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Blockchains can be public, permissionless networks implementing novel cryptocurrency-based technology features or permissioned, interorganizational networks championed by industry consortia. Some ventures operationalize a hybrid of these two network types to enhance adoption of their blockchain platforms by broadening their base of stakeholders or facilitating interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains. In this article, we synthesize literature and industry writings to identify four hybrid blockchain architectures: hybrid blockchain approach, connected hybrid blockchain, interoperable blockchain architecture, and hard-forked blockchain for enterprise use. We then analyze these architectures along dimensions of semantic modeling support between private and public networks, data connectivity between networks, syntactic interoperability support between networks with heterogeneous codebases, governance model, and technical features. We find that hybrid blockchain ventures make trade-offs: support API's, tools, and customized development so that a codebase is useful for private and public networks or provide such support for interoperation between heterogeneous codebases. We then conduct a case study of an exemplar for a hybrid blockchain approach, the startup Insolar. We identify characteristics that have led Insolar to be idiosyncratically agile and effective in its blockchain development, which together with our architecture analysis may be timely and prescriptive as enterprises grow interested in addressing blockchain hybridity and interoperability.

This article proposes the mobile sensor-cloud (MSC) architecture and theoretically characterizes it. The existing literature on sensor-cloud (SC) assumes stationarity of nodes, which limits the use of the associated theoretical models in mobile platforms. This article attempts to address this research lacuna by proposing a model for enabling mobile sensor-as-a-service and analyzing its performance. An MSC, typically, orchestrates interoperation of multiple mobile sensors with stationary ones. Present day mobile devices are equipped with an assortment of built-in sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, and vibration. Considering the inherent mobility of these sensors by virtue of the mobility of their host platforms, it is important to characterize the MSC. We propose the concept of virtualization of mobile sensor nodes in the SC, which is one of the first attempts of its type. Additionally, in this article, we discuss the problems encountered due to the random mobility of mobile devices registered in the SC. Thereafter, we provide a possible solution to the problem by the reallocation of suitable physical mobile sensor nodes to an existing virtual sensor with available resources. Analytical results reveal that the lifespan of the network increases by 80%–90% in MSC, compared to the traditional SC. On the other hand, unlike traditional SC, twice the number of sensor-owners get the opportunity to participate in an MSC. However, in an MSC, an end-user pays similar amounts for an application involving SC. The mobility of devices creates opportunities for the sensor owners to appropriately utilize the available resources in the virtual sensors, which justifies the observed results.

Gradual typing is a principled means for mixing typed and untyped code. But typed and untyped code often exhibit different programming patterns. There is already substantial research investigating gradually giving types to code exhibiting typical untyped patterns, and some research investigating gradually removing types from code exhibiting typical typed patterns. This paper investigates how to extend these established gradual-typing concepts to give formal guarantees not only about how to change types as code evolves but also about how to change such programming patterns as well. In particular, we explore mixing untyped "structural" code with typed "nominal" code in an object-oriented language. But whereas previous work only allowed "nominal" objects to be treated as "structural" objects, we also allow "structural" objects to dynamically acquire certain nominal types, namely interfaces. We present a calculus that supports such "cross-paradigm" code migration and interoperation in a manner satisfying both the static and dynamic gradual guarantees, and demonstrate that the calculus can be implemented efficiently.

In a multidomain application environment, it is of paramount importance for different organizations to collaborate with each other to facilitate secure interoperation. However, various types of conflicts related to access control constraints may arise as a result of integrating access control policies for individual domains, such as role inheritance violations (RIVs) and separation of duty violations (SoDVs). Current methods solve the conflicts in a centralized way by withdrawing or removing all crossdomain relationships resulting in the violations with the knowledge of all domains. However, these methods are inappropriate for large-scale systems due to their high computational complexity. In this article, we propose a distributed approach to avoid secure conflicts in a multidomain environment. We first model the role inheritance hierarchies of multiple domains as an interoperation graph. We then develop RIVs and SoDVs avoidance algorithms based on the interoperation graph and the communications among different domains. Each domain can execute the algorithms autonomously and in real time by evaluating whether its succeeding activated role can result in RIVs and SoDVs. We show that the new algorithms perform well in contrast to the existing algorithms.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made great progress. The interconnection between IoT and the Internet enables real-time information processing and transaction implementation through heterogeneous intelligent devices. But the security, the privacy, and the reliability of IoT are key challenges that limit its development. The features of the blockchain, such as decentralization, consensus mechanism, data encryption, and smart contracts, are suitable for building distributed IoT systems to prevent potential attacks and to reduce transaction costs. As a decentralized and transparent database platform, blockchain has the potential to raise the performance of IoT security to a higher level. This article systematically analyzes state of the art of IoT security based on the blockchain, paying special attention to the security features, issues, technologies, approaches, and related scenarios in blockchain-embedded IoT. The integration and interoperation of blockchain and IoT is an important and foreseeable development in the computational communication system.

