PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing, was established in May 2010 as a permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Six systems at the highest performance level (Tier-0) are deployed by Germany, France, Italy and Spain providing researchers with over 9 billion core hours of compute time. HPC experts from twenty-five member states - funded in part in three implementation projects - enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently PRACE is preparing for PRACE 2.0, the successor of the initial five year period. The objectives of PRACE-4IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include: assisting the transition to PRACE 2.0; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing advanced training which so far provided more than 15.000 person-training days to over 4700 persons, preparing strategies and best practices towards exascale computing, coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services, and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures. The proven project structure will be used to achieve each of the objectives in six dedicated work packages. The project will continue to be managed by Jülich. The activities are designed to increase Europe's research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting take-up by industry and special offers to SMEs; analysing new flexible business models for PRACE 2.0; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, the coming CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies.

The Data Infrastructure Capacities for EOSC (DICE) consortium brings together a network of computing and data centres, research infrastructures, and data repositories for the purpose to enable a European storage and data management infrastructure for EOSC, providing generic services and building blocks to store, find, access and process data in a consistent and persistent way. Specifically, DICE partners will offer 14 state-of-the-art data management services together with more than 50 PB of storage capacity. The service and resource provisioning will be accompanied by enhancing the current service offering in order to fill the gaps still present to the support of the entire research data lifecycle; solutions will be provided for increasing the quality of data and their re-usability, supporting long term preservation, managing sensitive data, and bridging between data and computing resources. All services provided via DICE will be offered through the EOSC Portal and interoperable with EOSC Core via a lean interoperability layer to allow efficient resource provisioning from the very beginning of the project. The partners will closely monitor the evolution of the EOSC interoperability framework and guidelines to comply with a) the rules of participation to onboard services into EOSC, and b) the interoperability guidelines to integrate with the EOSC Core functions. The data services offered via DICE through EOSC are designed to be agnostic to the scientific domains in order to be multidisciplinary and to fulfil the needs of different communities. The consortium aims to demonstrate their effectiveness of the service offering by integrating services with community platforms as part of the project and by engaging with new communities coming through EOSC.

EUDAT2020 brings together a unique consortium of e-infrastructure providers, research infrastructure operators, and researchers from a wide range of scientific disciplines under several of the ESFRI themes, working together to address the new data challenge. In most research communities, there is a growing awareness that the “rising tide of data” will require new approaches to data management and that data preservation, access and sharing should be supported in a much better way. Data, and a fortiori Big Data, is a cross-cutting issue touching all research infrastructures. EUDAT2020’s vision is to enable European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment, as part of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) conceived as a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, combining the richness of numerous community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe’s largest scientific data centres. EUDAT2020 builds on the foundations laid by the first EUDAT project, strengthening the links between the CDI and expanding its functionalities and remit. Covering both access and deposit, from informal data sharing to long-term archiving, and addressing identification, discoverability and computability of both long-tail and big data, EUDAT2020’s services will address the full lifecycle of research data. One of the main ambitions of EUDAT2020 is to bridge the gap between research infrastructures and e-Infrastructures through an active engagement strategy, using the communities that are in the consortium as EUDAT beacons and integrating others through innovative partnerships. During its three-year funded life, EUDAT2020 will evolve the CDI into a healthy and vibrant data-infrastructure for Europe, and position EUDAT as a sustainable infrastructure within which the future, changing requirements of a wide range of research communities are addressed.