Federated HPC, Cloud and Data infrastructures

An increasing interest is observed in making a diversity of compute and storage resources, which are geographic spread, available in a federated manner. A common services layer can facilitate easier access, more elasticity as well as lower response times, and improved utilisation of the underlying resources. In this white paper, current trends are analysed both from an infrastructure provider as well as an end-user perspective. Here the focus is on federated e-infrastructures that among others include high-performance computing (HPC) systems as compute resources. Two initiatives, namely Fenix and GAIA-X, are presented as illustrative examples. Based on a more detailed exploration of selected topical areas related to federated e-infrastructures, various R&I challenges are identified and recommendations for further efforts formulated