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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
SyncFree
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The goal of SyncFree is to enable large-scale distributed applications without global synchronisation, by exploiting the recent concept of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). CRDTs allow unsynchronised concurrent updates, yet ensure data consistency. This revolutionary approach maximises responsiveness and availability; it enables locating data near its users, in decentralised clouds.
Global-scale applications, such as virtual wallets, advertising platforms, social networks, online games, or collaboration networks, require consistency across distributed data items. As networked users, objects, devices, and sensors proliferate, the consistency issue is increasingly acute for the software industry. Current alternatives are both unsatisfactory: either to rely on synchronisation to ensure strong consistency, or to forfeit synchronisation and consistency altogether with ad-hoc eventual consistency. The former approach does not scale beyond a single data centre and is expensive. The latter is extremely difficult to understand, and remains error-prone, even for highly-skilled programmers.
SyncFree avoids both global synchronisation and the complexities of ad-hoc eventual consistency by leveraging the formal properties of CRDTs. CRDTs are designed so that unsynchronised concurrent updates do not conflict and have well-defined semantics. By combining CRDT objects from a standard library of proven datatypes (counters, sets, graphs, sequences, etc.), large-scale distributed programming is simpler and less error-prone. CRDTs are a practical and cost-effective approach.
The SyncFree project will develop both theoretical and practical understanding of large-scale synchronisation-free programming based on CRDTs. Project results will be new industrial applications, new application architectures, large-scale evaluation of both, programming models and algorithms for large-scale applications, and advanced scientific understanding.
LightKone
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The goal of LightKone is to develop a scientifically sound and industrially validated model for doing general-purpose computation on edge networks. An edge network consists of a large set of heterogeneous, loosely coupled computing nodes situated at the logical extreme of a network. Common examples are networks of Internet of Things, mobile devices, personal computers, and points of presence including Mobile Edge Computing. Internet applications are increasingly running on edge networks, to reduce latency, increase scalability, resilience, and security, and permit local decision making. However, today’s state of the art, the gossip and peer-to-peer models, give no solution for defining general-purpose computations on edge networks, i.e., computation with shared mutable state. LightKone will solve this problem by combining two recent advances in distributed computing, namely synchronisation-free programming and hybrid gossip algorithms, both of which are successfully used separately in industry. Together, they are a natural combination for edge computing. We will cover edge networks both with and without data center nodes, and applications focused on collaboration, computation, and both. Project results will be new programming models and algorithms that advance scientific understanding, implemented in new industrial applications and a startup company, and evaluated in large-scale realistic settings.