In the last decade, a number of initiatives were crucial for enabling high-quality research - by providing e-Infrastructure resources, application support and training - in both South East Europe (SEE) and Eastern Mediterranean (EM). They helped reduce the digital divide and brain drain in Europe, by ensuring access to regional e-Infrastructures to new member states, states on path to ascension, and states in European Neighborhood Policy area – in total 14 countries in SEE and 6 in EM. This VI-SEEM proposal brings together these e-Infrastructures to build capacity and better utilize synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the inter-disciplinary scientific user communities in the combined SEE and EM regions (SEEM). The overall objective is to provide user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for regional cross-border Scientific Communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEEM region; by linking compute, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, models, software and tools. This VRE will provide the scientists and researchers with the support in full lifecycle of collaborative research: accessing and sharing relevant research data, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing new knowledge and data - which can be stored and shared in the same VRE. Climatology and Life Science communities are directly relevant for Societal Challenges. The driving ambition of this proposal is to maintain leadership in enabling e-Infrastructure based research and innovation in the region for the 3 strategic regional user communities: supporting multidisciplinary solutions, advancing their research, and bridging the development gap with the rest of Europe. The VI-SEEM consortium brings together e-Infrastructure operators and Scientific Communities in a common endeavor.

The key objective of our project is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and higher education and research by better integrating formal and informal learning scenarios and adapting both the technology and the methodology that students will most likely be facing in universities. We are focusing on the context of secondary schools, often referred to as high schools, which provide secondary education between the ages of 11 and 19 depending on the country, after primary school and before higher education. The learning context from the perspective of the students is the intersection of formal and informal spaces, a dynamic hybrid learning environment where synchronous activities meet in both virtual and real dimensions. For this, we propose to develop an innovative Up to University (Up2U) ecosystem – based on proven experiences in higher education and big research – that facilitates open, more effective and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of digital content, tools and services adapted for personalised learning and teaching of high school students preparing for university. We will address project based learning and peer-to-peer learning scenarios. We strongly believe that all the tools and services the project is going to use and/or make available (i.e. incorporate, design, develop and test) must be sustainable after the lifetime of the project. Therefore, the project is going to develop business plans and investigate appropriate business models using the expertise of the Small Medium Enterprise and National Research and Education Network partners and their contacts with third-party business actors. Our plan is to make it easy for new schools to join the Up2U infrastructure and ecosystem that will form a federated market-place for the learning community.

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing, was established in May 2010 as a permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Six systems at the highest performance level (Tier-0) are deployed by Germany, France, Italy and Spain providing researchers with over 9 billion core hours of compute time. HPC experts from twenty-five member states - funded in part in three implementation projects - enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently PRACE is preparing for PRACE 2.0, the successor of the initial five year period. The objectives of PRACE-4IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include: assisting the transition to PRACE 2.0; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing advanced training which so far provided more than 15.000 person-training days to over 4700 persons, preparing strategies and best practices towards exascale computing, coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services, and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures. The proven project structure will be used to achieve each of the objectives in six dedicated work packages. The project will continue to be managed by Jülich. The activities are designed to increase Europe's research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting take-up by industry and special offers to SMEs; analysing new flexible business models for PRACE 2.0; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, the coming CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies.