Swarmchestrate consortium, led by HUN-REN SZTAKI, launches joint effort to expand cloud computing under Horizon Europe Framework Program

The EU-funded “Application-level Swarm-based Orchestration Across the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum” (Swarmchestrate) project launched at the beginning of 2024. This spring, the HUN-REN SZTAKI lead consortium of 14 partners gathered in Budapest for their first face-to-face project meeting to discuss the working plan of the project that introduces a fundamentally new application management approach, and then signed the consortium agreement recently.

The idea of Swarmchestrate derives from the revelation that IoT and the ever-growing collection of edge-connected devices, which require high-speed and highly accurate data transmission, push centralised cloud processing functions to their limits. Fog computing moves some of the processing from the cloud towards the edge and closer to the end device. Edge computing moves it to the edge of the network. These new highly distributed paradigms require novel application management methods. 

To overcome the limitation of current centralised application management approaches, Swarmchestrate will develop a completely novel decentralised application-level orchestrator, based on the notion of so-called swarms of interdependent units in a dynamic orchestration space. These swarms will be managed by decentralised orchestration agents with blockchain-based trusted solutions, state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms, and privacy-preserving data analytics.

The three-year-long project will test this new approach via real-life demonstrators from the areas of flood prevention, parking space management, video analytics and a digital twin of natural habitat.

The Swarmchestrate consortium consists of universities, research institutes and companies from 10+ different countries including partners from the UK and South Korea. HUN-REN SZTAKI is the coordinator of the project, Róbert Lovas, head of the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems has decades of experience in managing EU research and infrastructure projects ensuring the successful implementations of the envisioned project.

Besides coordinating Swarmchestrate, HUN-REN SZTAKI also acts as the Work Package leader of System Design, Demonstrator Specification and Development, Simulation and System Integration, and Digital Twin-related activities. These WPs will design the overall system architecture that incorporates the results of Swarm-based AI-driven intelligence, decentralised orchestration and blockchain-based knowledge, trust and security management. The system design will be supported by the feedback given by demonstrator partners and simulation, which is one of the key concepts for system development and maintenance, especially in a multi-tier Cloud-to-Edge paradigm. The integration will be performed based on the system design. Furthermore, the demonstrators will be developed and evaluated on the Swarmchestrate system. Finally, a digital twin, utilising a previously developed simulator, will be implemented and operated to evaluate system behaviour for prediction.

The project’s total budget is over 5 million EUR and co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) and supported by Seoul National University (Institute of Engineering Research).

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