Speakers
Description
Within the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the evolution toward federated digital infrastructures is strongly aligned with the broader European strategy for open and trusted science ecosystems. In this context, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation represents a key conceptual and operational framework aimed at enabling the seamless federation of distributed computing, data, and service resources across organizational and national boundaries, while preserving autonomy, policy compliance, and security constraints of participating providers. INFN contributes to this vision by leveraging its long-standing expertise in large-scale distributed computing, secure data management, and service orchestration in support of scientific communities.
In this context the two European-funded projects, EOSC-Connect and FLUID-AI, play complementary and strategic roles in reinforcing INFN’s participation in the EOSC Federation. EOSC-Connect primarily addresses the federation of resources and services by focusing on interoperability, harmonization of access mechanisms, and policy-driven integration across heterogeneous infrastructures. This is mainly focused on the federation among national nodes. Through its activities, EOSC-Connect supports the adoption of common interfaces, federated identity and access management, and shared service catalogs, enabling INFN resources to be exposed and consumed as part of a broader federated ecosystem. This approach reduces fragmentation and lowers the entry barrier for research communities, while ensuring that governance and usage policies remain enforceable across the federation.
FLUID-AI, on the other hand, targets the dynamic management and allocation of resources within and beyond security-controlled environments, with particular attention to ISO/IEC 27001-compliant areas dedicated to secure information management. In the INFN context, this translates into the ability to orchestrate workloads and services across trusted internal domains and external federated resources, while preserving strict guarantees on data protection, risk management, and compliance. FLUID-AI introduces intelligent, policy-aware mechanisms for adaptive resource placement, enabling workloads to fluidly transition between secure zones and less constrained environments based on data sensitivity, operational requirements, and real-time availability.
The combined impact of EOSC-Connect and FLUID-AI strengthens INFN’s role within the EOSC Federation by addressing both structural and operational dimensions of federation. Such integrated approach enables INFN to contribute to a sustainable and trustworthy federated ecosystem, where advanced scientific workloads can be executed across organizational boundaries without compromising security, compliance, or operational control. The experience gained through these projects provides a concrete pathway toward scalable, secure, and intelligent federation within the EOSC framework and beyond.