Although much effort has been devoted to the construction of the smart city, the current development is still in a chaotic situation and lacks a unified, integrated, and friendly ecosystem. To narrow the gap, in this article, we propose an interoperated, intelligent, and integrated platform called I3City to construct a sustainable ecosystem for the smart city. We develop system interoperation to break down the barriers of information islands, and open up data and functionalities of various systems. By fusing multisource heterogeneous urban data, we provide common intelligent services of knowledge and support for various upper-layer smart city applications, based on urban knowledge management and city profiling. We further develop an integrated service platform for the development and operation of the smart city based on cloud computing. We use a case to illustrate the advantages of I3City in practice. With several open problems discussed, we expect to stimulate more research interest in the smart city.

Although encryption and signatures have been two fundamental technologies for cryptosystems, they still receive considerable attention in academia due to the focus on reducing computational costs and communication overhead. In the past decade, applying certificateless signcryption schemes to solve the higher cost of maintaining the certificate chain issued by a certificate authority (CA) has been studied. With the recent increase in the interest in blockchains, signcryption is being revisited as a new possibility. The concepts of a blockchain as a CA and a transaction as a certificate proposed in this paper aim to use a blockchain without CAs or a trusted third party (TTP). The proposed provably secure signcryption scheme implements a designated recipient beforehand such that a sender can cryptographically facilitate the interoperation on the blockchain information with the designated recipient. Thus, the proposed scheme benefits from the following advantages: (1) it removes the high maintenance cost from involving CAs or a TTP, (2) it seamlessly integrates with blockchains, and (3) it provides confidential transactions. This paper also presents the theoretical security analysis and assesses the performance via the simulation results. Upon evaluating the operational cost in real currency based on Ethereum, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme only requires a small cost as a fee.

The current trends in personalized products drive the paradigms of production systems toward autonomous networked manufacturing systems. This article proposes an ontology-based holonic event-driven architecture for implementing loosely coupled, holonic, autonomous distributed systems. The event-driven architecture (EDA) enables the services provided by different organizations and their suborganizations to be autonomously configured and integrated, while ensuring that the predefined organizational event access rules are compulsorily followed. This is realized by organizing the event services in a holonic manager and modeling the knowledge of services via the ontology developed in this study. The ontology model and the corresponding autonomous configuration mechanism are introduced. We developed a demonstration case to elaborate our approach and implemented a testbed using Java-based technology for testing the effectiveness, efficiency, scalability, and reliability of the proposed approach. Note to Practitioners —The ever-changing customer demands, the volatile market, and the trend of mass personalization require manufacturing systems to be smart in the event of uncertainties. To this end, information sharing in the supply chain is a key factor. However, there are several barriers in implementing a cross-organizational information system, including security, access privileges, and system interoperability. To lift these barriers, this article proposes an ontology model and a hierarchical EDA. Compared with conventional architectures, our approach facilitates the management of access privileges, integration of interorganizational information systems, and their interoperation. Moreover, our approach is competitive compared with the conventional service-oriented architecture in terms of both scalability and reliability of the system. Before the proposed approach can be practically applied, the ontology model needs to be further extended, and the event registration and message exchange protocol need to be standardized.

