Hardware and software infrastructures for the digital society (INFRA)

The "hardware and software infrastructures for the digital society programme" covers all the research work aiming at producing the hardware and software architectures and infrastructures that will allow ubiquitous access to the various communication, storage and computing infrastructures. These infrastructures are very widely distributed on highly diverse scales (multi-scale), involving equipment items of very different and heterogeneous natures, ranging from networks of objects (sensors, micro and nano-controllers, etc.) to massively parallel architectures (including multi-core parallelism) and machine grids on the scale of the Internet.

The aim of this programme is to incite and support research and experiments in the strategic domains of hardware and software infrastructures for the Internet of the future, ambient intelligence, new services and associated modes of utilization, high-performance computing and storage, and ubiquitous availability of data, information and multimedia content.

The programme is at the core of the rise of the digital society, especially on the following themes:

• The consideration of widespread mobility;
• Ubiquitous communications; 
• Very high bandwidth technologies;
• The Internet of objects and control of the physical world;
• Omnipresent, convergent and interoperable services;
• Infrastructures for high-performance computing and mass storage;
• Effective utilization of new hardware components;
• Management and optimization of resources, including energy;
• The problems of security, reliability, resilience, performance and quality of service associated with these infrastructures; the control and guarantee of services;
• The applications and uses of the digital services associated with these infrastructures;
• The confidentiality of the users, the data and the services;
• The management of an extremely heterogeneous environment;
• The new communication architectures (opportunistic networks, content-oriented networks, vitalisation of infrastructures and services, etc.).

The thematic lines for this programme are:

1. The networks of the future
2. Infrastructures for the WEB, services and supercomputing
3. Software and hardware components for high performance communications and computing     
4. Applications and new uses