e-infrastructures address the needs of European researchers for digital services in terms of networking, computing and data management, and foster the emergence of Open Science as an essential block of the European Research Area (ERA)European Research Area
https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/european-research-area_en

Federated, national Infrastructures and European initiatives serve scientific communities by providing trusted and open environments to store, share and re-use scientific data and results. These platforms benefit from fast connectivity, high-capacity cloud solutions, and supercomputing capability systems.

Currently, e-infrastructures, related services and expertise for RIs in Europe are provided by different stakeholders, including:

• Major European initiatives, such as EuroHPC (under the form of a Joint Undertaking) or EOSC (under the form of a European Partnership), and the various projects under their portfolio;
• European collaborations between different centres such as GÉANT GÉANT 
  https://geant.org/, ESFRI Landmark PRACE PRACE
  https://prace-ri.eu/, EUDAT EUDAT 
  https://www.eudat.eu/ or EGI EGI 
  https://www.egi.eu/, which very often started as projects and have evolved into some forms of legal entities;
• National centres, often involved in the aforementioned initiative, which can also support directly several European RIs, according to national priorities and funding;
• Thematic RIs possessing their own RI-dedicated resources, collaborating via platforms like the ESFRI Clusters to address digital needs in projects across disciplines from a common wider domain (e.g. Environment, Life Science, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physics, Biomedical Science);
• Intergovernmental large-scale Research Infrastructures, notably CERN CERN 
  https://home.cern/, EMBL EMBL 
  https://www.embl.org/, ESO ESO 
  https://www.eso.org or ESA ESA 
  https://www.esa.int/, or ECMWF ECMWF 
  https://www.ecmwf.int/ which possess significant capabilities in e-infrastructure.

THE NEW BUILDING BLOCKS: EUROHPC AND EOSC

Over the last decade, the European e-infrastructure ecosystem has undergone significant developments, characterised by two main features: the establishment of a new, sustainable European advanced computing infrastructure, powered by the EuroHPC initiative, and the emergence of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which aims at building a European Data Space for Science, Research and Innovation, leveraging multiple data providers and pan-European e-infrastructures.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking Euro HPC Joint Undertaking 
https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/index_en was established to raise European competitiveness in high performance computing (HPC) and enable effort coordination and resource-sharing at the European level. The objective is to deploy a world-class HPC infrastructure and a competitive innovation ecosystem in supercomputing technologies, applications, and skills in Europe. To address this objective, EuroHPC JU has co-funded a number of large-scale HPC systems in Europe. As of mid-2023, three so-called pre-exascale centres and ten smaller petascale centres have been decided upon, some of them already operational, and others in planning or deployment phases. The first two EuroHPC exascale centres have also been launched, and are expected to be operational in Germany in 2024 and in France in 2026. Due to EuroHPC, the quantity and quality of HPC resources available for European research is larger than ever before and still developing, a pivotal factor in enhancing the competitiveness of European computational and data science.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) EOSC 
https://eosc-portal.eu/about/eosc intends to provide researchers with a virtual environment housing open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines by federating existing data infrastructures. EOSC is being co-created through a series of projects funded by the European Commission (EC) and initiatives from Member States (MS) and Associated Countries (AC). The European Partnership for the EOSC was launched in June 2021, working closely with the MS and the respective research communities. The EOSC Partnership will ensure a coordinated approach until at least the end of 2030, involving the European Commission, MS, AC, and stakeholders in investments and initiatives in the EOSC ecosystem. The funding envisages an EU investment of almost €500 million and an in-kind contribution of another €500 million from partners between 2021 and 2027. The aim is to improve the storing, sharing, and reusing of research data across borders and scientific disciplines. The EOSC Association was established as an International non-profit Association under Belgian Law (AISBL) in July 2020. Members and Observers of the EOSC Association include research funders, research performing organisations, RIs, data service providers and others.

ESFRI DATA, COMPUTING AND DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES

Some ESFRI landmarks and projects are specialised in providing digital services across scientific domains.

The ESFRI Landmark PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) is a collaborative initiative among European countries, established to provide HPC resources and develop related services. PRACE was founded in 2007 and has been implemented through a series of projects. It is now a legal entity, AISBL, under Belgian law. With the emergence of the EuroHPC initiative, PRACE’s strategy and role are shifting towards increasing community engagement rather than providing computing cycles.

The ESFRI Project SLICES SLICES 
https://www.slices-ri.eu (SLICES-RI) aims to provide a fully programmable and virtualised, remotely accessible, European-wide Research Infrastructure, providing advanced computing, storage and network components, interconnected by dedicated high-speed links. The project is intended to establish a flexible platform designed to support large-scale, experimental research focused on networking protocols, radio technologies, and services as well as data collection, distributed control and various edge-based computing architectures.

