FZI Joins Consortium of €4.5 Million EU Project to Deliver Context-Aware Cloud Topology Optimization

The EU project CACTOS aims at investigating how the deployment of services on cloud infrastructures can be optimized so that data centre operators can run cloud-based applications on top of current and future heterogeneous hardware as efficient as possible. The consortium of the €4.5 million EU project CACTOS consists of leading organisations and universities from Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Therefore, researchers from FZI and other leading organisations will develop a toolkit enabling data centre operators to analyse and simulate the behaviour of cloud applications in order to adapt cloud infrastructures to different pre-planned scenarios. In the end, the CACTOS toolkit will allow trade-off decisions taking into account the performance of all running applications as well as the overall energy consumption.

Within the project, researchers from FZI aim at supporting cloud developers and cloud operators to build and run cloud applications that meet various performance and reliability requirements. For this purpose, FZI is responsible for integrating cloud analysis and simulation tools into a common CACTOS tooling platform supposed to support developers and cloud operators in analysing and optimizing the quality of cloud applications, heterogeneous cloud infrastructure setups, cloud topologies, and the deployment of applications on top of such infrastructures.

Currently, there is no such integrated tooling facilitating optimizations for robust and responsive cloud applications and taking into account the current resource consumption as well as pre-planned workload trends. This is in line with FZI’s research on software architecture quality analysis and continuous transfer for industrial use.

More information
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik
Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14, 76131 Karlsruhe
Contact: Johanna Häs, FZI Corporate Communications and Media
Tel.: +49 721 9654-904
E-Mail: haes@fzi.de
About CACTOS
CACTOS is a collaborative research project co-funded under the ICT theme of the 7th framework programme (FP7) of the European Union. For more information, visit www.cactosfp7.eu.

In the project CACTOS, researchers address the challenge of mapping services to hardware and software resources in a cloud-environment as user demand and new technologies are driving a dramatic increase in the size, complexity, and heterogeneity of cloud infrastructures. Such infrastructures feature a variety of hardware technologies as well as different service models ranging from traditional server hosting to more interactive and complex services (e.g. remote rendering or gaming).

About the FZI Research Center for Information Technology
The FZI Research Center for Information Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is a non-profit institution for applied research in information technology and technology transfer. Its task is to provide businesses and public institutions with the latest research findings in information technology. It also qualifies young scientists for their career in academics or business as well as self-employment. Led by professors from different faculties, research teams at FZI interdisciplinary develop and prototype concepts, software, hardware and system solutions for their clients. Scientific excellence and interdisciplinary practice are therefore well established at FZI. The FZI House of Living Labs offers a unique research environment for applied research.

Every department at FZI operates under a certified quality management system according to DIN EN ISO 9001:2008. Departments working on medical information technologies are also certified according to DIN EN ISO 13485:2010. FZI has its head office in Karlsruhe and a branch office in Berlin.