Project description
Overcoming challenges in developing decentralised computing infrastructures
Decentralised computing infrastructures (DCIs) are critical to many operations, businesses and industries worldwide. However, they face the challenge of efficiently developing and deploying distributed applications throughout their whole operation without safety or operational issues. The EU-funded DOS project aims to develop novel hardware and software that offer programmers a much more efficient and cost-effective option for implementing changes to DCIs. These technologies will be a microkernel-based decentralised operating system to offer unified management of DCIs and a novel pluggable hardware solution that helps overcome hardware heterogeneity and more efficiently manage tools and processes. The DOS project promises to revolutionise DCIs and enhance their effectiveness.
Objective
The DOS project targets the challenge of developing and deploying distributed applications on large-scale decentralized computing infrastructures (DCIs) such that their dependability properties, e.g. safety and security, can be enforced by the foundational layers of the system stack in a policy-compliant manner.
While it is possible today to construct distributed applications, it is challenging to ensure that their dependability properties are preserved end-to-end in a DCI consisting of a diversified set of compute nodes hosted in multiple administrative jurisdictions. This situation is primarily caused by the limitations of existing system stack foundations: (a) hardware: DCIs expose heterogeneous compute nodes that lack a unified interface to access, isolate, and manage them; (b) OS: current OSes lack mechanisms for resource management in a safe and secure manner for heterogeneous nodes operating across multiple trust domains. As a result, programmers rely on ad-hoc programming and deployment mechanisms, which are not only prohibitively expensive to develop and error-prone but also cannot ensure compliance with the dependability requirements.
The DOS project seeks to bridge this gap by pursuing a radically new hardware/OS co-design by introducing
1. a pluggable hardware component called Isolation Control Unit (ICU) that abstracts out the hardware heterogeneity while providing a minimalistic interface for resource management, isolation, communication, and trust establishment.
2. a microkernel-based Decentralized Operating System (DOS) that builds on ICUs to manage DCIs as a unified dependable system substrate to enable policy-compliant application deployment.
Overall, our work aims to empower programmers by providing a generic distributed programming framework on top of DOS to concisely specify the dependability policies along with the application logic, while our system stack transparently enforces these policies in decentralized environments.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
80333 Muenchen
Germany