Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development
Innovation: from big data to big code, new ENEA algorithms are coming soon
To develop new computer codes through innovative, automatic and secure methods thanks to the Software Heritage universal archive of source codes. This is the objective of the “Bologna Big Code Lab”, a joint knowledge and experimentation laboratory born thanks to an agreement between ENEA and the University of Bologna, in partnership with Software Heritage and with the support of iFAB, International Foundation Big Data and Artificial Intelligence for Human Development. The project is based on Software Heritage’s immense digital library, created under the aegis of UNESCO by the French body INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation). The ENEA Research Center in Bologna hosts a copy of the library. Over a three-year period, automatic systems will be developed to produce new codes quickly and reliably by drawing on and aggregating the source programs already catalogued and stored in the archive.
“Source codes are sequences of instructions, comprehensible to and modifiable by people but executed by computers. They are inside computers and mobile phones. Thanks to them, we can control satellites and produce websites and most of the objects with which we interact every day”, explains Simonetta Pagnutti of ENEA’s ICT Division, which represents the Agency in the Big Data Association.
Thanks to an ENEA venture, an agreement was signed with INRIA in 2019 to develop the first European institutional “mirror” of the Software Heritage archive. Since 2016, the archive has collected, preserved and enabled access to the source codes of all publicly available software in the world.
“A project of great cultural, social and scientific importance, sponsored by giants like Microsoft, Intel and Google. Navigating through the nearly twelve billion files stored in the archive, you can come across the sixty-thousand-line code that guided Apollo 11’s onboard computer, bringing man to the moon 50 years ago. Or you can browse “TAUmus”, one of the first software programs in the world behind computer music, developed in the 1970s”, the researcher continues. “What we have replicated at the ENEA Centre in Bologna is a vital backup that allows accessibility to over 170 million archived projects. Access to such a library, a true library of Alexandria of software, will provide the opportunity for researchers and scientists from the agency and university to study and analyse codes and algorithms, developing methods to extract information and produce new knowledge. So, like ‘Big Data’, we can talk about ‘Big Code’. This is an ongoing research field, still to be explored, but rich in spillovers. A field with a broad scope, bound to have an important strategic value. It opens up new opportunities for young researchers: codes are the essential component of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and every digital application”, Pagutti concludes.
In addition to research, the project will incorporate various training and digital literacy activities to reflect on fundamental issues related to the development of information technology, with the aim of enhancing awareness of the profound changes underway in the economic, cultural and social arenas linked to the increasingly widespread use of new technologies.
Recently, the first public event “Software Heritage, Universal Code Archives- Digressions on the subject” was held in the Giorgio Prodi Auditorium at the University of Bologna’s Department of Computer Science. The day-long event was dedicated to open source, the new digital archives and codes, in both their leading roles in the digital revolution and as a part of our cultural heritage and, as such, something to be preserved and protected.
The Bologna Big Code Lab project and this venture were born and developed within the framework of the Bologna Technopole. It currently houses the Data Centre of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and will soon host Leonardo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, to be managed by Cineca. There will also be space for start-ups and research laboratories, creating the perfect environment to connect research and industrial networks.
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For more information:
Simonetta Pagnutti, ENEA - ICT Division,
https://www.ifabfoundation.org