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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DARE (Delivering Agile Research Excellence on European e-Infrastructures)

Teaser

Summary

DARE is an ambitious project that aims to provide novel approaches for creating and using data-powered methods at the frontiers of todayâ€™s research and innovation. DAREâ€™s central goal is to support research developers â€“ domain-expert software developers â€“ to transparently make use of European e-infrastructures, research infrastructures and other platforms and software in order to create maintainable and highly customised applications targeting domain users. This requires a tightly knit technological core - the DARE platform - that offers and itself exploits semantics, optimisation, abstraction and automation regarding data and computation on diverse European e-infrastructures.
Meeting its objectives, DARE will increase the utilisation and impact of e-infrastructures and shield end-users from potential underlying technological changes or disruptions. Moreover, it will lead to manageable and user-friendly applications addressing high-impact societal challenges. DARE is aligned with EOSC developments.

The DARE project aims to:
1. Pioneer an integrated development and delivery hyper-platform for creating, refining and running abstract methods.
2. Provide an integrated set of tools for examining and managing methods, their repeated use and their data by exploiting a hierarchy of high-level programmable services.
3. Deliver demonstrations of the sustainability and productivity gains provided by DARE to expert teams creating, refining and using methods dealing with extreme data and computation boundaries.
4. Organise training and consultation events in order to publicise its proposed solution as well as to take additional requirements onboard for future improvements.

Work performed

All activities of DARE culminate to the design, implementation and usage of the main outcome of the project, the DARE platform. The latterâ€™s architecture is defined in the context of WP2 and is the first pillar that establishes the basic principles of its implementation. The second pillar is the set of requirements for the DARE pilots (WP6 and WP7), and their distillation into concrete user stories (WP3). The individual components that are integrated in the platform are developed and updated in the contexts of WP3 and WP4. WP5 is responsible for the realisation of the integrated platform, as it provides and manages the operational and testing environments for deploying and using the platform.

The DARE goals are generally met in line with the Description of the Action (DoA). By the end of M18, the architectural requirements are becoming concrete, as well as the implementation and piloting work begins to stabilise. By the end of M18, the integrated DARE platform has been further developed and it has successfully supported the demonstration and training actions of both use-case pilots. The distilled user stories that have in part guided the development of the pilots and of the platform have been timely defined and analysed. The training and evaluation of the DARE platform by the EPOS and ENES communities, presented in the respective deliverables, were favourable and confirm DAREâ€™s assumptions and objectives.

At the same time, DARE is active in synergising with other projects such as with DEEP and XDC, in order to avoid technical overlaps, maximise impact and make the best possible use of the EOSC vehicle of shared services. A concrete step towards such synergies was the organization of a joint workshop between all EINFRA-21 project as well as with other related projects on 10 July 2019, in Athens.
With respect to the project objectives above the following achievements have been made:
1. A reference architecture has been specified and the first version of the platform has been released. The architecture implements a logical knowledge base which facilitates the storage of concepts and descriptions of executable methods.
2. The DARE platform has customised and integrated tools for monitoring long campaigns as well as for recording and retrieving data provenance information.
3. Demonstrable and documented use-case implementations addressing requirements of the EPOS and IS-ENES communities. Usefulness and usability initially evaluated as part of two training sessions, one per each domain involved.
4. DARE has completed two training sessions as per the work plan. These sessions communicated DARE to a number of trainees who are actively involved in either specifying or implementing domain-specific e-infrastructures for their respective communities. At the same time, DARE has extensively organised workshops, presented and published related technical progress at a number of high-impact conferences, such as the AGU fall meeting and the IEEE eScience conference.

Final results

DARE is the forerunner of a methodology that will deliver the power needed to gain the benefits of the next decadeâ€™s wealth and diversity of data. It aims to be a critical asset for research, business and government as Europe addresses global societal challenges. The methodology, tools and architectures developed within DARE improve the productivity of key experts and research developers who are overwhelmed today. DARE achieves this by creating data-driven and concept-enabled technology to amplify and accelerate their work.

This delivers agility by substantially reducing time to deliver data-driven scientific methods. DARE will deliver research excellence via giving those methods much increased power in their application domain and by polishing those data-powered methods through rapid and well-targeted refinement. The two use cases, of EPOS and IS-ENES provide compelling evidence of wider applicability. DARE plans to organise webinars targeting communities outside of EPOS and IS-ENES, e.g. in Nuclear Fusion and Material Sciences.

More specifically, DARE pushes the current state-of-the-art in the following ways:
1. DARE focuses on research teams, empowering them to innovate, in a holistic, accessible and interoperable framework, without bogging them down in technical detail.
2. DARE offers a developer-friendly framework along with sophisticated tools, to allow for managing data provenance, to promote communication, transparency and reproducibility.
3. DAREâ€™s high-level workflow abstractions allow for the near-seamless combination of Cloud, HTC and HPC platforms and services.
4. DARE methods and tools are inherently FAIR and, combined with the DARE catalogues, they will be computer-actionable.

DAREâ€™s impact is driven by enabling research developers and domain experts to work on extremes. DARE provides the capability to engage users across e-Infrastructures, enabling DARE hyper-platform to address a large part of the European research community, spanning more than 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals that are engaged in the creation of new knowledge, new products and new services.

Within this large market, DARE has impact on (a) the European domain specific e-Infrastructures, which can exploit DARE in order to create new data-driven services more easily, (b) science and technology professionals that can use DARE-powered infrastructures more easily, without being concerned with technicalities, and (c) the â€œlong tail of scienceâ€, including research institutes, research teams, individual researchers, SMEs, etc., who, due to lack of tools, methodology or resources, are unable to make the most of even todayâ€™s wealth of data, scientific advances and the power of the e-infrastructure Commons.