SLICES is a European initiative establishing a large-scale, sustainable research platform aiming at promoting innovation to benefit citizens. The SLICES Research Infrastructure is developed to provide services related to experimentation in the context of digital sciences including 5G, 6G, NFV, Internet of Things, and cloud computing. SLICES will, in particular, provide cutting-edge testbed infrastructure and tools that can be used across several sectors of society, such as smart cities, smart agriculture, energy efficiency, e-health, cryptocurrencies, and more.

Building a community of researchers, SLICES provides the necessary solutions to create and manage efficiently the experiments, focusing in particular on facilitated access for the experiments, the reproducibility of the research experiments, the validation of the experiment results and finally, the publication of the results in open data access. The SLICES resources encompass, among others, compute, storage, and network components, which will be interconnected by dedicated high-speed links, fostering resource federation and mutualisation from diverse universities and research centres.

SLICES is comprised of partners from 15 European countries and has received the endorsements of key stakeholders and the political support of 11 European Governments. The SLICES partners have experience in the operation and experimentation with real infrastructure, covering the following areas:

• Advanced wireless networking
• Smart infrastructure operation and management
• Design and validation of new DIs and hyper-converged infrastructures
• Energy efficiency and carbon footprint
• Security and privacy

With SLICES-SC, we aspire to foster the community of researchers around this ecosystem, create and strengthen necessary links with relevant industrial stakeholders for the exploitation of the infrastructure, advance existing methods for research reproducibility and experiment repeatability, and design and deploy the necessary solutions for providing SLICES-RI with an easy to access scheme for users from different disciplines. A set of detailed research activities has been designed to materialize these efforts in tools for providing transnational (remote and physical) access to the facility, as well as virtual access to the data produced over the facilities. The respective networking activities of SLICES-SC aspire in fostering the community around these infrastructures, as well as open up to new disciplines and industrial stakeholders.

For more information on the SLICES Infrastructure, its activities, partners, and related projects, please visit the official SLICES website: htps://www.slices-ri.eu