Presentations from the second online workshop of the BDVA are now available

On July 3rd 2020, BDVA organised in collaboration with ETP4HPC and the European Commission, the second session of an online workshop to discuss in depth the challenges, limitations and longer term perspectives of the Large Scale Pilot actions that are currently being developed in the context of the ICT-11-2018-2019 calls. As in the first session, this session and its insights will facilitate the definition of future research and innovation needs in terms of convergence and alignment of the basic technologies and their utilization in industry and specially SMEs.

This second session gathered over 40 participants representing HPC, Data, AI and IoT areas of expertise, with a good balance of Research, Industry, policy makers and other relevant players.

This event aimed specifically at discussing the following focus areas of the HPC-HPDA-spectrum:

• Data: avoidance of moving data, data curation and anonymizing, cross-IT infrastructure management.
• Workflows: approaches for mastering the complexity and orchestration. Would a reference architecture of workflows be helpful?
• HPC/Cloud infrastructure to edge: data movement, data sharing and orchestration, use of blockchain technology, cybersecurity, importance for industry (digital Twin context).
• AI/ML, training: need for automated ML, distributed training, explainability of the decision-making process.

To stimulate the discussion around these areas, a list of guiding questions was prepared for the ICT-11 projects and namely:

• How does each field impact your project? Specifically, describe how to incorporate HPC processing in your use cases.
• What are your projects’ plans to provide solutions to these challenges?
• Prioritize the four fields in terms of complexity and importance for R&I calls in Europe and pls. explain your decision
• What could be specific contributions of your project partners or other institutions in Europe in each of these areas?
• It is important to understand the requirements of industry in shaping future HPC strategy. What can these projects tell us about the unique HPC needs of these industrial partners – both from a technical perspective as well as from a strategic perspective? How do you think that industry is engaged to the above-mentioned areas? What are your ideas about a commercialization of the product results?

In addition, Michael Malms presented the Transcontinuum Initiative (TCI), a horizontal collaboration between European associations and projects involved in IT technology, application and services provisioning for the Digital Continuum (presentation here). The term Transcontinuum describes the defining characteristic of the infrastructure required for the convergence of data and compute capabilities in many leading edge industrial and scientific use scenarios.

The outcomes of the workshop will be relevant for the future research and innovation activities in both the EuroHPC JU, and the AI, Data and Robotics Partnership, and are meant to support alignment in between both partnerships.

• Organisers: Martina Barbero (BDVA), Ana García (BDVA), María S. Pérez (UPM, BDVA), Michael Malms (ETP4HPC)
• Moderators:María S. Pérez (UPM, BDVA), Michael Malms (ETP4HPC)

Presentations:

• LEXIS: Stephan Hachinger (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre), Marc Levrier (ATOS). Presentation here.
• INFINITECH:Pavlos Kranas (LeanXcale). Presentation here.
• IoTwins: Paolo Bellavista (UNIBO), Francesco Millo (Bonfiglioli). Presentation here.
• Evolve: Jean-Thomas Acquaviva (DDN), Angelos Bilas (FORTH). Presentation here.
• CYBELE:  Sophia Karagiorgou (Ubitech). Presentation here.
• DeepHealth: Mónica Caballero (Everis), Jon Ander Gómez (UPV), Eduardo Quiñones (BSC), Marco Aldinucci (University of Torino). Presentation here.

Original source: https://www.bdva.eu/node/1605