INAF, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics is proposing AstroFIt-2 in order to support transnational brain circulation of young researchers, by means of 18 Incoming Mobility 3-year fellowships to be issued in two calls, each of 9 fellows, to be carried out at the 17 INAF Research Centers across Italy. INAF, the Italian government’s public research body that promotes, performs and coordinates astrophysics research, also cooperates with universities and other national and international entities, and has approximately 1000 permanent staff, and more than 500 contractual scientific posts. INAF is internationally renowned for its excellent science and technology, and has prime responsibility in many international astrophysical programs. AstroFIt-2 thus gives young researchers experience, through working with international teams in highly relevant, world-class scientific and technological astrophysics projects. AstroFIt-2 builds on the success and experience acquired by INAF’s AstroFIt Cofund program, and so dramatically increases the quality and quantity of AstroFIt results in the following areas: • international mobility and brain circulation: by increasing the length (3 years vs 2) and number (18 vs 14) of fellowships; • efficiency, financial support, and user-friendliness of the program by: - increasing: a) the time for awarded fellows to reply to communications (45 days vs 15); b) the time between a fellowship being awarded and its start date (6 months vs 4); c) the living allowance (45.000 EUR/year vs 40.000) and the contribution to research and training expenses (6.000 EUR/year vs 5.000) - shortening: the evaluation process (4 months vs. 5); • inter-disciplinary and inter-sectorial research of the fellows by: - enhancing interactions and feedback between fellows and the Hosting Structure; - increasing the impact of the overall program in terms of scientific activity, transnational collaborations and inter-disciplinary experience.

ExaNeSt will develop, evaluate, and prototype the physical platform and architectural solution for a unified Communication and Storage Interconnect and the physical rack and environmental structures required to deliver European Exascale Systems. The consortium brings technology, skills, and knowledge across the entire value chain from computing IP to packaging and system deployment; and from operating systems, storage, and communication to HPC with big data management, algorithms, applications, and frameworks. Building on a decade of advanced R&D, ExaNeSt will deliver the solution that can support exascale deployment in the follow-up industrial commercialization phases. Using direction from the ETP4HPC roadmap and soon-available high density and efficiency compute, we will model, simulate, and validate through prototype, a system with: 1. High throughput, low latency connectivity, suitable for exascale-level compute, their storage, and I/O, with congestion mitigation, QoS guarantees, and resilience. 2. Support for distributed storage located with the compute elements providing low latency that non-volatile memories require, while reducing energy, complexity, and costs. 3. Support for task-to-data sw locality models to ensure minimum data communication energy overheads and property maintenance in databases. 4. Hyper-density system integration scheme that will develop a modular, commercial, European-sourced advanced cooling system for exascale in ~200 racks while maintaining reliability and cost of ownership. 5. The platform management scheme for big-data I/O to this resilient, unified distributed storage compute architecture. 6. Demonstrate the applicability of the platform for the complete spectrum of Big Data applications, e.g. from HPC simulations to Business Intelligence support. All aspects will be steered and validated with the first-hand experience of HPC applications and experts, through kernel turning and subsequent data management and application analysis.