Cloud computing has become pervasive across the computing industry serving various domains ranging from HPC to Big Data and IoT. However, cloud service providers and hardware and software ecosystems are currently mainly driven by US companies. Hence, European companies that follow the established cloud-migration trend to exploit the inherent technological advancements, face critical challenges : a) strong dependencies to overseas technology providers, b) increased security and data privacy concerns, and c) limited flexibility in designing custom software and hardware that better satisfies the requirements of the European market and ecosystem. Recognizing these limitations of the current status-quo, the European Commission has launched the European Chip Act as a driver to achieve European sovereignty in chip design and computing infrastructure. At the center of this activity lies the EU Processor Initiative (EPI) that spearheads the development of the first EU made chip and compute units. Still, for EPI and its associated activities to be successful towards the goal of EU sovereignty in computing, tremendous work must be undertaken for the upbringing of the software ecosystem that CSPs offer. Software support that ranges from operating systems to compilers and runtimes, system software, and auxiliary software deployment services for cloud computing need to progress in a rapid pace alongside hardware development, in order to ensure that EU customers can migrate to the envisioned EU cloud seamlessly and safely without compromising any requirements or SLAs in terms of performance, energy efficiency, security, and usability.
AERO has the mission of enabling the future heterogeneous EU cloud infrastructure. Towards this, the project will develop - to a high TRL level - all components necessary to achieve out-of-the-box heterogeneous execution of the cloud ecosystem on the European processor. AERO will open-source all enabling technologies and release software prototypes to further accelerate development and adoption of the EU cloud via well-established interfaces that make heterogeneous execution accessible. The provision of these AERO technologies, will enable potential EU cloud users and customers to: a) utilize early prototypes to test existing and new codebases, b) optimize their codebase to fully utilize the benefits of heterogeneous hardware acceleration in the EU cloud, c) harness the existing security elements of the European processor as well as design and prototype next-generation post-quantum encryption modules, d) provide feedback to EPI and other relevant projects towards faster adoption, and e) contribute to the collective EU effort towards compute sovereignty.
More specifically, AERO aspires to:
1) Upbring and optimize the software ecosystem based on managed programming languages (mainly Java) – and their associated cloud-based infrastructure - on the heterogeneous EU cloud.
2) Upbring and optimize the software ecosystem based on native programming languages and runtimes (mainly SYCL , OpenCL, and DPC++/OneAPI) for the heterogeneous EU cloud.
3) Upbring and optimize the necessary OS, driver, and virtualization support infrastructure for EU cloud deployment.
4) Develop the necessary cloud-ready components for a typical state-of-the-art cloud deployment including management, orchestration, and monitoring.
5) Research and develop open interfaces for exploiting accelerated hardware components in the EU processor for performance and security.
6) Accelerate the adoption of the EU cloud ecosystem via upstreaming to open-source projects, communicating and disseminating AERO’s results to industry, academia, and standardization bodies.
Upon successful completion, AERO will complete the continuous path from EU flagship projects to a future heterogeneous EU cloud infrastructure. To achieve that, AERO combines pivotal expertise from EPI with world-leading EU-derived software technologies to pave the way for the envisioned highly performing, energy efficient and operational-ready EU cloud, catalyzing the creation and provision of a wide range of improved cloud services in various application domains (e.g. database acceleration, space exploration, automotive, etc.).
