5GINFIRE

The 5GINFIRE is, by design, a duality project that sets its overall technical objectives as a prerequisite for achieving a longer term strategic objective that aspires to resonate beyond its lifetime and act as valuable source of constant feedback. As such, it is indeed quite ambitious but at the same time pragmatic and feasible in identifying, building, and eventually specifying, a critical mass of technological components and optimal architecture designs.

In order to guarantee architectural and technological convergence the proposed Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based Reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of Experimental Facilities will be built in alignment with on-going standardization and open source activities, also targeted by other closely related programme activities such as FIWARE and 5G-PPP to name a few. Accordingly, the Open5G-NFV FIRE ecosystem may serve as the forerunner experimental playground wherein new components, architecture designs and APIs may be tried and proposed before they are ported to more industrially “mainstream” 5G networks that are expected to emerge in large scale.

Accordingly, the specific 5GINFIRE project objectives are defined as follows:

1. Establish the first 5G NFV-enabled experimental testbed capable of instantiating and supporting vertical industries based on industry-leading and open source technologies.
2. Specify, Implement and Operate Verticals drawn from the Automotive Industry on top of the Open5G-NFV common experimental facility.
3. Provide a platform for innovation in Europe specifically suitable for SMEs
4. Develop open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) functionality and toolsets for experimental architecture instantiation featuring automation of deployment process, orchestration and lifecycle management aiming at enabling truly Open Experimentation that fosters innovation.
5. Enable in-testbed and extra-testbed demonstrations in an open reference platform.
6. Open software and APIs for rapid prototyping and inclusion of new building block functionalities with the necessary metadata definition.
7. Accelerate the formation of an open European-initiated, global-reach, long-term sustainable community and liaise with other relevant initiatives to further the goals of this project.

University of Thessaly is participating as an Open Caller.

Project's website: https://5ginfire.eu/

MED-GOLD

The MED-GOLD project will demonstrate the proof-of-concept for climate services in agriculture by developing case studies for three staples of the Mediterranean food system: grape, olive and durum wheat. Agriculture is primarily driven by weather and climate, and future climatic conditions will further increase its vulnerability to crop failure and pest damage. Nowhere in the globe will this have consequences as dramatic as in the Mediterranean Basin — a hot spot of global change where higher than average projected climate change threatens an extremely rich and intertwined biological and cultural diversity, and will increase its vulnerability to natural hazards including biological invasions. The challenge for this region is how to increase the resilience of this complex ecological, economic, and cultural heritage of global relevance in an era of decreasing resources and climate change.

Climate services , understood as the transformation of climate-related data and other information into customised products (e.g., projections, trends, advice on best practices, and any other climate-related service that may be of use for the society), have the potential to support the transition towards a climate-resilient and low-carbon society. Developing a capacity for climate services that can inform decision-making in agriculture is therefore a priority both in Europe and worldwide, as agriculture is directly affected by climate variability and change. The long-term goal of this project is to make European agriculture and food systems more competitive, resilient, and efficient in the face of climate change.

The cumulative added value of MED-GOLD will range from enhancing agricultural management to supporting and informing policy-making at the Mediterranean, European and global levels. This is because olive, grape, and durum wheat are grown across the globe and produce the raw materials for global food commodities such as olive oil, wine and pasta. These in turn, are key staple foods of the Mediterranean diet with demonstrated potential for contrasting the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies with important food security implications and significant health benefits, and for reducing the ecological footprint of the global food system.

The diverse, multidisciplinary MED-GOLD partnership enables suppliers/purveyors and users to develop climate services jointly in close collaboration — a key challenge for achieving climate services with high added-value. Project partners that are world leaders in the wine, olive oil, and pasta sectors will lead the three Mediterranean case studies. Extension of the MED-GOLD approach will be tested for coffee — the world’s most important agricultural commodity.

Project's website: https://www.med-gold.eu/

HELIX

HELIX (funded by GSRT) is a convergence-building instrument for the coordination of research-oriented eInfrastructures in Greece. It is comprised of three independent and complementary entities – NNCRI, OpenAIRE-D and HELNET- that will respectively address the increasing horizontal “big computing” and “big data” needs of the Greek academic & research community and the emerging need for experimentally driven research.

Overall, it will form a single national ecosystem within which it will provide research and advisory services, support training activities, and offer relevant expertise on the combination of high-end communications, high-performance and high-throughput distributed computing, elastic cloud resource provisioning, and scalable data processing & analysis. It will facilitate data sharing and access to global knowledge across different research disciplines, scientific teams, and institutions, thereby contributing to interdisciplinary research, formation of inter-institutional virtual research team within Greece, and participation of Greek research facilities in virtual integrated facilities (including private research networks) with global scope. It will instrument several ‘as a Service’ offerings where part of the management capabilities is handed over to researchers, thereby facilitating innovation on novel frameworks delivering advanced researcher-controlled capabilities.

HELNET is a unified Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) infrastructure in the form of a unique, pan-Hellenic, federated, highly heterogeneous and large-scale experimental facility, which will offer “Testbeds as a Service” and will extend and improve the distributed FIRE installations around Greece (Univ. of Athens, NTUA, Univ. of Patras) led by the University of Thessaly and its widely recognized NITOS network experimentation testbed facility. The involved facilities, under the HELNET component, will be offering experimentation services based on cutting-edge networking equipment, thus enabling the experimental evaluation of innovative applications and protocols in the field of 4G/3G communications, WiFi networking, Software Defined Networking and Software Defined Radios. The HELNET experimental facility will empower innovation at national and international level and significantly upgrade the competitive advantage of the Greek institutions and facilities for the industrial development and innovation.

Project's website: http://helnet.eu/index.php/home-2/