The Strategy of the Commons: Modelling the Annual Cost of Successful ICT Services for European Research

The provision of ICT services for research is increasingly using Cloud services to complement the traditional federation of computing centres. Due to the complex funding structure and differences in the basic business model, comparing the cost-effectiveness of these options requires a new approach to cost assessment. This paper presents a cost assessment method addressing the limitations of the standard methods and some of the initial results of the study. This acts as an illustration of the kind of cost assessment issues high-utilisation rate ICT services should consider when choosing between different infrastructure options. The research is co-funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme through the e-FISCAL project (contract number RI-283449)

RDF DATABASES – CASE STUDY AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data presentation model and the SPARQL query language have been the core of the semantic web technologies since the early 2000’s. In this article, we evaluate three RDF storage technologies. Our motivation is to find a storage solution that can be used to process “big data” RDF sets. Our method is based on measuring query response times with large samples (hundreds of thousands of RDF documents, millions of RDF statements). We find that all the proposed technologies provide much better performance than querying RDF data stored in files. However, with 300 000 documents, even with the fastest technology, an aggregation query still lasts more than 100 seconds in our environment. As a further performance improvement, we test the same data and queries with MongoDB, demonstrate its performance (10 seconds instead of 100) and scalability (up to 1000 000 documents). However, despite its benefits we must note that because of its data presentation and query limitations, MongoDB probably cannot serve as a generic storage for all kinds of RDF documents

Vastuullisuus ruokaketjussa. Eväitä johtamiseen, mittaamiseen ja viestintään

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Corporate Responsibility in the Food Chain: The Criteria and Indicators

Corporate responsibility (CR) is becoming a key issue in the food chain. In order to make sense of this phenomenon, a seminal aper by Maloni and Brown (2006) called for further empirical investigation on the criteria of responsibility in the food supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to answer the call by identifying the criteria for defining CR and develop indicators for measuring the responsibility performance of the food chain.The study was based on interactive and participatory stakeholder dialogues with diverse experts, corporate representatives and other stakeholders, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governmental bodies. Through an iterative research process we identified the criteria and developed the indicators. Our findings enable business leaders to evaluate and manage their operations towards more responsible business praxis

Funding, Sustainability, and Governance

Discussions about funding, sustainability, and governance of any e-infrastructure service tend to be culmination points of the tensions between bottom-up and top-down, static and dynamic, and prescriptive and descriptive approaches. Data management brings in additional challenges due to the time aspect. While a computing centre or network technology might be considered obsolete after a few years, data management requirements often extend decades or even centuries into the future. Funding commitments need to be made for long periods of time, and decisions about sustainability and governance models could be seen as setting a precedent that ties down parties for years into the future. At the same time, it is anticipated that the amount of data being produced will continue to exceed the capacity of the managed (curated and otherwise maintained) data services, adding the need to discuss prioritisation of the different datasets

EOSC-SYNERGY. EU DELIVERABLE: D5.1 National/International engagement plan with policy makers and funders

In order for the project to have an impact on the national policies and practices as well as the broader EOSC-related policy landscape, it is necessary to develop a coherent engagement strategy for the interactions with the key policy-level stakeholders. This document presents an analysis of the specific challenges of the current EOSC landscape, initial information and assumptions related to the organisational structures and dynamics the policy engagement approach is based on and the key processes and the mechanisms they will be assessed (and updated, if necessary) during the project lifetime.EOSC-SYNERGY receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 857647.Peer reviewe

Heterogeneous exascale computing

Exascale services bring new unique challenges that the current computational, big data and workflow solutions are unable to meet. The chapter includes a detailed description of selected exascale services with known state of the art in extreme date solutions. The integration of requirements and the analysis of the state of the art in the exascale field is centered in on a description of a high-level architectural approach. The next main contribution of the paper is the description of the architecture capable to handle heterogeneous exascale services coming from both academic as well as industrial sphere. Those two models represent a (conceptual, and technological) design of a platform that addresses the requirements of the use cases. The resulting architecture will help us provide computing solutions to exascale challenges within the H2020 project PROCESS

Environmental responsibility in the food chain : what to measure?

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