"The progress beyond the state of the art involves the definition of the ACTiCLOUD architecture, the development and optimization of the ACTiCLOUD components, their integration, and their evaluation.
The main results after the completion of the project, are as follows:
- the integration of the embraced scale-up hardware platforms (Numascale and KMAX) with cloud technologies.
- a rack-scale hypervisor that provides all the necessary mechanisms for virtualizing, managing and monitoring compute, network, and storage resources across the rack, as well as the mechanisms to reconfigure resources on demand.
- system libraries for running resource demanding applications such as Big Data, Analytics and HPC applications.
- compilation, scheduling, and garbage collection optimizations within managed runtime systems, putting significant effort on bringing up a state-of-the-art research VM (MaxineVM) and transitioning it to ACTiCLOUD’s Hyperscale JVM.
- a distributed cloud resource manager (ACTiManager) consisting of functional components, placement algorithms, and models for workload classification, interference detection and mitigation, and performance prediction.
- the ""cloudified"" enhancement of MonetDB to exploit the ACTiCLOUD architecture by being more resource aware, reacting to changing workloads quickly, and provisioning resources with elasticity.
- the ""cloudified"" enhancement of Neo4j to support online graph analytics alongside online transaction processing, on systems that provide an abundance of RAM and cores that typically constitute cloud envirnoments.
Some core impacts thanks to the success of ACTiCLOUD are as follows:
Strengthening the competitiveness and growth of cloud service providers: ACTiCLOUD’s achieves significant improvement in resource efficiency which may translate to a significant reduction of TCO. With a total worldwide spending on cloud IT infrastructure (server, storage, networking) reaching several billion euros, ACTiCLOUD’s impact on cost savings can lead to a significant paradigm shift in cloud architectures.
Lowering the costs of cloud services for end-users: While cloud offerings already provide competitive pricing to their customers compared to hosting in-house facilities, further cost reductions can be delivered by utilizing the cost benefits of ACTiCLOUD-enabled systems. We anticipate that based on the resource efficiency achieved by ACTiCLOUD, cloud service providers can proceed with charge reductions in the order of 20-30% for modestly equipped offerings, and to more than 10x for highly equipped offerings that are currently charged at extremely high monthly rates. This will further increase the uptake of cloud technology to more end-users both with modest and high resource demands.
Facilitating the “cloudification” of critical business applications: Banking, telecommunications e-commerce and numerous other domains rely on large, in-memory databases that pose non-conventional resource demands to cloud infrastructures and are currently either operating outside the cloud or are overpriced. ACTiCLOUD had a special target for resource demanding applications built on top of database frameworks in order to facilitate their smooth integration in cloud environments with reasonable pricing."
