Six European supercomputing centres, namely BSC (Spain), CEA (France), CINECA (Italy), CSC (Finland), CSCS (Switzerland) and JSC (Germany), agreed to align their services to facilitate the creation of the Fenix Infrastructure. The distinguishing characteristic of this e-infrastructure is that data repositories and scalable supercomputing systems are in close proximity and well integrated. An initial version of this infrastructure was realised through the ICEI project (Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the Human Brain Project), which was part of the European Human Brain Project (HBP). Researchers from or associated to the HBP were the initial prime users of this e-infrastructure.
The objectives of ICEI can be summarized as follows:
- To perform a coordinated procurement of equipment and related maintenance services, licences for software components, and R&D services for realizing elements of the Fenix e-infrastructure;
- Design a generic e-infrastructure for the HBP, driven by its scientific use-cases and usable by other scientific communities;
- Build the e-infrastructure having the following key characteristics
- Interactive Computing Services
- Elastic access to scalable compute resources
- Federated data infrastructure;
- Establish a suitable e-infrastructure governance
- Develop a resource allocation mechanism to provide resources to HBP users and European researchers at large; and
- Assist in the expansion of the e-infrastructure to other communities that provide additional resources.
