and mobile access / aggregation networks themselves and their related functions as depicted in Figure 1. A key aspect is scalability to cope in the most efficient way with the increasing number of customers, d...
Concept and Project Objectives. The MOLTO project is rooted in two lines of research. One is the GF approach to multilingual grammars and interlingua-based translation pioneered by the UGOT site since the early 1990’s. The other line is semantic web technology, providing structured data that can be used as the basis of GF translation. The time is ripe to put these lines together and develop a solution to the increasingly urgent problem of real-time multilingual translation of web documents with high quality. This requires a consortium with a variety of competences. While UGOT stands for the multilingual GF technology, web technology is represented by Ontotext. UPC is the main responsible for scaling up GF translation with statistical methods. UHEL contributes with the integration of MOLTO techniques with standard translation tools and workflows. To show the generality of the techniques, three very different case studies are performed: mathematical exercises (main responsible UPC), patents (Mxw), and cultural heritage (UGOT). MOLTO builds on the results of several earlier projects, in particular the following European projects:
Concept and Project Objectives. 1.1.1. The eScience ecosystem For many scientists computational modelling is becoming more and more important for their work. In the whole spectrum, depending on the kind of application, one sees increasing use of local clusters, of national and international Service Grids and of supercomputers. Not only is it important for them to have access to the computational power to run their models, but also it is of equal importance to be able to collaborate with researchers across the world. In these collaborations one often shares computational power. Large amounts of data, fast networks and lots of computing capacity are the main hardware ingredients of what is called the eScience ecosystem: everything that is needed for electronic science. In addition to the hardware, specialized software and experts are needed. Clusters of computers, Service Grids and supercomputers all cover specific areas in the computational spectrum. If one wants to run very large tightly coupled models, supercomputers are the only way. If one has general type of large throughput work, but needs to collaborate with many other researchers in many places, one needs Services Grids. When one has large throughput jobs all year around, but does not need to share with other researchers, an in-house computer-cluster may be the right option. Desktop Grids1 are a fourth category of large scale computing resources available to scientists. In a Desktop Grid, one aggregates the unused computing cycles of a large number of Desktop computers to run one single application. A Desktop Grid is not suited for all kinds of applications, but it is very useful for “pleasantly parallel applications” such as parameter sweeps, Monte Carlo Simulations, etc. The pyramid below shows the relationship between different models of distributed computing that are used.
Concept and Project Objectives. B.1.1.1 Objectives of GALS architecture for target applications It is envisioned by the European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council (ENIAC) that during the course of the FP7 the CMOS technology miniaturisation will continue, even if increasing difficulties may slow down the pure technological progress. And in fact, the increased complexity, performance requirements, and the need for power and EMI reduction present almost unsolvable challenges to designers of complex embedded systems. The continued technology improvement towards nanoscale dimensions generates additional problems for embedded system design. The combination of complex application requirements and technology imperfections (e.g. process variability and reliability) exacerbate the problems of timing closure and clock tree generation requiring additional design iterations and extended design-to-market time. It is imperative to deal with these issues; one very promising option is the use of a Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design methodology. The idea of GALS system design is not entirely novel. However, despite significant research effort, the number of industrial GALS applications is currently relatively low. When analyzing why a GALS approach has not been adopted by industry we observe that several issues have not been fully addressed until now. Firstly, the design-flow for GALS chip interconnect is not mature enough to guarantee reliable and comfortable chip design. Secondly, the main strengths of GALS design, such as improvement of system integration, better EMI characteristics and power reduction, were never completely exploited and proven in practice. Lastly, the targeted GALS applications were sometimes not a perfect match with the GALS techniques. From our perspective, a GALS solution needs to have the following properties in order to be widely used: standard interfaces should be defined that will be widely adopted (rather than the existing situation in which numerous GALS proposals have each suggested their own interfaces to the synchronous world); the GALS design flow should be based on standard EDA tools extended with an additional reliable and user-friendly asynchronous tool-set; the GALS interface architecture should be based on high-throughput, low complexity solutions; the GALS interface proposal and source code should be offered free-of-charge within an open core framework to gain popularity and to break the prejudices that exist to mixed asynchronous/sy...
