The SSICLOPS project advanced the technical state of the art in multiple areas, as outlined below.
The project developed cloud federation mechanisms and implemented them to build a geographically distributed OpenStack-based testbed that integrates the solutions developed in the project within a single testbed. The testbed applies secure and robust multipath communication based on multipath TCP to connect the multiple cloud domains and load balancing mechanisms that were developed in the project. In addition, the project developed modeling and measurement tools for the cloud by developing a P4 language benchmarking suite for programmable FPGA-based systems, and a rapid prototyping framework for P4.
SSICLOPS developed various enhancements to intra-cloud infrastructure technologies, such as operating system communication stack and APIs to improve performance, and implementing high performance scheduling and filtering mechanisms. SSICLOPS also improved virtualisation techniques to enhance cloud performance, for example, by improving the I/O performance in virtualized systems. Furthermore, the project developed new transport protocols for data centers to enhance the secure communication within a single cloud domain (using the NDP protocol), between multiple cloud domains (leveraging secure multipath communication), and towards the user/client (working on new modern transport protocols, such as QUIC).
SSICLOPS improved the privacy and security framework in cloud systems by developing CPPL, a Compact Privacy Policy Language that allows specifying policies for operating in a federated cloud environment, regarding, for example, privacy and security requirements or performance. We also developed mechanisms for secure processing within clouds.
SSICLOPS applied the developed technologies in four use case scenarios (in-memory databases, high-energy physics computation, network function virtualization and delivery of latency-sensitive information), thereby proving their applicability in real-life use.
The software developed in the project will be available as open source.
SSICLOPS researchers have actively participated in standardisations (IETF, ETSI), including co-chairing relevant working groups, and presented papers in top scientific conferences to make the solutions developed in the project available for the wider community. A notable achievement in this respect was a best paper award in SIGCOMM.
SSICLOPS is a highly technical project in which the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project are not as evident since the objectives of the project were not directed towards societal based problems. However, the socio-economic impact can be seen in a financial business environment in which the solutions developed within the project will allow greater opportunities for smaller, private-based cloud enterprises to compete against large-scale public cloud providers in the areas of scalability and performance, thereby closing the gap in terms of performance competitiveness and potential reduction of costs and resources used.
