Expected impact

Added value of the project results at National, European and International level

GUIDE plans to build upon the impact of the GRID and GPU predecessor projects and capitalize on the expectations that were created for the user communities with regard to the new opportunities provided by eInfrastructures. GUIDE will help extend the up-take of eInfrastructures across a wide range of cross research and private communities, help develop and optimize the private companies infrastructure, and finally help sustainability of National private HPC Initiatives in the region.

The project will have a positive effect on the human capital in the region in two ways. First, by helping to retain highly-skilled researchers (“brain-drain” prevention), by making information and knowledge resources accessible to them; and second, by training new young researchers within institutions involved in the project and the wider community effected by project results. In a wider context the current proposal addresses the issue of the “digital divide” between countries and regions having high-tech ICT technologies and those that do not. Promoting the regional HPC eInfrastructure and their use by new communities in the countries on the “wrong side” of the divide contributes to the stated EU policy of overcoming this divide as stated in Communications from the Commission: Com(2001) 346 final, and Com(2001) 279 final.

The overall impact of GUIDE as an Integrated Infrastructure is expected to be along the lines below.

On the overall level:

 – The project will expand the regional eInfrastructure to address the specific needs of new scientific communities, by providing the new regional HPC infrastructure within the Phase 4 activity (Task 4.5 Technology transfer of the methods, algorithms, APIs and documentation to TRANS SPED), and empowering a number of new Virtual Research Communities within Phase 1-4 activity. Tackled by, Collaborative Arrangements.

–  Support the integrated provision of eInfrastructure related services to the research community at a National and European level by providing transparent access to the HPC and network infrastructure. Tackled by Service Activities.

–  The project will establish more effective scientific collaboration and innovation by joining together the research from different institutes within the new Virtual Research Communities, and providing to them access to the high-end infrastructure. Tackled by Service Activities, Collaborative Arrangements.

Dissemination and/or exploitation of project results, and management of intellectual property rights

In order to ensure that the GUIDE results in terms of:

– Applications, and application-specific software service development

– HPC infrastructure operation, and management tools deployment

– Technologic transfer procedures status

More specifically, an outline of the main actions of the dissemination and exploitation plans is as follows. General actions, applying to all three main dissemination/exploitation areas are:

– Designing, developing and maintaining a content-rich portal for all of the GUIDE related research, development and dissemination results and information.

– Make all public deliverables of the project available through both GUIDE website but also through any other potential national or EC project specifically dedicated at concertation / eInfrastructure Library activities.

– Publications and papers from the project participants, including also qualitative newsletters as well as more targeted media divided into specific target group types (e.g. production of film material for potential media coverage and web-streaming), thus raising awareness for GUIDE in the national and global community.

– Organization and participation in conferences, workshops and training events, in order to disseminate the project results to both users and HPC infrastructure operators.

In order for the GUIDE project to have a major long-lasting impact in terms of reducing the digital divide between Romania and the rest of Europe, it must aim to achieve socio-political and socio-economic impact beyond the research and education community. This implies that strategic targets of dissemination must go beyond HPC researchers and HPC-user researchers, and specifically include university/academic senior staff, industries/SMEs, and other key players and stakeholders who need to become deeply aware of the eInfrastructure concept and the results pursued by GUIDE. The GUIDE project will full adhere to the EC recommendations and guidelines listed in:

http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/science-communication/index_en.htm; http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/science-communication/pdf/communicating-eu-research.pdf;

http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/communicating-science_en.pdf;

http://ec.europa.eu/research/conferences/2004/cer2004/pdf/rtd_2004_guide_success_communication.pdf

Intellectual property rights

The project is expected to develop some source code for the deployment of advanced applications, algorithms and methods in WP 2, WP 3 and WP 4. This source code might be in the form of additions/modifications to readily available software, or the development of completely new software. In the former case, as the project will strive to use Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) whenever possible, all changes to such software will be governed by the same user license as the original software and will be committed back to the source tree in order to be included in new releases. The copyright of new source code will remain in the consortium or a combination of the consortium and original module authors. On the case of changes in the source code of software which does not fall in the FLOSS category (copyright holder permission will be required first), the status of changes and copyrights will be negotiated with the original copyright holder. Software originally developed within the project will be made available to the user community under a FLOSS license with the copyright remaining within the consortium or the subset of participants that developed the project. External additions to the source code thereafter, by the community, will follow the established trends of shared copyright in FLOSS projects. GUIDE project will follow the recommendations of the “Expert group report on the Management of intellectual property in publicly-funded research organisations: Towards European Guidelines” (http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/pdf/iprmanagementguidelines-report.pdf) and/or recomandation of the ROSA experts. The GUIDE Public Research Organisations (PROs) – and majority of consortium belongs to this category – will adopt the “Innovation Model” for the management of the IPR. This means that the initial ownership of results and inventions funded by public funds will be vested to the PROs where the research has been conducted. Any eventual business associates, which partnership will indeed pursue, will retain the IPR of the services/procedures that they will develop/deploy in the course of the project. Detailed IPR issues including publication of results will be specified within the Consortium Agreement of the project.

Business case TRANS SPED is a research oriented SME whose business strategy is centred on the concept of identifying niche sectors for edge technologies and applications. In this context TRANS SPED has identified the possibility to use the GRID and GPU technology, which is approaching maturity and commercial exploitation.

TRANS SPED continuously collaborates with national and European universities, R&D institutes and entities, working together on the latest cutting edge technologies, in order to come up with innovative solutions that address the market challenges.

Creating technology to make the IT world safer has always been the motto that brought

TRANS SPED up the recognition as an important security solutions and defense solutions integrator. That is why the research and development activity plays an important role in creating and developing products and solutions meant to be integrated within more complex security systems. Actually, R&D has been for years TRANS SPED’s main source for PKI a of GRID and GPU certificate to maintain IT security. Some results of TRANS SPED’s growth based on R&D are the spin-offs of companies and business units promoting products and solutions developed on proprietary technologies. The proposed project and its results are integrated and in direct support of several strategic objectives assumed by TRANS SPED’s Strategy 2011-2015, will improve our business and move the company forward to the next level of maturity.

The foreseen beneficiaries and expected market for the product resulted from the project are:

• Business to Business: IT critical infrastructures;
• Business to Government: Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Justice
• Business to Public Institution: Universities, R&D Institutes, Hospitals, etc