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.

Publications

2017
The HARNESS Platform: A Hardware- and Network-Enhanced Software System for Cloud Computing Software Architecture for Big Data and the Cloud, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 323-351, 2017, ISBN: 9780128054673 Jose Coutinho, Mark Stillwell, Katerina Argyraki, George Ioannidis, Anca Iordache, Christoph Kleineweber, Alexandros Koliousis, John McGlone, Guillaume Pierre, Carmelo Ragusa, Peter Sanders, Thorsten Schütt, Teng Yu, Alexander Wolf BibTeX
Harness
2014
QoS-aware Storage Virtualization for Cloud File Systems Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Programmable File Systems, pp. 19-26, PFSW '14, 2014 Christoph Kleineweber, Alexander Reinefeld, Thorsten Schütt BibTeX
DOI
Harness