SLICES-RI starts the pre-operation phase

SLICES Research Infrastructure (RI) has completed the initial phase of implementation and delivers the first set of research services to scientific communities. The project starts the pre-operation phase and offers the following newly developed services: Beyond-5G Blueprint and Federated Learning Blueprint, complemented by supporting services, including the machine learning service and the Basic Infrastructure service, which gives low level access to basic building blocks such as virtual or bare metal machines, GPUs or site interconnectivity.

About SLICES Research Infrastructure

SLICES is the first scientific instrument to support research in digital infrastructures, covering the full research life-cycle, including digital objects management and reproducibility. SLICES is intent-based and is organised according to various Blueprints that will be extended over time.  SLICES consortium gathers partners from 16 European countries, all of them having committed to contribute resources. SLICES has received the endorsements of key stakeholders and the political supports of 12 European Governments. Several of the current partners are operating facilities that are already on their national and regional RI roadmaps. 

SLICES will engage, in a long-term and sustainable and aligned way, communities involved in (i) novel Digital Infrastructure technologies and paradigms (ii) future Internet large-scale testbed development and operation; (iii) the operation of Platforms as a Service, and (iv) the development of the software necessary to control and manage it. It will also link them with transversal (vertical) applications and provide synergies between academia, industry and business actors.

SLICES is a part of the ESFRI Roadmap. ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (https://www.esfri.eu/about-esfri), is a strategic instrument to develop the scientific integration of Europe and to strengthen its international outreach. The mission of ESFRI is to support a coherent and strategy-led approach to policy-making on research infrastructures in Europe, and to facilitate multilateral initiatives leading to the better use and development of research infrastructures, at EU and international level.

About SLICES Pre-Operation

ESFRI applies a lifecycle approach to the development and implementation of Research Infrastructures. The lifecycle concept describes the different milestones in the development, implementation and operation of a research infrastructure over time, specifying minimal key requirements that must be met at each stage. The application of this concept allows for a coherent assessment of the scientific and organizational maturity of Research Infrastructures across all fields of science. 

Following the concept of the ESFRI lifecycle, SLICES RI implements an initial phase of operation, called pre-operation, where selected research services are offered to scientific communities to realize advanced experiments in the offered infrastructure. Pre-operation is also used as a mean for extensive testing with users outside the SLICES developer community in order to make it more robust and identify ways of improvements. It is used as a proof-of-concept mechanism to assess and validate: 

1. technical maturity of SLICES RI to support research and development in the field, 
2. support for scientific workflows, including reproducibility and FAIR data management, and 
3. legal and organizational aspects of operating the research infrastructure in early stage of development. 

About Beyond-5G Blueprint

The objective of this blueprint is to provide the community with a software stack, hardware, and methodology to create reproducible experiments with cutting edge 5G and post-5G environments. This blueprint is designed in a modular way to support full and partial deployments. For example, experiments focusing on 5G can only deploy the core and use a simulated RAN, while experiments focusing on the RAN can just deploy a RAN, assuming they have access to a core. Advanced users may even deploy a core and connect it with multiple RANs. 

About Federated Learning Blueprint

The SLICES Research Infrastructure offers an ideal platform for experimenting with real hardware, distributed across multiple locations and interconnected by Layer 2 network links. The Federated Learning Blueprint provides templates and tutorials to help researchers leverage this infrastructure for federated machine learning research. It integrates key components —such as distributed virtual machines, bare-metal servers, storage, GPUs, and Jupyter notebooks— into streamlined, user-friendly experiments, demonstrating how to effectively use existing or new federated learning platforms on the distributed SLICES infrastructure.

About the pre-operation infrastructure 

SLICES-RI provides a fully programmable and virtualized, remotely accessible, European-wide research infrastructure, providing advanced computing, storage and network components, interconnected by dedicated high-speed links. 

The following countries participate to the initial phase of pre-operation with the goal to provide centrally-managed research services to scientific communities:

• Post-5G Blueprint
  • Belgium
  • France
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • Italy
• Federated Learning Blueprint
  • Belgium
  • Hungary
  • Poland
• Supporting services
  • Belgium
  • Cyprus
  • Germany
  • Hungary 
  • Poland

How to use SLICES pre-operation infrastructure? 

The entry point to the SLICES pre-operation infrastructure is through the SLICES Documentation page (https://doc.slices-ri.eu). The web page describes the SLICES offer to scientists and researchers from Academia and Industry and presents the guidelines how to use the infrastructure and services to conduct experiments. 

To set up user accounts and projects in SLICES please follow the guidelines in the documentation page and use https://portal.slices-ri.eu.  

For more information, refer to the official SLICES Web Page (https://www.slices-ri.eu).