The ESFRI Project SoBigData++ SoBigData++ 
http://www.sobigdata.eu/ (SBD++) seeks to establish a European infrastructure of big data and social data mining, using new methods and implementing it in different fields of data analysis. It aligns with current scientific trends in machine learning and data science to promote ethically sound and open research in large datasets that democratises the value of data science. SBD++ is expected to become a leading RI for realising large-scale social mining experiments.

The ESFRI Project eBRAINS EBRAINS 
https://www.ebrains.eu/ aims to develop a digital platform for brain research and neuroscience, as part of the wider Human Brain Project (HBP), a flagship research initiative focused on studying the human brain and developing new technologies and approaches for brain research. eBRAINS seeks to create a collaborative and integrated platform connecting researchers, data, and computational tools to advance our understanding of the brain and its functions. The platform is designed to facilitate data sharing, analysis, and modelling across different disciplines and research areas related to neuroscience.

The landscape of DIGIT Research Infrastructures is represented in Figure 1.

E-infrastructure IN THEMATIC RIs 

Research Infrastructures have often been built to address common challenges which typically required strong collaboration and pooling of resources, including infrastructure resources. In Europe, this has resulted in the creation of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the mid-1950s, for Particle Physics research, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) for Astronomy in the early 1960s. Other major organisations include the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL), and the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). From their early beginnings, all of these large RIs have faced the challenge of managing the vast amounts of data they produced and processed. Their digital solutions and services are being employed by a broad variety of users.

Today, ESFRIs are also joining forces in 'clusters' to address common challenges related to FAIR data management, as part of the wider EOSC framework. These clusters operate in different scientific domains such as Environmental Sciences (ENVRI-FAIR ENVRI-FAIR 
https://envri.eu/home-envri-fair/), Physics and Astrophysics (ESCAPE ESCAPE 
https://projectescape.eu/), Biomedical Sciences (EOSC-Life EOSC-Life 
https://www.eosc-life.eu/), Photon and Neutron (PANOSC PANOSC 
https://www.panosc.eu/), and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSHOK SSHOK 
https://sshopencloud.eu/).

DIGITAL TWINS

The development in digital technologies and capabilities has led to the emergence of new approaches for doing research. Digital twins (DT) Digital twins 
https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en/connect-university/events/high-performance-computing-and-digital-twins-climate-action are virtual representations of physical objects, processes or systems using real world data to create simulations that can predict how they will behave or perform. Widely used in engineering and manufacturing to simulate industrial processes, DTs are now being implemented in an increasing number of scientific domains, where they are expected to unlock the potential of digital modelling, leveraging high performance computing and AI as key technologies to model the Earth, oceans, biodiversity, traffic, the human, and more. Being able to simulate and study complex phenomena through digital twins in real time and with precision will considerably increase the quality of research and foster innovation but also help us address global challenges such as climate change.

Examples of European initiatives to develop digital twins include Destination Earth Destination Earth (DestinE) 
https://destination-earth.eu/ (DestinE), a flagship initiative of the European Commission aiming to develop a highly accurate global-scale digital model of the Earth. This model will monitor, simulate and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities. It will contribute to achieving the objectives of the transition towards green and digital as part of the European Commission’s Green Deal European Commission’s Green Deal 
https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en and Digital Strategy European Digital Strategy 
https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age_en. A number of other digital twins supported by the EC are being established for monitoring oceans (European DTO European DTO 
https://www.mercator-ocean.eu/en/digital-twin-ocean/), biodiversity (BioDT BioDT 
https://biodt.eu/), geographical extremes (DT-GEO DT-Geo 
https://dtgeo.eu) or addressing multiple domains (InterTwin InterTwin 
https://www.intertwin.eu).

DATA SPACES

The European strategy for data aims at creating a single, unified data market, ensuring Europe’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty. As part of this strategy, common European data spaces Common European data spaces 
https://dataspaces.info/common-european-data-spaces are being established in several domains to increase data availability for use in the economy and society, while maintaining control over companies and individuals who generate data. Common European data spaces bring together relevant data infrastructures and governance frameworks in order to facilitate data pooling and sharing. Targets for data spaces include:

• Deploying data-sharing tools and services for the pooling, processing and sharing of data by an open number of organisations, as well as federate energy-efficient and trustworthy cloud capacities and related services;
• Including data governance structures, compatible with relevant EU legislation, which determine, in a transparent and fair way, the rights concerning access to and processing of the data;
• Improving the availability, quality and interoperability of data, both in domain-specific settings and across sectors.

The February 2020 European data strategy European data strategy 
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-data-strategy_en announced the creation of data spaces in eight strategic fields: health, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, mobility, financial, public administration and skills. EOSC has been added later to this list, as a crosscutting key priority meeting the Green Deal objectives.