The overall objective of the Next Generation I/O Project (NEXTGenIO) is to design and prototype a new, scalable, high-performance, energy efficient computing platform designed to address the challenge of delivering scalable I/O performance to applications at the Exascale. It will achieve this using highly innovative, non-volatile, dual in-line memory modules (NV-DIMMs). These hardware and systemware developments will be coupled to a co-design approach driven by the needs of some of today’s most demanding HPC applications. By meeting this overall objective, NEXTGenIO will solve a key part of the Exascale challenge and enable HPC and Big Data applications to overcome the limitations of today’s HPC I/O subsystems. Today most high-end HPC systems employ data storage separate from the main system and the I/O subsystem often struggles to deal with the degree of parallelism present. As we move into the domain of extreme parallelism at the Exascale we need to address I/O if such systems are to deliver appropriate performance and efficiency for their application user communities. The NEXTGenIO project will explore the use of NV-DIMMs and associated systemware developments through a co-design process with three ‘end-user’ partners: a high-end academic HPC service provider, a numerical weather forecasting service provider and a commercial on-demand HPC service provider. These partners will develop a set of I/O workload simulators to allow quantitative improvements in I/O performance to be directly measured on the new system in a variety of research configurations. Systemware software developed in the project will include performance analysis tools, improved job schedulers that take into account data locality and energy efficiency, optimised programming models, and APIs and drivers for optimal use of the new I/O hierarchy. The project will deliver immediately exploitable hardware and software results and show how to deliver high performance I/O at the Exascale.

The consortium of this European Training Network (ETN) "BigStorage: Storage-based Convergence between HPC and Cloud to handle Big Data” will train future data scientists in order to enable them and us to apply holistic and interdisciplinary approaches for taking advantage of a data-overwhelmed world, which requires HPC and Cloud infrastructures with a redefinition of storage architectures underpinning them - focusing on meeting highly ambitious performance and energy usage objectives. There has been an explosion of digital data, which is changing our knowledge about the world. This huge data collection, which cannot be managed by current data management systems, is known as Big Data. Techniques to address it are gradually combining with what has been traditionally known as High Performance Computing. Therefore, this ETN will focus on the convergence of Big Data, HPC, and Cloud data storage, ist management and analysis. To gain value from Big Data it must be addressed from many different angles: (i) applications, which can exploit this data, (ii) middleware, operating in the cloud and HPC environments, and (iii) infrastructure, which provides the Storage, and Computing capable of handling it. Big Data can only be effectively exploited if techniques and algorithms are available, which help to understand its content, so that it can be processed by decision-making models. This is the main goal of Data Science. We claim that this ETN project will be the ideal means to educate new researchers on the different facets of Data Science (across storage hardware and software architectures, large-scale distributed systems, data management services, data analysis, machine learning, decision making). Such a multifaceted expertise is mandatory to enable researchers to propose appropriate answers to applications requirements, while leveraging advanced data storage solutions unifying cloud and HPC storage facilities.

The IoT market is currently undergoing transformation from applications involving semi-passive devices operating within a single platform, to applications involving smart objects with embedded intelligence while spanning multiple platforms. State-of-the-art security mechanisms are not sufficient for protecting end-to-end this wave of IoT applications. SecureIoT is a joint effort of global leaders in IoT services and IoT cybersecurity to secure the next generation of dynamic, decentralized IoT systems, which will span spanning multiple IoT platforms and networks of smart objects, through implementing a range of predictive IoT security services. SecureIoT will architect predictive security services in-line with leading edge reference architectures (RA) for IoT applications (i.e. RAs of the Industrial Internet Consortium, the OpenFog Consortium and the Platform Industrie 4.0), which will serve as a basis for specifying security building blocks at both the edge and the core of IoT systems. SecureIoT will provide concrete implementations of security data collection, security monitoring and predictive security mechanisms, which will be the basis for offering integrated services for risk assessment, compliance auditing against regulations and directives (e.g. GDPR, NIS, ePrivacy), as well as support to IoT developers based on programming annotations. The services will be open and based on the SECaaS (Security-as-a-Service) paradigm. The SecureIoT services will be challenged in market driven scenarios and use cases in the areas of smart manufacturing (Industrie 4.0), connected cars and IoT-enabled socially assistive robots. Their deployment will be based on both enterprise-scale globally available IoT platforms and community open source platform of the partners. As part of its exploitation strategy, SecureIoT will integrate a multi-sided market platform in order to offer SECaaS services, but also to enable integration of additional security mechanisms in its ecosystem.

The infrastructures of the financial sector are nowadays more critical, sophisticated and interconnected than ever before, which makes them increasingly vulnerable to security attacks. Despite increased security, most security measures remain fragmented and static i.e. inappropriate for confronting sophisticated and asymmetric attacks. FINSEC is a joint effort of prominent stakeholders in the financial sector and global leaders in physical & IT security, towards introducing a novel standards-based reference architecture (RA) for integrated (cyber & physical) security. The RA will enable timely preparation against attacks, while at the same time facilitating stakeholders’ collaboration for risk assessment/mitigation in the financial supply chain, as a means of confronting complex threats and their cascading effects. FINSEC will provide a mature implementation of the RA, based on the enhancement and integration of novel solutions of the partners (eg., Anomaly Detection, AI CCTV Analytics, Risk Assessment Engines, Collaborative Risk Analysis & Management, Compliance), which will be bundled in a toolbox. The RA implementation and the toolbox will be validated through realistic pilots involving stakeholders in the identification, assessment and mitigation of threats. The five pilots involve high-impact scenarios including SWIFT network protection, buildings and ATM networks security, peer-to-peer payments network protection, risk assessment for insurance purposes and securing financial SMEs. The pilots will engage >=500 security & finance experts, while providing a representative coverage of the financial services industry (ie. banking, capital management, insurance, card & P2P payments), which is a sound basis for FINSEC’s broader impact. Towards maximum impact, FINSEC will establish an ecosystem of security solutions for the financial sector, which will be supported by the partners’ dense network of sales, marketing, standardization and regulation channels worldwide.