This article takes a function-to-form approach to word-formation in present-day English and argues that the ecosystem metaphor can help morphologists see competition in word-formation and its resolution in a new light. The analysis first draws correspondences between four lexical functions (transcategorial, transconceptual, evaluative, and compacting) and ten formal operations (prefixation, suffixation, compounding, blending, morphostasis, stress shift, clipping, desuffixation, initialization, and replication) and concludes that there is no across-the-board interoperation competition to encode each function, but rather a fairly complementary distribution of the operations between the four functional subsystems. Each functional subsystem is then reviewed in turn and it is shown that, again, there is no full-scale competition at this level, but rather some fairly pronounced tendencies towards complementariness, and, in one case, also towards combination. The broad division of labor within each subsystem can, remarkably, be accounted for in different terms: the conditioning is primarily semantic (with formal subconsiderations) in the transcategorial and transconceptual subsystems while it is formal in the evaluative and compacting subsystems.

Over the last decades, collaborative assembly design has received much attention, which has provided fruitful results in terms of data models, knowledge-based, and top-down geometric modeling approaches, to name a few. Particularly, researchers have focused their efforts towards assembly relationships within product models, but have limited the scope to static assembly geometric description as currently stated in computer-aided design (CAD) systems. A disruptive vision is assumed in this research work, arguing that the assembly design itself presents a dynamic nature via, especially, dynamic motion. Such a paradigm shift requires an appropriate logical and semantic foundation to augment current CAD systems and data models’ capabilities with the capture of dynamic phenomena such as assembly motions and kinematic behaviors. Traditional CAD systems nowadays can handle the kinematics-related motion-related information; however, the interoperation of this motion-related information from one CAD system to the other is still a limitation of the interoperability standards. To tackle this research challenge, this paper aims at defining an original framework built upon a formal ontology to capture and share dynamic assembly motion among heterogeneous CAD systems. The formal ontology uses spatiotemporal mereotopology, which serves as a theoretical backbone to qualitatively describe the dynamic behavior of a product. This theory addresses the qualitative description of the temporal dimension over the spatial dimension of 3D objects. The proposed ontology is then enhanced to maintain semantic continuity of the spatial and temporal aspects embedded in assembly design ontology models. Built with a Web Ontology Language (OWL) data structure to interact with a CAD system and a motion visualization application, the ontology ensures the dynamic motion information capturing and sharing. SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) is utilized to show the semantic reasoning among the moving and non-moving parts of the product assembly. As a result, a semantic articulation ensuring flexibility and interoperability as a competitive industrial edge is demonstrated with proof of concept to be effective in a collaborative assembly design environment.

Delivering services for Internet of Things (IoT) applications that demand real-time and predictable latency is a challenge. Several IoT applications require stringent latency requirements due to the interaction between the IoT devices and the physical environment through sensing and actuation. The limited capabilities of IoT devices require applications to be integrated in Cloud and Fog computing paradigms. Fog computing significantly improves on the service latency as it brings resources closer to the edge. The characteristics of both Fog and Cloud computing will enable the integration and interoperation of a large number of IoT devices and services in different domains. This work models the scheduling of IoT service requests as an optimization problem using integer programming in order to minimize the overall service request latency. The scheduling problem by nature is NP-hard, and hence, exact optimization solutions are inadequate for large size problems. This work introduces a customized implementation of the genetic algorithm (GA) as a heuristic approach to schedule the IoT requests to achieve the objective of minimizing the overall latency. The GA is tested in a simulation environment that considers the dynamic nature of the environment. The performance of the GA is evaluated and compared to the performance of waited-fair queuing (WFQ), priority-strict queuing (PSQ), and round robin (RR) techniques. The results show that the overall latency for the proposed approach is 21.9% to 46.6% better than the other algorithms. The proposed approach also showed significant improvement in meeting the requests deadlines by up to 31%.

Secure interoperation is an important technology to protect shared data in multi-domain environments. IRBAC (Interoperable Role-based Access Control) 2000 model has been proposed to achieve security interoperation between two or more RBAC administrative domains. Static Separation of Duties (SSoD) is an important security policy in RBAC, but it has not been enforced in the IRBAC 2000 model. As a result, some previous works have studied the problem of SMER (Statically Mutually Exclusive Roles) constraints violation between two RBAC domains in the IRBAC 2000 model. However all of them do not enforce how to preserve privacy of RBAC policies, such as roles, roles hierarchies and user-role assignment while detecting SMER constraints violation, if the two interoperable domains do not want to disclose them each other and to others. In order to enforce privacy-preserving detection of SMER constraints violation, we first introduce a solution without privacy-preserving mechanism using matrix product. Then a privacy-preserving solution is proposed to securely detect SMER constraints violation without disclosing any RBAC policy based on a secure three-party protocol to matrix product computation. By efficiency analysis and experimental results comparison, the secure three-party computation protocol to matrix product based on the Paillier cryptosystem is more efficient and practical.

