SLICES, the first European testing platform for digital sciences

University - Designed as a scientific tool for digital sciences, the SLICES platform is a unique initiative in the world. Serge Fdida, the computer science professor behind the project, explains the challenges of this infrastructure, which involves more than 100 European universities and research centers. How was the SLICES project created and what are its objectives? Serge Fdida: SLICES , for LargeScale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies, is the first large scientific instrument developed by and for research in the digital sciences, and in particular in networks and computer systems. To make an analogy, it is the first "telescope" to support and validate the results of experimental research in this field. Moreover, Europe is the right scale to carry and implement this type of instrument. Although many platforms have been developed in the past, none of them is perennial, nor sufficiently large and coordinated to cover the entire life cycle of the research. These limitations have led the scientific community that I have coordinated to evolve from the concept of a set of distributed test platforms to that of a large scientific instrument.