Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently, leading to severe resource waste and ultimately limiting their applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. This creates a significant need to lift existing technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources towards promoting cloud computing as a critical cornerstone for digital economy. ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud computing architecture for drastically improved management of cloud resources, targeting 1.5x increase in resource efficiency and more than 10x in scalability. By utilizing modest investments on hardware intelligence that enables true resource disaggregation between multiple servers, we will progress current state-of-the-art in hypervisors and cloud management systems promoting holistic resource management at the rack scale and across distributed cloud sites. On top of this, we will evolve the ecosystem around in-memory databases, a core component for extremely demanding and highly critical classes of applications that up to now have faced severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements with state-of-the-art cloud offerings, with a final goal to provide cost-efficient and highly performant DataBase-as-a-Service (DBaaS) cloud platforms. ACTiCLOUD builds on top of cutting-edge European technologies for cloud servers brought into the project by Numascale and Kaleao, and extends OnApp's MicroVisor, an innovative hypervisor to virtualize resources at the rack-scale. Furthermore it joins the forces of highly acclaimed academic institutions to address key research challenges and extend the capabilities of OpenStack and JVM. Finally, it applies the foreseen innovation to MonetDB, the column-store database pioneer, and Neo4j, the world-leader in graph databases.

Developing new security paradigms, architectures, and software, for more secure and trustworthy ICT systems and services has clear social, scientific, and market motivation. This motivation is becoming stronger due to the changing threat landscape; over the past decade we are witnessing an ever-increasing amount of cyberattacks on the Internet. We believe that to advance the field of cybersecurity, we must act proactively and in synergy, instead of being reactive to cyberattacks. We propose SHARCS, a framework for designing, building and demonstrating secure-by-design applications and services, that achieve end-to-end security for their users. SHARCS will achieve this by systematically analyzing and extending, as necessary, the hardware and software layers in a computing system. This holistic approach is necessary, as no system can truly be secure unless every layer is secured, starting from the lowest one. We will measure the effectiveness of the SHARCS framework by using it on a diverse set of security-critical, real-word applications. The applications have been chosen from three different domains, medical, cloud and automotive, to demonstrate the platform independence capabilities of SHARCS. SHARCS will provide a powerful foundation for designing and developing trustworthy, secure-by-design applications and services for the Future Internet.

EVOLVE is a pan European Innovation Action with 19 key partners from 11 European countries introducing important elements of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud in Big Data platforms taking advantage of recent technological advancements to enable cost-effective applications in 7 different pilots to keep up with the unprecedented data growth we are experiencing . EVOLVE aims to build a large-scale testbed by integrating technology from: • The HPC world: An advanced computing platform with HPC features and systems software. • The Big Data world: A versatile big-data processing stack for end-to-end workflows. • The Cloud world: Ease of deployment, access, and use in a shared manner, while addressing data protection. EVOLVE aims to take concrete and decisive steps in bringing together the Big Data, HPC, and Cloud worlds, and to increase the ability to extract value from massive and demanding datasets. EVOLVE aims to bring the following benefits for processing large and demanding datasets: • Performance: Reduced turn-around time for domain-experts, industry (large and SMEs), and end-users. • Experts: Increased productivity when designing new products and services, by processing large datasets. • Businesses: Reduced capital and operational costs for acquiring and maintaining computing infrastructure. • Society: Accelerated innovation via faster design and deployment of innovative services that unleash creativity. EVOLVE intends to build and demonstrate the proposed testbed with real-life, massive datasets from demanding applications areas. To realize this vision, EVOLVE brings together technology and pilot partners from EU industry with demonstrated experience, established markets, and vested interest. Furthermore EVOLVE will conduct a set of 10-15 Proof-of-Concepts with stakeholders from the Big Data value chain to build up digital ecosystems to achieve a broader market penetration.