Smart city applications is not just limited to the use of technology in building better cities and improving the citizens’ quality of lives. In reality, it is capable of building comprehensive solutions for the development of sustainable communities, irrespective of being urban or rural. Different communities will have their own dynamics and complexity, some communities are widespread and distributed, while some are more dense and concentrated. Each of these characteristics can either become an advantage or a barrier while developing solutions for these communities, which can be addressed with the proper use of technology. Internet of things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSN), are the technologies in particular that can help in building comprehensive solutions for creating sustainable communities as they have a wide variety of applications such as disaster management, healthcare, energy, water, surveillance, structural health monitoring and environmental monitoring. This paper describes about four major research works in smart city application areas such as (a) design and deployment of an IoT system for early warning of landslides, (b) heterogeneous wireless communication design and optimization for enabling real-time management of interoperation of heterogeneous devices and data services in a hybrid electrical network, (c) development of (low-cost) IoT sensors for remote patient monitoring and (d) design and deployment of systems and solution for providing mobile offshore connectivity for fishing vessels—internet over sea. This paper details the current state of the art, challenges to be solved, and the methodology that we have adapted for developing solutions in all these research areas. The extensive research in IoT, WSN and its applications has resulted in receiving the award, titled “World Center of Excellence in Landslide Risk Reduction” and five patents, namely (a) network-based system for predicting landslides and providing early warnings (b) mobile infrastructure for coastal region offshore communications and networks (c) wearable wireless tongue controlled devices (d) Systems, methods, and devices for remote health monitoring and management (e) Systems, methods, and devices for remote health monitoring and management using internet of things sensors

This paper introduces the topic of the Special Section on the ERTMS Level 3 Hybrid case study. The European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is a system of standards for management and interoperation of signalling for railways. The case study focuses on the ERTMS Level 3 Hybrid principles, which accommodates different types of trains, including trains equipped for ERTMS and non-ERTMS trains. The Special Section contains seven contributed articles describing the application of a formal method to the case study and these contributions are outlined. A overview of the assumptions and requirements of the case study are presented at a level of detail sufficient for the reader to follow the contributed articles.

As the complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems increases, a large variety of tools and technologies for IoT management are making their way into both research setups and the market. IoT management solutions must consider the resource restrictions of embedded devices, as well as their heterogeneity and network dynamics. With these in mind, the Internet Engineering Task Force developed several standards targeting the integration and interoperation of heterogeneous devices, such as the Representational State Transfer Configuration Protocol (RESTCONF) or the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) Management Interface. Concurrently, the Open Mobile Alliance developed the Lightweight Machine-to-Machine protocol, for IoT device management. This paper provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of IoT management technologies, frameworks and protocols. Also, it proposes a taxonomy for IoT devices management. In addition to presenting the various solutions, the paper provides comparative views, standardization timeline, and market analysis. The presented analysis ranges from traditional network management protocols, such as Simple Network Management Protocol, to the newest IoT management and configuration protocols, such as CoAP Management Interface and Lightweight Machine-to-Machine protocols. Moreover, this survey identifies remaining challenges and solutions offered by recent management protocols, not covered by previous surveys.

Powerful incentives are driving the adoption of FAIR practices among a broad cross-section of stakeholders. This adoption process must factor in numerous considerations regarding the use of both domain-specific and infrastructural resources. These considerations must be made for each of the FAIR Guiding Principles and include supra-domain objectives such as the maximum reuse of existing resources (i.e., minimised reinvention of the wheel) or maximum interoperation with existing FAIR data and services. Despite the complexity of this task, it is likely that the majority of the decisions will be repeated across communities and that communities can expedite their own FAIR adoption process by judiciously reusing the implementation choices already made by others. To leverage these redundancies and accelerate convergence onto widespread reuse of FAIR implementations, we have developed the concept of FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP) that captures the comprehensive set of implementation choices made at the discretion of individual communities of practice. The collection of community-specific FIPs compose an online resource called the FIP Convergence Matrix which can be used to track the evolving landscape of FAIR implementations and inform optimisation around reuse and interoperation. Ready-made and well-tested FIPs created by trusted communities will find widespread reuse among other communities and could vastly accelerate decision making on well-informed implementations of the FAIR Principles within and particularly between domains.

