Description du projet
Des solutions révolutionnaires rendent le marché du cloud plus accessible
Le marché mondial du cloud a beau être en pleine expansion, il demeure un terrain de jeu réservé à quelques fournisseurs. Cet état de fait maintient les prix à des niveaux élevés et la qualité des services à un bas niveau, tout en provoquant l’enfermement propriétaire («lock-in») des fournisseurs. Le projet STARCloud, financé par l’UE, propose un paradigme cloud révolutionnaire qui repose sur la blockchain et vise à traiter la définition et l’application de la qualité de service (QoS) dans les systèmes entièrement distribués. Le projet emploiera des méthodes formelles pour l’analyse statique et le contrôle d’exécution des infrastructures cloud de prochaine génération afin d’apporter un soutien à la qualité de service. De plus, il introduira des approches et des outils innovants, comme des mécanismes de consensus, un langage spécifique au domaine pour les définitions de la QoS et des outils d’analyse formelle de la QoS ainsi qu’un cadre pour la mise en relation et la négociation des contrats intelligents.
Objectif
Today the cloud market is restricted to few providers, which entails higher prices, vendor lock-in and lower service quality. Smart Contracts (SC) and blockchain could reshape this market since they lower costs and provide trust without resorting to intermediaries. This paradigm, named blockchain-based clouds, prevents vendor lock-in and has the potential to make market's barriers so low that anyone with idle or spare computational resources can offer cloud services. The STARCloud project systematically utilises formal methods for the static analysis and runtime control of the next generation clouds for creating support for Quality of Service (QoS). To this aim, since the state-of-the-art solutions cannot be used in this domain, this project provides novel approaches and tools, including consensus mechanisms, a domain specific language for QoS definitions and QoS formal analysis tools, and a framework for the matchmaking and negotiation of SCs. Supporting QoS will boost the adoption of decentralised clouds; thus reducing prices and environmental impact; and improving QoS, which make the cloud providers and consumers that use blockchain-based clouds more competitive, specially in Europe, where the most advanced commercial solutions are located. Moreover, these solutions will enable geographically sparse micro and traditional cloud providers to join the market, which will leverage cloud and edge computing in Europe. The project is timely and, besides involving collaborators from many of the best European research institutes, it is supervised by I. Brandic, one of the main cloud experts in the world and actively involves one of the main players in the market: iExec. Overall, the solutions proposed here will contribute to the disruptive blockchain-based cloud paradigm and find immediate use in industry and academia by addressing the fundamental requirement of most cloud consumers, in particular business: QoS definition and enforcement in completely distributed systems.
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Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
1040 Wien
Autriche