SPECTRUM: Sustainable Future for Research computing
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At the beginning of February, the Kick-Off meeting of the European SPECTRUM project, funded under the Horizon Europe programme, was held in Amsterdam.
SPECTRUM project brings together the major players in scientific computing for High Energy Physics and Radio Astronomy and some of Europe’s largest computing centres, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Italy is well represented in SPECTRUM in both spheres, with the INFN at the forefront for collider physics and CINECA for large computing infrastructures.
SPECTRUM aims to address the problem of sustainability of scientific computing for the disciplines under study: 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, High Energy Particle Physics and Radioastronymics are preparing revolutionary tools that require infrastructures many times larger than current capabilities. In this context, the SPECTRUM project aims to formulate a Research, Innovation and Implementation Strategy (SRIDA) and a Technical Design document outlining financially and environmentally sustainable solutions.
This collaborative effort aims to create an Exabyte-scale federation of research data, promoting “data intensive” scientific collaborations across Europe.
“We have high expectations for the SPECTRUM project,” says Tommaso Boccali, a researcher at INFN in Pisa and project manager for INFN, “but what we feel is most relevant is the possibility of an open and constructive discussion between users and large computing infrastructures, leading to a future greater integration and the design of a next generation of the latter that is more usable by the scientific communities we represent.”
“Today, we are seeing an increasing use of systems in which data use and high-performance computing are increasingly interconnected.- Says Fabio Affinito, Head of Specialist Support and R&D CINECA – This dynamic requires special attention in designing and developing strategies capable of adapting to different and specific user use cases. In this context, SPECTRUM represents an extraordinary opportunity, and CINECA, also as leader of ICSC’s Spoke 0 on Infrastructure, is excited to contribute to the project’.