In order to meet the pressing demand for wide-area communication required by the Global Energy Interconnection (GEI), accelerating the construction of satellite-terrestrial integrated networks that can achieve network extension and seamless global coverage has become the focus of power communication technology development. In this study, we propose a satellite-terrestrial integrated network model that can support interconnection and interoperation on the IP layer between the satellite system and the terrestrial segment of the existing power communication system. First, the composition and function of the satellite-terrestrial collaborative network are explained. Then, the IP-based protocol stack is described, and a typical application experiment is conducted to illustrate the particular process of this protocol stack. Finally, a use case of IP interconnection that depends on GEO satellite communication is detailed. The experimental study has showed that the satellite-terrestrial collaborative network can efficiently support various IP applications for the GEI. Keywords: Global Energy Interconnection (GEI), Satellite-terrestrial integrated network, IP network

Web services are middleware designed to support the interoperation between different software systems and devices over the Web. Today, we encounter a variety of situations in which services deployed on the Internet of things (IoT), such as wireless sensor networks, ZigBee networks, and mobile edge computing frameworks, have become a widely used infrastructure that has become more flexible, intelligent and automated. This system supports multimedia applications, E-commerce transactions, business collaborations and information processing. However, how to manage these services has been a popular topic in IoT research. Existing research covers numerous resource models, based on sensors or human interactions. For everything as a service, things are available as a service include products, processes, resource management and security provision. To cope with the challenge of how to manage these services, we present an extension of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom architecture as a resource expression model to construct a systematic approach to modeling both entity and relationship elements. The entity elements are formalized from a fully typed, multiple-related dimensions perspective to obtain a whole frequency-value-based representation of entities in the real world. A relationship model is extended and applied to define resource models based on relationships defined from a semantics perspective that is based on our proposed existence-level reasoning. Then, a processing framework is proposed that seeks to optimize the searching efficiency of typed resources in terms of IoT data, information and knowledge inside an integrated architecture, and the framework includes Data Graph, Information Graph and Knowledge Graph. We concentrate on improving performance in accessing and processing resources and providing resource security protection by utilizing the cost difference of both type conversions of resources and traversing on resources. Finally, an application scenario is simulated to illustrate the usage of the proposed framework. This scenario shows the feasibility and effectiveness of our method, considering the conversion, traversing and storage costs. Our method can help improve the optimization of services and scheduling resources of multimedia systems.

The Hybrid ERTMS/ETCS Level 3 is a standard for the management and interoperation of signalling for railways by the European Union. Its aim was to increase the throughput of railway tracks, by integrating the physical information coming from the trackside detection system with information transmitted by the train itself regarding its position and integrity. In this paper, we propose a formal model of the Hybrid ERTMS/ETCS Level 3 (ver. 1A) in Promela and its validation using Spin. We describe how we derived the model from the informal requirements and the abstractions we applied during this process; moreover, we explain how we validated and verified the model, and the ambiguities we detected in the requirements document. Although Spin provides very good verification facilities, it lacks a proper support for performing user-driven validation by simulation and scenario specification; therefore, we propose two facilities built upon the Promela language (having different expressive power) that allow for easy specification of scenario execution.

Smart CPSs (S-CPSs) have been evolving beyond what was identified by the traditional definitions of CPSs. The objective of our research is to investigate the concepts and implementations of reasoning processes for S-CPSs, and more specifically, the frameworks proposed for the fuzzy front end of their reasoning mechanisms. The objectives of the paper are: (i) to analyze the framework concepts and implementations of CPS, (ii) to review the literature concerning system-level reasoning and its enablers from the points of view of the processed knowledge, building awareness, reasoning mechanisms, decision making, and adaptation. Our findings are: (i) awareness and adaptation behaviors are considered as system-level smartness of S-CPSs that are not achieved by traditional design approaches; (ii) model-based and composability approaches insufficiently support the development of reasoning mechanisms for S-CPSs; (iii) frameworks for development of reasoning in S-CPS should support compositional design. Based on the conclusions above, we argue that coping with the challenges of compositionality requires both software-level integration and holistic fusion of knowledge by means of semantic transformations. This entails the need for a multi aspect framework that is able to capture at least conceptual, functional, architectural, informational, interoperation, and behavioral aspects. It needs further investigation if a compositionality enabling framework should appear in the form of a meta-framework (abstract) or in the form of a semantically integrated (concrete) framework. Highlights Smartness in CPSs is a holistic and synergistic behavioral characteristic. Complex mental representations are compositional. Compositionality is necessary for smart CPSs. Without a rigorous unifying framework, designing synthesis reasoning remains ad hoc.

