ELASTIC
A Software Architecture for Extreme-ScaLe Big-Data AnalyticS in Fog CompuTIng Ecosystems

Participants
- Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC, Spain)
- IKERLAN S COOP (IKL, Spain)
- Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP, Portugal)
- Information Catalyst for Enterprise LTD (ICE, United Kingdom)
- SixSQ SARL (SIX, Switzerland)
- Thales SA (TRT, France)
- Thales Italia SPA (THALIT, Italy)
- Gestione ed Eserizio del Sistema Tranviario SPA (GEST, Italy)
- Citta Metropolitana di Firenze (FLO, Italy)
Duration
2018-2021
Budget
5 920 581,25 €
Programme
European programmes: Horizon 2020 - Research and Innovation Framework Programme
Big data is nowadays being integrated in systems requiring to process a vast amount of information from (geographically) distributed data sources, while fulfilling the non-functional properties (real-time, energy-efficiency, communication quality and security) inherited from the domain in which analytics are applied. Examples include smart cities or smart manufacturing domains.
ELASTIC will develop a novel software architecture (SA) to help system designers to address this challenge. The SA will incorporate a novel elasticity concept to distribute and orchestrate the resources across the compute continuum (from edge to cloud) in an innovative fog computing environment. The new elasticity concept will enable to match analytics workload demands and fulfilling non-functional properties. The fog computing architecture will incorporate energy-efficient parallel architectures, combined with innovative distributed storage, secure communications and advanced cloud solutions. Overall, the SA will enable the combination of reactive data-in-motion and latent data-at-rest analytics into a single extreme-scale analytics solution, in which the analytics workloads will be efficiently distributed across the compute continuum based on their suitability and data processing needs.
The capabilities of ELASTIC will be demonstrated on a real smart-mobility use case, featuring a heavy sensor infrastructure to collect data across the Florence tramway network, equipped with advanced embedded architectures, heterogeneous sensors, V2I connectivity and access to cloud resources. Representative applications for advanced driving assistant systems, predictive maintenance and public/private transport interaction, have been selected to efficiently process very large heterogeneous data streams from distributed sensors.
ELASTIC technology will enable the development of innovative mobility services while preparing the technological background for the advent of full autonomous mobility systems.
our contribution
From IKERLAN we collaborate on this project by providing experience and know-how in secure communication systems and advanced computing, software architectures development and data processing in big-data environments. IKERLAN is involved in all the different phases of the project, taking part both in the development of the computing environment and in the subsequent deployment for the different use cases.
Specifically, our technology center leads the work package corresponding to the development of the fog computing architecture, integrating the data processing in the devices themselves (edge nodes), the infrastructure in the cloud (cloud computing) and communications, in a single advanced and intelligent computing environment. It is an important role in ensuring security and ensuring the quality of communications, through policies and mechanisms that reduce the risk of attacks and increase the availability of the solution.