In the EU project Harness a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software stack for heterogeneous hardware resources is developed that supports innovative network technologies. Existing solutions often offer only homogeneous resources and relative cheap network connections. With Harness we are trying to increase productivity by using innovative hardware to increase the performance of applications and to reduce their energy consumption. For computations standard processors, FPGAs, and GPUs are used to increase the performance of individual applications in the cloud. In the networking area we adapt the network topology to the application requirements, and use software router to perform calculations in the network.
ZIB is mainly working in the storage area and will develop storage solutions that are individually configured for the user by a mixed use of hard drives and SSDs. For this we use XtreemFS. The user can set per volume, whether the data access should be optimized for fast random access (random access) or for fast sequential access (data streaming). With service level agreements (SLAs) the user can define which services they need for their application.
Further details:
http://www.harness-project.eu/
