The overall objective of GreenDIGIT is to develop and validate a consistent framework, including a package of innovative technical solutions, models, and tools to increase the sustainability of digital RIs by lowering their environmental and climate impact throughout their whole lifecycle. This overall objective can be broken down into a set of more specific objectives, as follows:
O1: Assess status and trends of low impact computing among community of ESFRI Research infrastructures to produce technical and policy recommendations and the general roadmap.
Description of objective: GreenDIGIT will conduct surveys and interviews among the partner DIGITAL RIs and within the broader ESFRI landscape to assess the status and to capture good practices in the low environmental impact operation of digital services. Develop an actionable methodology for assessing energy efficiency and the environmental (and climate) impact of RIs during the operational stage, and during the whole lifecycle. The objective is to define common approaches that can be adopted across these RIs, as a pilot for generalising energy-aware methodologies for RIs in the DIGIT domain overall.
Challenge and innovation (results): There have not been such surveys conducted for DIGITAL and other ESFRI RIs. A survey will be developed with the contribution of the RI (and external) experts to make it an efficient instrument in collecting, monitoring, analysing information about RIs status and practices. The survey and its results will provide a basis for developing a roadmap for integrated actions for increasing the sustainability of digital RIs
O2: Provide reference architecture and design principles, as well as an actionable model for RIs about environmental impact assessment and monitoring, reflecting on the whole RI lifecycle.
Description of objective: Reference Architecture that includes all major components involved in the RI operation and functioning; provides the basis for analysing impact factors and defining key metrics for monitoring and optimisation.
Challenge and innovation (results): There is no architecture defined at the moment which places energy and carbon footprint at the center of the RI design approach. Many infrastructure solutions are implemented and used by different RIs, the telecom and cloud industries, however more specific architecture for RIs reflecting specific Open Science and research requirements/practices is still lacking. So, it is difficult to provide effective monitoring and optimisation in the RI ecosystems. The developed technical solutions will include cloud native services design and provisioning, support for virtual research environments. The proposed architecture will provide a basis for RI monitoring, assessment and certification, while ensuring smooth integration with the broader open science ecosystems, particularly the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
O3: Develop and validate technologies, methods, and tools for digital service providers among European RIs to reduce energy consumptions and overall environmental impact.
Description of objective: GreenDIGIT will propose new/effective approaches and methodologies and develop/prototype/test supporting tools for digital service providers to continuously monitor their energy consumption and implied environmental impact, as well as to provide fully-automated and energy-aware orchestration of complex service meshes across the edge-cloud continuum to reduce their resource usage footprint and induced energy consumption.
Challenge and innovation (results): There are no available/Open Source tools and structured methodologies that can be easily reused across multiple RI datacenters or any other RI technical components to plan and implement energy/impact conscious operation. RI facilities/platforms are diverse, and tools should allow adaptation and configuration. There are no common metrics for environmental impact monitoring. It is also worth pointing out that mapping the energy consumption from the main hardware components of servers and network devices (i.e., CPUs, memory, disks, network I/O) onto individual service meshes/network slices is not a trivial task. Indeed, physical resources are typically shared among multiple virtual resources (e.g. microservice, VNFs) and it is necessary to design novel analytics and profiling algorithms that can aggregate monitoring streams and raw KPIs coming from the RI individual components (e.g. computing resources, network devices, 5G functions and processes), and estimate the energy- and carbon-footprint of service meshes on the edge-cloud continuum.
O4: Develop technical tools that will assist researchers in designing environmental impact aware digital applications with reproducibility, Open Science and FAIR data management considerations
Description of objective: GreenDIGIT will provide researchers with virtual research environments and open science tools to develop and manage portable and reproducible scientific workflows, in particular for experimental research that is important for new ICT and digital technologies. The new Reproducibility as Service (RaaS) will be integrated with RI user portals and will provide a virtual environment for researchers to comply with FAIR data management principles and integration with the EOSC federated data management infrastructure. The planned activities will make available data easier accessible and reusable and avoid reproducing former experiments and allow for resource-optimal experiment placement. Trusted and reproducible workflows eliminate the need for re-execution, thus lowering the carbon footprint of scientific discoveries through a reduced number of data access operations and calculations.
Challenge and innovation (results): There are multiple solutions for research workflow automation and data management, however there are no integrated solutions combining all required functionality to support the whole research lifecycle from the (infrastructure) experiment setup to run, collect data, validate and process results, and finally produce and archive reproducible experiments, ensuring FAIR data sharing.
O5: Educate and support digital service providers in the RI communities about good practices on environmental impact conscious lifecycle management and operation of infrastructures and services.
Description of objective: Training courses will be developed and delivered for different target groups identified in the broad RI communities. To extend impact, GreenDIGIT will organise a set of “train-the-trainer” workshops with invited experts in sustainable digital technologies. Target is to establish regular courses and a recognised certificate of attendance. In particular, a skill-based approach will be followed in order to address life-long learning and professional learning with the possibility to propose micro-credentials in order to recognize that these skills have been properly acquired.
Challenge and innovation (results): There are no widely available education or training programs on environmentally aware or sustainable digital infrastructure technologies. GreenDIGIT will solve both tasks on development of instructional methodology and reference training modules. Development of training curricula courses will be supported by the proposed framework for competences and skills related to sustainability and environmentally aware practices for different RI actors: operators/engineers, application developers, researchers, managers/administrators, and eventually policy decision makers. This will be supported by defining the required competences and skills for the main organisational role in RIs and developing a set of reference training modules.