RI-SCALE 3rd Competence Center Meeting: Key Outcomes and Next Steps

Project director Gergely Sipos highlighted the core mission driving these efforts: “The RI-SCALE works on a cutting edge new technology, called Data Exploitation Platform, that can connect big scientific data holdings with compute centres to empower scientists with online environments where scientific data, compute capacity and AI applications are virtually co-located, ready for large scale data analysis. The technology includes new software, new deployments at federated HPC and Cloud compute centres, and new operational models that consider the economic and environmental sustainability aspects of the setups.”

Key outcomes

The first day focused on reviewing current platform deployments across compute sites and Research Infrastructure (RI) data holdings, alongside progress presentations from scientific and technology validator teams. On the second day, discussions shifted toward the upcoming validation report and the embedding of the DEP technology into the user environments operated by the RIs. A major takeaway was ensuring that researchers can access these tools seamlessly, elevating and not disrupting their existing research practices. The two days long meeting  shows that the project is firmly on track for its next major milestones: the First DEP validation Report, and the 2nd DEP release . While individual validation cases are moving at different speeds, all together they are making excellent progress. In the scientific sector, teams are successfully testing applications with pseudonymized sensitive data, and one imaging team has developed a new chat interface that could benefit other areas of the project. Technical work on image compression and resource tracking remains strictly on schedule, though a few specific teams are currently accelerating their development to prepare for the next round of platform testing.

The next steps

As the project moves forward, development will focus heavily on refining data connections and bringing direct user feedback into the upcoming software updates. The project roadmap is clearly laid out across short, mid, and long-term milestones. In the short term, the priority is finalizing and delivering first scientific and technological use case validations. The mid-term focus centers on the second platform release scheduled for February 2027, which will launch alongside external outreach and open calls for additional Research Infrastructures and users. Looking further ahead, long-term planning will address sustainable operational models for the DEP instances within RIs, EGI, broader scientific networks or as part of dedicated Data Labs.