CloudLightning Project Looks to Self-Managed HPC Services

In this video, Prof. John Morrison from University College Cork describes the CloudLightning project. CloudLightning’s vision is a European economy that thrives and leads the world in the provision and adoption of high performance cloud computing services. Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Program, CloudLightning brings together eight project partners from five countries across Europe.

The project proposes to create a new way of provisioning heterogeneous cloud resources to deliver services, specified by the user, using a bespoke service description language. Our goal is to address energy inefficiencies particularly in the use of resources and consequently to deliver savings to the cloud provider and the cloud consumer in terms of reduced power consumption and improved service delivery, with hyperscale systems particularly in mind.

For clouds to be successful they need to continue to provide affordable, reliable, computing and storage services. They must continue to adapt to an ever growing user community whose service needs are unpredictable and rapidly changing. They must embrace heterogeneous hardware as they endeavour to provide specialist services. Furthermore, as they struggle to come to grips with energy usage, they must enact strategies to minimize energy consumption per unit of service.

The expected benefits of CloudLightning’s proposed management and delivery model include:

• Benefits to cloud service consumers through increased accessibility to heterogeneous processing resources and reduced development, deployment and optimization effort.
• Benefit to cloud service providers since the increased accessibility lowers the effort required to consume their resources, allowing them to market their offerings more effectively and hence increase turnover.
• Improved efficiency of cloud data centres through more effective resource management and the wider uptake of power-efficient heterogeneous processing resources.
• Strengthened competitiveness of the European industry by providing indigenous cloud service providers, particularly SMEs, with new technology which allows them to differentiate themselves in the global cloud market place.

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