“SOftware Defined Application Infrastructures managemenT and Engineering”
In this new era of heterogeneous, software-defined and high-performance computer environments, SODALITE, a Research and Innovation Action project (RIA) funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, aspires to address this heterogeneity by providing application developers and infrastructure operators with tools that abstract their application and infrastructure requirements to enable simpler and faster development, operation, and execution of heterogeneous applications reflecting diverse circumstances over heterogeneous, software-defined, high-performance, cloud infrastructures, with a particular focus on performance, quality, manageability, and reliability. Coordinated by XLAB, SODALITE has been launched in February 2019 with the purpose of offering a new solution in the field of heterogeneous architectures. The project will follow a path to simplify and ease the way developers approach the development of next-generation applications in the upcoming era of Cloud computing and High-Performance Computing (HPC), among others, for the impact in the European Industry. Because the impact of heterogeneity on all computing tasks is rapidly increasing, innovative architectures, algorithm and specialized programming environments and tools are needed to efficiently respond to the demands of industry, using new and mixed/diversified parallel architectures. SODALITE will target an application for developers and infrastructure operators to provide a faster and easier way to abstract their applications, gaining time and reducing costs in different software life cycle processes such as development, deployment, operation and execution. The scenarios when usually developers face the problems are heterogenous and the focus of solutions is on performance, quality, manageability and reliability. Moreover, SODALITE supports Digital Transformation of European Industry through increasing design and runtime effectiveness of software-defined infrastructures, to ensure high-performance execution over dynamic heterogeneous execution environments; increasing simplicity of modelling application and infrastructures, to improve manageability, collaboration and time to market. The project coordinator, Daniel Vladušič (XLAB) affirms that “Performance-oriented Infrastructure-as-a-Code in heterogeneous environments is the next step for the modern systems design and overall lifecycle,” With a total budget of 3.650.731,000€, SODALITE will be running for 36 months (February 2019-January 2021) by a multidisciplinary consortium including strong computer science research in Europe (XLAB, Slovenia), a global service provider (ATOS, Spain), a High-Performance Computing Centre for research and service institution affiliated to the University of Stuttgart (Germany), The Polytechnic University of Milano (Italy), a German SME focused on enabling adaptable and ethical data utilization (ADAPTANT, Germany), a global leader on supercomputing company (CRAY, United Kingdom), IBM Research (Israel), the European network of Cybersecurity centers and competence Hub for innovation and Operations (CERTH, Greece) and finally The European Research Institute in Service Science (UVT-JADS, Netherlands). For more information on the project, please contact the coordinator Daniel Vladušič (daniel.vladusic@xlab.si) or visit our website www.sodalite.eu
Keywords
software, hardware, heterogeneity, complex systems, cloud computing