EU Launches RItrain-DIGIT to Close the Skills Gap in HPC, Cloud and AI Operations

Europe's research infrastructures have a compute problem that has nothing to do with FLOPS. It's a people problem. The organizations running national and federated cloud and HPC systems are struggling to keep technical staff current on a stack that keeps sprawling: AI/ML pipelines, federated data access, digital sovereignty requirements, and a growing pile of overlapping service offerings. Budgets aren't growing to match. That's the gap RItrain-DIGIT, a newly launched Horizon Europe project, is trying to close.

The project, short for "Advancing Digital Competencies in European Research Infrastructures," officially kicked off this month under Grant Agreement 101292852 (Call: HORIZON-INFRA-2025-01-DEV-01). It's funded at 1.5 million euros and coordinated by the EGI Foundation, the nonprofit behind Europe's federated e-infrastructure. The consortium includes HUN-REN SZTAKI (Hungary's research computing institute), ACK Cyfronet AGH (a Polish HPC center), PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and the University of Stuttgart's HLRS supercomputing center.

If you've followed EU research infrastructure funding, the shape of this will feel familiar: a multi-institution consortium, a training deliverable, a mobility component. What's worth paying attention to is the specific technical scope and how they're structuring the curriculum.

What's Actually in the Training Program

RItrain-DIGIT isn't a generic "learn cloud computing" bootcamp. It's building what the project calls Learning Pathways, structured curricula that feed into a broader Training Programme covering four domains:

• HPC and cloud systems – the operational fundamentals of running workloads on national and federated infrastructure
• AI and data techniques – covering the ML/AI tooling that's increasingly bolted onto traditional HPC workflows
• Federated access – the identity, authorization, and interoperability layer that lets researchers use resources across institutional and national boundaries
• IT Service Management – formalized through a FitSM certification scheme, which is basically ITIL's leaner cousin, built specifically for federated and distributed IT environments common in research infrastructure

That last piece is easy to overlook but it's arguably the most practical. FitSM is a lightweight standard for managing IT services, and getting RI technical staff certified on it means these organizations get a common vocabulary and process framework for running services across borders. Anyone who's tried to coordinate incident response or change management across a dozen institutions with a dozen different informal practices will recognize why that matters.

Alongside the training curriculum, the project is standing up a Mobility Programme: staff exchanges between institutions, countries, and scientific domains. This is the part that's harder to scale via online courses. A researcher at a national compute center can only learn so much about, say, how a different country's federated identity system handles cross-border authentication by reading documentation. Actually going and working inside another infrastructure's operations for a stretch is a different kind of knowledge transfer, and it's the kind that tends to stick.

There's also a Training Platform in the works, a one-stop-shop that aggregates open educational resources so the training doesn't just live inside a single grant cycle. Given how EU-funded projects have a habit of producing excellent material that disappears once funding lapses, building a persistent aggregation platform is a reasonable hedge against that failure mode.

Why This Sits on Top of EGI and PRACE

RItrain-DIGIT isn't building infrastructure from scratch. It's explicitly designed to run on top of the EGI e-infrastructure and the PRACE ESFRI Landmark, the network of national compute providers that PRACE coordinates. That's a deliberate choice: rather than training people on synthetic environments, staff get hands-on exposure to the actual production systems powering European research.

Giuseppe La Rocca, RItrain-DIGIT's Project Director, framed the goal as uniting "digital research infrastructures across domains in a dedicated DIGIT skill development project" to support upskilling the European scientific workforce. Serge Bogaerts, PRACE's Managing Director, positioned the project alongside other training efforts like HPCTRAIN, describing it as part of the service offering PRACE wants to present to its member organizations and user communities. He also flagged the collaboration angle: the project is meant to give a "more integrated perspective" on services across Europe's different e-infrastructures, rather than each provider running its own siloed training effort.

That integration angle is really the thesis of the whole project. Europe's research computing landscape is famously fragmented, national HPC centers, EGI's federated cloud, PRACE's supercomputing network, and a growing list of AI-specific initiatives all operate somewhat independently. Without coordinated training, RI staff end up learning one infrastructure's quirks deeply and knowing almost nothing about the others, which makes cross-infrastructure collaboration harder than it needs to be.

The timing also lines up with a broader theme showing up across HPC funding right now. Between NAIRR's shift from pilot to operations mode in the US and various EU digital sovereignty initiatives, there's growing recognition that AI-era research infrastructure needs are outpacing the workforce trained to operate them. Compute capacity keeps getting funded. The people who know how to run it well are a scarcer resource.

Key Takeaways

• RItrain-DIGIT is a 1.5M euro, Horizon Europe-funded project (Grant Agreement 101292852) coordinated by EGI Foundation, with partners HUN-REN SZTAKI, ACK Cyfronet AGH, PRACE, and University of Stuttgart's HLRS.
• The Training Programme covers four Learning Pathways: HPC/cloud systems, AI/data techniques, federated access, and IT Service Management, the latter backed by a FitSM certification scheme.
• A Mobility Programme will fund staff exchanges across institutions and countries to enable hands-on knowledge transfer that online courses can't replicate.
• Training runs on real production infrastructure, built on the EGI e-infrastructure and PRACE's ESFRI Landmark network, rather than isolated sandbox environments.
• The project reflects a wider pattern in research computing: infrastructure funding is outpacing workforce readiness, and coordinated, cross-border training is emerging as the fix.