Greener Future Digital Research Infrastructures

In order to keep Research Infrastructures at the highest level of excellence in science, new technologies and solutions must be developed to steer toward a reduced environmental footprint, as it is the case for all domains of our societies. Lowering the environmental impact of digital infrastructures should be a priority as they today contribute 3 to 4% of the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission in the world and expected to triple from 2020 to 2050. GreenDIGIT brings together 4 major distributed Digital Infrastructures at different lifecycle stages, EGI, SLICES, SoBigData, EBRAINS, to tackle the challenge of environmental impact reduction with the ambition to provide solutions that are reusable across the whole spectrum of digital services on the ESFRI landscape, and play a role model. GreenDIGIT will capture good practices and existing solutions and will develop new technologies and solutions for all aspects of the digital continuum: from service provisioning to monitoring, job scheduling, resources allocation, architecture, workload and Open Science practices, task execution, storage, and use of green energy. GreenDIGIT will deliver these solutions as building blocks, with a reference architecture and guidelines for RIs to lower their environmental footprint. It will include the extension of a workload manager, Virtual Machine Manager, AI/ML training framework, and IoT/5G/network management solutions from 4 participating RIs with new brokering logic to optimize task execution toward low-energy use. User-side tools and Virtual Research Environments will also be expanded with energy usage reporting and reproducibility capabilities to motivate users to apply low-energy practices. The new solutions will be validated through reference scientific use cases from diverse disciplines and will be promoted to providers and users through an active dissemination and training programme, in order to prepare the next generation of Digital RIs with a low environmental footprint.