We are witnessing a wave of emerging cloud computing technologies and services that empower advanced applications from different vertical sectors, with diverse requirements. In addition, there is a movement from top-down-designed architectures that apply centralized resource control, towards federations of loosely coupled autonomous or semi-autonomous systems, managed by multiple independent actors that are self-organized in a distributed manner. These trends give rise to a number of fundamental challenges that relate to the application deployment, the support of heterogeneous infrastructures and the provided security.
Inline with the above, SERRANO steps in to define an intent-based paradigm of operating federated infrastructures consisting of edge, cloud, and HPC resources, which will be realized through the SERRANO platform. At the top, SERRANO will create an abstraction layer that automates the process of application deploying functionality across the various computing technologies. This layer will be part of an infrastructure agnostic automation process that translates applications’ high-level requirements to infrastructure-aware configuration parameters. The SERRANO platform will automatically determine the most appropriate (computing, storage, networking) resources of the cloud continuum to be used by an application, and then transparently deploy workloads and coordinate data movement.
A sense, discern, infer, decide, and act, continuous control loop will run over an infinite to adjust resources and migrate the tasks based on feedback regarding the application’s and the resources’ state. Service assurance mechanisms based on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques will facilitate the autonomous adaptation and management of the deployed services and resources. These mechanisms will be dynamically triggered by a data-driven cloud and network telemetry framework that collects and analyses telemetry data across the distributed edge/cloud/HPC infrastructure.
SERRANO platform will also develop hardware and software-based mechanisms that provide security, privacy and multi-tenancy by design. In this way, applications and users will be able to maintain control over their data integrity and privacy when relying on publicly shared edge and cloud infrastructures. SERRANO will capitalize on the benefits offered by hardware accelerators used to execute prototype tasks that arise often in applications, coupled with novel transprecision computing mechanisms to exploit the accuracy versus resource usage tradeoff. These will enable the dynamic adaptation of the computations’ precision, based on application requirements, further improving the overall performance and energy efficiency of the infrastructures.
Finally, SERRANO will demonstrate its advanced and innovative capabilities through three well-defined use cases in cloud storage services, fintech and manufacturing, utilizing edge, cloud and HPC infrastructures. The use cases correspond to high-demanding, safety-critical, dynamic, greatly impactful applications that pose heterogeneous demands.