SODALITE

In recent years the global market has seen a tremendous rise in utility computing, which serves as the back-end for practically any new technology, methodology or advancement from healthcare to aerospace. As a single revenue figure to represent this claim, it is sufficient to mention the value of the digital transformation market, valued at almost 800B $ by 2025.

As part of that market, however, according to the World Economic Forum report many trends such as Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT) promise to push the resources of the EU off the rails if these trends' requirements are not properly managed and supported by needed specific ICT software technology. At this point, an ICT evolution is witnessed. On the one hand, using standard infrastructures in compute centers has brought many benefits, e.g., to manageability, up-time, and overall control. On the other hand, it is observed that, more and more often, computation jobs require specialized execution environments. Thus, we are entering a new era where heterogeneous, software-defined, high-performance computing environments are ready for use and are needed for specific purposes.

SODALITE aims to support development and operation teams in exploiting this heterogeneity. The focus will be on environments that comprise accelerators/GPUs, configurable processors and non-x86 CPUs, such as ARMv8. General purpose GPUs are becoming common currency in the data-center, while the specialized FPGA accelerators, ranging from the deep-learning specific accelerators to burst buffers technologies, are becoming "the big coin", enormously speeding up disks and likely to become common in the near future. SODALITE seeks to address the gap emerging around the aforementioned software-defined, application-specific infrastructures, with the following mission: To provide application developers and infrastructure operators with tools that

1. abstract their application and infrastructure requirements to
2. enable simpler and faster development, deployment, operation, and execution of heterogeneous applications reflecting diverse circumstances over
3. heterogeneous, software-defined, high-performance, cloud infrastructures, with a particular focus on performance, quality, manageability, and reliability.