Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BRAINE (Big data pRocessing and Artificial Intelligence at the Network Edge)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-05-01 bis 2022-04-30
The BRAINE project’s overall aim is to boost the development of the Edge framework and, specifically, energy efficient hardware and AI empowered software systems, capable of processing Big Data at the Edge, supporting security, data privacy and sovereignty. BRAINE’s overall aim will be reached by targeting five fine-grained goals:
- Devising an EC infrastructure that offers control, computing, acceleration, storage, and 5G networking at the Edge and excels in scalability, agility, security, data privacy, and data sovereignty in Big Data and AI for low latency and mission-critical applications.
- Developing a future-proof Edge security framework and associated infrastructure. based on the latest software and hardware security technologies.
- Developing a distributed and partly-autonomous system that takes data privacy and sovereignty into account on each and every decision regarding workload placement, data transfer, and computation, while guaranteeing interoperability with the environment.
- Developing a heterogeneous, energy efficient Edge MicroDataCenter, suitable for stationed, mobile, and embedded autonomous applications, that goes beyond the current hardware and software architectures and offers Big Data processing and AI capabilities at the Edge.
- Testing and demonstrating the effectiveness and generality of the BRAINE approach by evaluating multiple real-world use cases and scenarios that exhibit the required scalability, security, efficiency, agility, and flexibility concerns.
Through the achievement of its goals, the BRAINE project will help to position Europe at the forefront of the intelligent edge computing field, enabling growth across many sectors (manufacturing, smart healthcare, surveillance, satellite navigation, and others). By lowering the barriers for utilising edge computing for artificial intelligence applications, BRAINE will open the door for European SMEs to leverage state of the art technologies, driving their development and growth as industry leaders in their sectors.
- Devising an EC infrastructure that offers control, computing, acceleration, storage, and 5G networking at the Edge and excels in scalability, agility, security, data privacy, and data sovereignty in Big Data and AI for low latency and mission-critical applications.
- Developing a future-proof Edge security framework and associated infrastructure. based on the latest software and hardware security technologies.
- Developing a distributed and partly-autonomous system that takes data privacy and sovereignty into account on each and every decision regarding workload placement, data transfer, and computation, while guaranteeing interoperability with the environment.
- Developing a heterogeneous, energy efficient Edge MicroDataCenter, suitable for stationed, mobile, and embedded autonomous applications, that goes beyond the current hardware and software architectures and offers Big Data processing and AI capabilities at the Edge.
- Testing and demonstrating the effectiveness and generality of the BRAINE approach by evaluating multiple real-world use cases and scenarios that exhibit the required scalability, security, efficiency, agility, and flexibility concerns.
Through the achievement of its goals, the BRAINE project will help to position Europe at the forefront of the intelligent edge computing field, enabling growth across many sectors (manufacturing, smart healthcare, surveillance, satellite navigation, and others). By lowering the barriers for utilising edge computing for artificial intelligence applications, BRAINE will open the door for European SMEs to leverage state of the art technologies, driving their development and growth as industry leaders in their sectors.
In WP2, Partners have been defining the EMDC. Specific activities include: innovative cooling systems, new boards containing the composable building blocks (i.e. GPU, ASIC, FPGA, CPU, memory), enabling software solutions (i.e. firmware), telemetry-based functions enabling monitoring capabilities and network awareness at the orchestration level, crypto-accelerators for storage and secure communications, securitization of the communications between the EMDC and the rest of the network, integration of the EMDC with complementary systems for communication such as 5G.
In WP3, Partners focused on (i) feasibility studies for implementing WP3 components; (ii) testbed setup; (iii) early prototypes of WP3 components; (iv) components upgraded; (v) Integration. Finally, Deliverable 3.1 has been submitted.
In WP4, Partners worked on 1) secure data management framework for AI at the Edge, 2) efficiently handling data at the edge at scale , workflow definition language and authoring tool, and 4) execution measurement and monitoring WP4 has successfully delivered the milestone MS04 in M09 and the deliverable D4.1 in M11.
In WP5, Partners have focused on the requirements for the use cases.
In WP6, Partners worked on the exploitation, dissemination and standardization of the BRAINE technologies and solutions.
An exploitation strategy has been delivered.
A dissemination strategy dedicated to BRAINE has been prepared (D6.2) and finalized and first dissemination activities acknowledging BRAINE have been conducted. A constantly maintained website, logos and templates are in place. The first two Ask BRAINE panel sessions went live and were very well received by both academia and practice.The Dissemination Report and Fact Sheet (D6.3) is in its final stage and the COPEP file are both continuously updated and maintained.
The Standardization activities as part of T6.3 started first efforts in M7 with participation to ISO 17825 standard and a conference provided to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute).
In WP3, Partners focused on (i) feasibility studies for implementing WP3 components; (ii) testbed setup; (iii) early prototypes of WP3 components; (iv) components upgraded; (v) Integration. Finally, Deliverable 3.1 has been submitted.
In WP4, Partners worked on 1) secure data management framework for AI at the Edge, 2) efficiently handling data at the edge at scale , workflow definition language and authoring tool, and 4) execution measurement and monitoring WP4 has successfully delivered the milestone MS04 in M09 and the deliverable D4.1 in M11.
In WP5, Partners have focused on the requirements for the use cases.
