Coordinated by ATOS Spain, the European project called “Towards a functional continuum operating system” (ICOS) was launched in September 2022 and will run for the next three years. Researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) in particular will be involved in the development of a single platform to facilitate the management of data and distributed execution across the compute continuum that will be able to run seamlessly on heterogeneous and possibly small devices.
The persistent proliferation of novel computing and sensing device technologies, and the ever-growing demand for data-intensive applications on the edge and in the cloud, are driving the next wave of transformation in computing systems architecture. The resulting paradigm shift in computing is centered around the dynamic, intelligent and seamless interconnection of IoT, edge, and cloud resources together in one computing system to form a continuum. The main research objective of the ICOS project is based on implementing a platform that will be a common hub of reference and the integration of individual heterogeneous technologies and equipment related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing.
“BSC contributes to the ICOS project with our expertise in programming models and distributed execution and data management. In addition to having a significant role in the design of the ICOS platform, BSC will lead the effort on the development of the data and runtime management components and will provide tools developed by the Workflows and Distributed Computing group (COMPSs and dataClay) as baseline technologies. BSC will also lead the creation of the ICOS suites: the different software distributions to install ICOS on the devices composing the continuum”, says Francesc Lordan, BSC researcher in the Workflows and Distributed Computing team and principal investigator of the ICOS project at BSC.
The successful implementation of the ICOS project is based on the following two pillars: 1) the implementation and application of appropriate methods for the protection of security and privacy in heterogeneous reference networks, and 2) finding efficient machine learning algorithms that will be able to process a large amount of data and information with the least possible response time and burden on the computing devices at the edges of a network.
The ICOS project will join forces with the next generation of higher-level (meta) operating systems for the smart IoTs with solid computing capacity at the smart device–, system– and edge level, embedded in a compute continuum from IoT-to-edge-to-cloud.
About ICOS
Started in September 2022 and funded with a total budget of 11 million euros, the ICOS project has 22 beneficiaries covering a diverse ecosystem of high-quality technology related to artificial intelligence and compute continuum. The ICOS project will design, develop and deploy an open multi-platform, plug-and-play and technology-agnostic meta-operating system, which will run transparently on top of native OSs.