by Patrizio Dazzi and Massimiliano Corsini (ISTI-CNR)
ISTI-CNR is involved in the H2020 CHARITY project (Cloud for HologrAphy and Cross RealITY), which started in January 2021. The project aims to leverage the benefits of intelligent, autonomous orchestration of a heterogeneous set of cloud, edge, and network resources, to create a symbiotic relationship between low and high latency infrastructures that will facilitate the needs of emerging applications.
This goal is accompanied by the extra challenge of easing the transition from traditional hosting environments to the novel environment proposed by CHARITY. To address this issue, the project will equip application providers with adaptive, end-to-end lifecycle management tools and continuous integration and delivery techniques. At the same time, automation at the network level will be facilitated by zero-touch network slice life-cycle management. The project will further enable and foster the development of a Virtual Network Function (VNF) repository to assist applications to benefit from the compute and network continuum management environment.
The key value proposition is CHARITY’s work on infusing intelligence at the resource management strategies level that does not rely solely on utility functions, as has been done so far. Instead, it relies on cognitive decision-making, based on an overall understanding of the resource, application and context characteristics. To this end it will be of paramount importance to provide solutions and approaches enabling the efficient and seamless management of heterogeneous computing and network resources.
CHARITY has the potential to tackle any kind of highly interactive class of services and applications and it will be validated against a wide class of highly anticipated applications characterised by extreme levels of interaction and data exchange between the end users and application components, i.e., AR, VR and Holography applications.
In summary, the main outcome of CHARITY will be a community-driven, open-source framework consisting of:
A system for the autonomous orchestration, life-cycle management and efficient exploitation of a wide range of compute and network resources and infrastructures that is not dependent on a single large vendor yet remains compatible with all.
A collection of tools, mechanisms and algorithms enabling the efficient, contextualised and network-aware exploitation of edge resources and application reconfiguration.
A set of VNFs along with a VNF repository that will support highly interactive application leveraging tools, technologies and platforms stemming from fields such as big data.
Tools for the application providers to simplify the deployment and management of application components, mainly targeting the needs of SMEs (DevOps automations, specifications, APIs and best practices).
CHARITY runs from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2023. It is coordinated by Uwe Herzog (EURESCOM) while Tarik Taleb (ICTFICIAL) is serving as technical manager for the project. ISTI-CNR is leading WP3 energy, data and computationally efficient mechanisms supporting dynamically adaptive and network-aware services.
Link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101016509
Please contact:
Patrizio Dazzi and Massimiliano Corsini
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