IoT is developing rapidly with frequently appearing new wireless standards and applications. However, besides a large number of IoT benefits, its further development is now being slowed down due to the repetition of old Internet development flaws while dealing with IoT heterogeneity. The current misleading trend aims to solve all IoT interoperation problems by inserting IP Addresses into those wireless protocols where the IP stack clearly slows down application performance and drains the battery, e.g. LPWANs such as LoRaWAN and SigFox. This paper tackles IoT heterogeneity from a different perspective: it is the application interoperation which matters the most. The protocols beneath the application layer shall work for smooth upper-layer service provisioning where the IP shall be just one of the many underlying integration options instead of being the essential one. Inspired by previous proposals for a more flexible internetworking architecture, this paper applies those theoretical concepts in practice by proposing a protocol-independent distributed interoperation model for smooth service provisioning over heterogeneous IoT wireless contexts. The arguments pro the IP-agnostic IoT application interoperation are supported by the model's prototype which showed 1.6-2 times faster MQTT application operation over LoRa and WiFi compared to the legacy IP-based MQTT provisioning over that protocols.

Several computer tools exist to develop High-Integrity Avionics Systems (HIAS). The plethora and diversity of tools are good to provide variety to support the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), but they require extra efforts to interconnect tools to make use of tool results in a systematic way. The variety of tools comes along with stakeholders working on diverse models of the same HIAS under development for which developers must wait for others to get notifications of model changes so updates can be considered by other models from tools. Such a deadlock unfortunately increases risks and costs. Some initiatives such as the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard have made efforts to connect different tools with each other along the SDLC. They provide a framework to facilitate integration and interoperation of computer tools but do not deal with the above deadlock problem. This paper discusses technical aspects and business impact to incorporate model analytics by means of a design process based on autonomously crosschecked models of avionic systems. The approach is meant to make easy the verification of models from the same HIAS. The OSLC initiative provides an attractive chance to explore considerations and investigate technological details to implement a plugin model-analytics capability in the OSLC cloud. This paper also presents a research discussion on challenges and opportunities, including relevant topics such as aviation certification standards. Concluding remarks, recommendations, and future research are presented as well.

Product-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings have advantages and potential for transforming societies to a circular economy and for improving environmental performance. Original equipment manufacturers providing PaaS offerings take higher responsibility for product performances in the use phase than those selling products. This responsibility can be supported by digital technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics (BDA). However, insights on how data of product designs and in-use services are managed for PaaS offerings in product lifecycle management (PLM) software are scarce. This mini-review first gives an account of extant major research works that successfully applied BDA, a specific technique of artificial intelligence (AI), to cases in industry through a systematic literature review. Then, these works are analyzed to capture requirements for a PLM system that will exploit the IoT and BDA for PaaS offerings. The captured requirements are summarized as (1) facilitate product and service integration, (2) address multiple lifecycles, (3) adopt an ontology approach encompassing several product standards, and (4) include reading data to process in an interoperation layer.

Today’s landscape of computational science is evolving rapidly, with a need for new, flexible, and responsive supercomputing platforms for addressing the growing areas of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics (DA) and convergent collaborative research. To support this community, we designed and deployed the Bridges-2 platform. Building on our highly successful Bridges supercomputer, which was a high-performance computing resource supporting new communities and complex workflows, Bridges-2 supports traditional and nontraditional research communities and applications; integrates new technologies for converged, scalable high-performance computing (HPC), AI, and data analytics; prioritizes researcher productivity and ease of use; and provides an extensible architecture for interoperation with complementary data intensive projects, campuses, and clouds. In this report, we describe Bridges-2’s hardware and configuration, user environments, and systems support and present the results of the successful Early User Program.