3rd IT4RIs 2018 Interoperable infrastructure for big data research infrastructures: opening

Real-time applications (disaster warning and response, traffic flow control, weather monitoring and forecasting, etc.) are among the most challenging applications to develop, deploy and control on distributed infrastructure, but can be of great current and future value to research, industry and public safety/security. Applications that fuse real-time requirements with environmental science require the establishment of dedicated agile e-infrastructure that can provide fundamental storage and processing capacity that is able to respond effectively to time-critical events.

To address many of the real-time challenges facing the scientific research community and society at large today, it is necessary to be able to analyse and process large quantities of heterogeneous data acquired in several different scientific domains and at present distributed across many different kinds of existing ICT infrastructure. Of particular concern is how to manage real-time aspects in the management of large quantities of data being generated by sensor deployments in real-time, the fast orchestration of workflows on virtual infrastructure in response to real-time events or in response to irregular demands on resources by researchers, and the search and aggregation of research data from multiple sources and catalogues on-demand. Solutions that make use of new developments in Cloud, virtual infrastructure, or software engineering tools and methodologies are particularly timely in this context.

The workshop for "interoperable infrastructures for interdisciplinary big data science (IT4RIs)" focuses on practical aspects of the design, development and operation of research e-infrastructure and virtual research environments, as well as the interaction between ICT infrastructure and user communities. This year, the workshop specifically highlights the software engineering aspects for time critical cloud applications: engineering approaches, standards, methodologies and utilizations in infrastructures. The workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers and developers to exchange their experiences and ideas on building nearly real-time data processing solutions, and models for programming, executing and controlling time-critical applications on virtualized infrastructures (e.g., Clouds).