In WP6, Partners worked on the exploitation, dissemination and standardization of the BRAINE technologies and solutions.
An exploitation strategy has been delivered.
A dissemination strategy dedicated to BRAINE has been prepared (D6.2) and finalized and first dissemination activities acknowledging BRAINE have been conducted. A constantly maintained website, logos and templates are in place. The first two Ask BRAINE panel sessions went live and were very well received by both academia and practice.The Dissemination Report and Fact Sheet (D6.3) is in its final stage and the COPEP file are both continuously updated and maintained.
The Standardization activities as part of T6.3 started first efforts in M7 with participation to ISO 17825 standard and a conference provided to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute).
· Definition and design of the innovative EMDC BRAINE hardware solution based on: (1) specifically designed monoblock chassis with innovative passive (i.e. fan-less) two-phase cooling system based on Loop Thermosyphon (LTS) and nanoparticles, lowering OPEX 20-30%; (2) new backplane/connector including both dual x8 lane Gen4 PCIe interface and 4 x 10/25G Ethernet link for unprecedented intra- and inter-EMDC throughput; (3) new compact card design fitting the proposed BRAINE common form factor and drastically reduce non-processing hardware redundancies. Overall, a fully loaded BRAINE EMDC is expected to consume only 1/3 of a standard 19-rack node, but with the computational power of 8 standard rack size computers, consuming only up to 2 kW.
· Design and preliminary development of EMDC Embedded Software based on open components (e.g. SONiC operating system for the embedded Ethernet switch) and efficient EMDC management infrastructure compliant with OCP (Open Compute Project).
· Design and preliminary development of hardware accelerated innovative solutions for packet filtering, FPGA-based MAC layer, digital IP blocks of remote radio unit for accelerating 5G networking, and non-volatile memory express acceleration.
· Design and first implementation of inter-EMDC Communication infrastructure based on: (1) telemetry-based SDN-controlled solution relying on open disaggregated multi-vendor architecture; (2) innovative cost-effective filterless solution exploiting bi-directional transmission over a single fiber; (3) 5G software defined RAN (SD-RAN) with external radio unit (RU) for the different 3GPP functional splits, including split 6, 7.2-x.
· Design a solution to develop services that enable applications to execute workloads utilizing Edge resources. Services include virtualization, automated deployment, smart workload placement, running and managing workloads, and monitoring of the resources and applications.
· Design a smart, agile workload placement and orchestration that considers the unique characteristics of the Edge nodes, ensuring that applications can run reliably on the infrastructure and that the resources are used in an efficient way.
· Develop distributed learning techniques preserving privacy and improving security on the Edge while balancing with computational and networking heterogeneous resource constraints.
· in-network firewalling implementations
· CPU offloading of IPSec and transport security layer (TLS) protocols in smartNICs.
· Evaluation of energy efficiency of QKD considering the post-quantum security that is under benchmarking of the standardization bodies.
· Design of cryptographic acceleration for in fibre-based connectivity links for edge nodes. A link-security testbed including the EMDC module and the smart-NIC from Mellanox has been setup leveraging on a ring of dark fibres with quantum key distribution (QKD).
- Apache Ozone selected.
- mapping between the privacy requirements and the data lifecycle management policies has also been designed.
- modelling of the workload as workflows that run on a Kubernetes cluster as a set of collaborating containers.
- first version of the workflow authoring tool.
· Design and preliminary development of EMDC Embedded Software based on open components (e.g. SONiC operating system for the embedded Ethernet switch) and efficient EMDC management infrastructure compliant with OCP (Open Compute Project).
· Design and preliminary development of hardware accelerated innovative solutions for packet filtering, FPGA-based MAC layer, digital IP blocks of remote radio unit for accelerating 5G networking, and non-volatile memory express acceleration.
· Design and first implementation of inter-EMDC Communication infrastructure based on: (1) telemetry-based SDN-controlled solution relying on open disaggregated multi-vendor architecture; (2) innovative cost-effective filterless solution exploiting bi-directional transmission over a single fiber; (3) 5G software defined RAN (SD-RAN) with external radio unit (RU) for the different 3GPP functional splits, including split 6, 7.2-x.
· Design a solution to develop services that enable applications to execute workloads utilizing Edge resources. Services include virtualization, automated deployment, smart workload placement, running and managing workloads, and monitoring of the resources and applications.
· Design a smart, agile workload placement and orchestration that considers the unique characteristics of the Edge nodes, ensuring that applications can run reliably on the infrastructure and that the resources are used in an efficient way.
· Develop distributed learning techniques preserving privacy and improving security on the Edge while balancing with computational and networking heterogeneous resource constraints.
· in-network firewalling implementations
· CPU offloading of IPSec and transport security layer (TLS) protocols in smartNICs.
· Evaluation of energy efficiency of QKD considering the post-quantum security that is under benchmarking of the standardization bodies.
· Design of cryptographic acceleration for in fibre-based connectivity links for edge nodes. A link-security testbed including the EMDC module and the smart-NIC from Mellanox has been setup leveraging on a ring of dark fibres with quantum key distribution (QKD).
- Apache Ozone selected.
- mapping between the privacy requirements and the data lifecycle management policies has also been designed.
- modelling of the workload as workflows that run on a Kubernetes cluster as a set of collaborating containers.
- first version of the workflow authoring tool.