#	Pagina
attuale pagina	/open-h2020/projects/206362/results.html

Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ACTiCLOUD (ACTivating resource efficiency and large databases in the CLOUD)

Teaser

Summary

Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently, leading to severe resource waste and ultimately limiting their applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. This creates a significant need to lift existing technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources towards promoting cloud computing as a critical cornerstone for digital economy.

ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud computing architecture for drastically improved management of cloud resources, targeting 1.5x increase in resource efficiency and more than 10x in scalability. By utilizing modest investments on hardware intelligence that enables true resource disaggregation between multiple servers, we progress current state-of-the-art in hypervisors and cloud management systems, promoting holistic resource management both at the rack scale and across distributed cloud sites. On top of this, we are evolving the ecosystem around in-memory databases, a core component for extremely demanding and critical classes of applications that up to now have faced severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements to state-of-the-art cloud offerings, with a final goal to provide cost-efficient and highly performant DataBase-as-a-Service (DBaaS) cloud platforms.

Work performed

\"For the reporting period (M1 - M18), the consortium has successfully met its objectives. In particular, the focus of this period was threefold: a) To set the basis for the successful implementation of the ACTiCLOUD system by defining its architecture, b) To perform an initial integration \"\"exercise\"\" that would bring together all the critical components of the system, i.e. the hardware platforms (Numascale and KMAX systems), the virtualization layer (Microvisor), the cloud manager (Openstack), the language runtime (JVM) and the two database frameworks (MonetDB and Neo4j) and c) To implement baseline versions of the modules of the system, including the ACTiManager (the cloud management \"\"plug-in\"\" that incorporates intelligence to resource management), the extended Microvisor, hyperscale JVM and \"\"cloudified\"\" MonetDB and Neo4j.

Together with the technical work, the consortium has put significant effort to maximize the impact of the project. To this direction, we have (among others) disseminated our project concepts, objectives and initial results in nine research publications, established our presence in the web and social media (https://twitter.com/ACTiCLOUD, https://www.researchgate.net/project/ACTiCLOUD), co-organized one scientific workshop and given 10 talks in scientific conferences and workshops.\"

Final results

\"The progress beyond the state of the art for the reporting period, involves the integration of the embraced hardware platforms (Numascale and KMAX) with cloud technologies (i.e. virtualization middleware and cloud management), the integration of the initial version of ACTiManager with Openstack, an initial extension of MaxineVM to manage rack-scale resources, the enhancement of MonetDB with a query analyzer to support resource elasticity and the performance optimization of Neo4j for cloud environments.

The main results expected until the end of the project, are as follows:

- Rack-scale hypervisor. An extension of MicroVisor capable of virtualizing resources at the rack level.

- Distributed cloud resource manager (ACTiManager). A \"\"plug-in\"\" to OpenStack to manage effectively resources in local and across distributed clouds.

- Hyperscale JVM. An optimized version of JVM to execute effectively on the ACTiCLOUD architecture

- \"\"Cloudified\"\" MonetDB. An optimized, elastic version of MonetDB to execute effectively on cloud platforms

- \"\"Cloudified\"\" Neo4j. An optimized version of Neo4j to execute effectively on cloud platforms.

Some core impacts anticipated by the success of ACTiCLOUD are as follows:

Strengthening the competitiveness and growth of cloud service providers: ACTiCLOUDâ€™s targets a significant reduction of TCO. With a total worldwide spending on cloud IT infrastructure (server, storage, networking) reaching several billion euros, ACTiCLOUDâ€™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 targeted 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 â€œcloudificationâ€ 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 has 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.\"