ICT Infrastructures for eScience: the Way Towards a new Scientific Renaissance
The European Commission put forward a renewed strategy for ensuring that European researchers have access to state-of-the-art infrastructure for computing, simulation and networking so that Europe can take the lead in developing the science of the future. The strategy, presented in the Communication “ICT infrastructures for eScience”, is based on three vectors: eScience, e-Infrastructures and innovation.
A number of concrete actions frame its implementation, requiring the coordination of efforts and reinforced commitment of national and EU funding authorities. The new Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions was adopted by the European Commission on 5 March 2009. The Communication highlights the strategic role of e-Infrastructures as a crucial asset underpinning European research and innovation policies. It calls on Member States and the scientific communities, in cooperation with the European Commission, to reinforce and co-ordinate efforts to further develop world-class ICT infrastructures (also known as e-Infrastructures) to pave the way towards a Scientific Renaissance in the 21st century. 21st century science is experiencing major changes in the way it is performed. Researchers are facing unprecedented levels of complexity in tackling scientific challenges with global societal impact. These challenges cannot be addressed by a single researcher, institution or country. For example, researching climate change requires complex computer simulations that access data stored in on-line repositories all over the globe; creating individualised models of humans for targeted healthcare requires increasingly sophisticated modelling and simulation; and emulating catastrophes such as nuclear disasters, pandemics and tsunamis, to design civil protection schemes, requires researchers to increasingly experiment in virtual worlds rather than in real environments.
In all these examples it is essential to bring together scientists from different scientific fields, and to give them access to top-of-the-line computational and data resources. This is what e-Infrastructures are about: enabling collaboration, sharing resources, and providing access to information. In fact, today we cannot imagine advanced research without the intensive use of sophisticated e-Infrastructures. There is both a need and an opportunity to further develop these resources as a strategic platform underpinning European scientific and innovation leadership. This calls for a renewed effort from the Member States, the European Commission and scientific communities to boost investment in e-Infrastructures and to ensure the proper coordination and alignment of national and Community strategies. Furthermore, e-Infrastructures need to include a richer set of functionalities, such as new generations of system and application software, virtual machines, service delivery platforms, visualisation tools, semantic-based search engines, and so on, in order to support multi-disciplinary teams in transforming bits, bytes and flops into scientific discoveries and complex engineering.
At the same time, while developing the conditions for the 21st century science, the aspects of innovation and sustainability have also to be addressed. For example, the potential impact of e-Infrastructures in domains with a clear public dimensions, such as health, eGovernment, civil protection and education, is large and still unexplored. A successful implementation of the proposed strategy will position Europe as a world hub of scientific excellence and contribute to the consolidation and further development of a cohesive European Research Area.
Kostantinos Glinos
European Commission Head of Unit DG INFSO/F3 GÉANT & e-Infrastructure
