Innovative Technologies and Applications for Data Centres and High-Performance Computers

The Digital Society is structured as a set of services accessible through the Internet, which continually demand greater benefits, quality and security. In order to provide such services to the users on any type of device connected to the Internet (computers, tablets, mobile phones, IoT networks, etc.), it is essential that there are ICT infrastructures that provide them. Nowadays, although part of the computation is derived to peripheral servers (Edge Computing), only with clusters of large dimensions it is possible to meet the high number of user requests and the volume of data that must be processed (and eventually stored) per second. As well as the number of devices connected to the Internet will continue to grow dramatically, especially if we take into account the rise of IoT, if the current designs of clusters were maintained, these would have serious scalability problems.

The overall objective of this coordinated project is to develop techniques to improve the scalability of these servers in terms of performance and energy. Applications will also be developed that take advantage of these improvements, and that have a great impact on the 7th (digital society) and 8th (Security) challenges.
To contribute to this goal, in this subproject new proposals will be developed in the research lines traditionally followed by our group, mainly working on issues of improvement of processing nodes, interconnection networks architecture of servers, clients access through wireless networks, devices and IoT standards and various applications that take advantage of the improvements made to the servers. In addition, these applications are intended to guarantee the basic principles of information security, such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. Globally, it seeks to improve the performance without increasing consumption or cost.

Specifically, in the field of processing nodes, research will be carried out on architecture of quantum accelerators and on-chip networks with support for bandwidth guarantees per application. In the context of other subsystems, network technologies for exascale systems will be investigated, specifically to improve topologies and routing mechanisms and congestion control techniques, as well as the provision of QoS to applications. Regarding Cloud and Fog systems, the research will focus on security and efficient management of computing resources. It will also be researched in IoT networks for intelligent environments, optimizing the most recent low power standards and designing more efficient devices. In addition, SDN techniques will be developed for the management of Cloud, WiFi and IoT topologies. In the field of applications, accelerators (GPUs or TPUs) will be used to solve problems related to airspace management in real time through neural networks. In addition, the improvement of the quality of service (QoS) will be addressed in the coding and transmission of multimedia content over wireless networks. And finally, and related to the security of the information of the applications, it is tried to create mechanisms of detection of threats, of security incidents and above all, able to detect the malware designed especially for this type of applications and platforms.