The 6th General Assembly meeting of the PHYSICS project took place on March 6th – 7th, 2023, in Munich, Germany, and was hosted by Fujitsu TDS GmbH.
The event provided a platform for the consortium partners to report on the status of various tasks and deliverables. The coordinator and work package (WP) leaders led discussions on any outstanding matters, fostering engagement and collaboration. The meeting was conducted using a hybrid format, blending in-person and virtual participation.

Looking forward to the next one!

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Press Release: PHYSICS 6th General Assembly appeared first on PHYSICS.

The 5th PHYSICS project General Assembly meeting was held on November 15th – 16th, 2022 in Madrid, Spain and was hosted by ATOS.
Partners had the opportunity to update the consortium on the progress of different tasks and deliverables, and further discuss any open issues. Led by the coordinator and WP leaders, the consortium also discussed feedback generated by the project’s review and future plans regarding the third and final year of the PHYSICS project. The meeting was organized in a hybrid mode.

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Press Release: PHYSICS 5th General Assembly appeared first on PHYSICS.

Abstract

Serverless environments have attracted significant attention in recent years as a result of their agility in execution as well as inherent scaling capabilities as a cloud-native execution model. While extensive analysis has been performed in various critical performance aspects of these environments, such as cold start times, the aspect of workflow orchestration delays has been neglected. Given that this paradigm has become more mature in recent years and application complexity has started to rise from a few functions to more complex application structures, the issue of delays in orchestrating these functions may become severe. In this work, one of the main open source FaaS platforms, Openwhisk, is utilized in order to measure and investigate its orchestration delays for the main sequence operator of the platform. These are compared to delays included in orchestration of functions through two alternative means, including the execution of orchestrator logic functions in supporting runtimes based on Node-RED. The delays inserted by each different orchestration mode are measured and modeled, while boundary points of selection between each mode are presented, based on the number and expected delay of the functions that constitute the workflow. It is indicative that in certain cases, the orchestration overheads might range from 0.29% to 235% compared to the beneficial computational time needed for the workflow functions. The results can extend simulation and estimation mechanisms with information on the orchestration overheads.

Authors

• George Kousiouris
• Chris Giannakos
• Konstantinos Tserpes
• Teta Stamati

The post Measuring Baseline Overheads in Different Orchestration Mechanisms for Large FaaS Workflows appeared first on PHYSICS.

The 4th PHYSICS project General Assembly meeting was held on July 4th – 6th, 2022. The meeting was hosted by RYAX in Athens, Greece. During the meeting, the partners analyzed the project’s growth and had the opportunity to participate in meeting in person or join virtually in discussions about the next goals of the project. All the work packages of the project were discussed in-depth to monitor the project’s progress and agree on future plans.

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Press Release: PHYSICS 4th General Assembly appeared first on PHYSICS.

Abstract

Edge Computing (EC) performs computation at the close proximity to the end devices and reduces dependency to the Cloud and Internet. It also overcomes the Quality of Service (QoS) and latency issues that come naturally from the best- effort behaviour of the Cloud. Although reduced dependency to the Internet enables the application of the EC to the real- time applications, without a standard architecture, EC benefits cannot be incorporated. To this end, in our previous papers, we proposed a novel software reference architecture (SRA) for Edge Servers. The SRA allows receiving Edge Computing benefits without worrying about setup or configuration, but only focusing on software development. Regardless of the computing power of the Edge Servers, the architecture enables a decentralised (real- time) task execution at the edge. Once a task request arrives, the receiving server determines whether to execute the task on itself or offload it to any of the neighbouring servers, by considering several parameters, such as latency, and available resources. In this paper, we explain how servers decide where to execute the task, without requiring a centralized load balancer. Moreover, we show how they share their resources between each other to create a common knowledge of their neighbouring servers.

Index Terms—real-time computing, edge computing, task of- floading, fog computing, decentralized load balancer.

Authors

• Volkan Gezer
• Achim Wagner

The post Real-Time Edge Framework (RTEF): Decentralized Decision Making for Offloading appeared first on PHYSICS.

The CCGrid symposium series serves as a major international forum for presenting and sharing recent research accomplishments and technological developments in the field of Cluster, Cloud and Internet computing. CCGrid 2022 is the 22nd edition of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Cluster, Cloud and Internet computing, took place from 16-19 May 2022.  EU Day, organised by HUB4CLOUD, explores the major developments in the European cloud computing ecosystem, in particular open source approaches. The presentation was held by Prof. George Kousiouris, Harokopio University of Athens.

Proposal

Modern cloud computing advances have been pressing application modernization in the last 15 years, stressing the need for application redesign towards the use of more distributed and ephemeral resources. From the initial IaaS and PaaS approaches to microservices and now to the serverless model (and especially the Function as a Service approach), new challenges arise constantly for application developers. This tutorial presents a design and
development environment coming from the H2020 PHYSICS project, that aims to ease application evolution and migration to the new FaaS model, based on the widely used Node-RED open source tool. The goal of the environment is to enable a more user friendly and abstract function and workflow creation for complex FaaS applications. To this end, it bypasses workflow description and function reuse limitations of the current FaaS platforms, by providing an extendable, pattern-enriched palette of ready-made, reusable functionality that can be combined in arbitrary ways. The environment embeds seamless DevOps processes for generating the deployable artefacts (i.e. functions and images) of the FaaS platform (Openwhisk). Annotation mechanisms are also available for the developer to dictate diverse execution options or management guidelines towards the deployment and operation stacks. Indicative scenarios of usage will be demonstrated, including creating, registering and executing functions and flows based on the Node-RED runtime, parallelizing a workload, collecting data at the edge and creating function orchestrators to accompany the application. The target FaaS platform in this case is another popular open source solution, Openwhisk.

Overall process: PHYSICS Design Environment

❖Local Control UI environment
❖Embeds Node-RED container with PHYSICS provided nodes and subflows
❖Flow management and Build process linked to the cloud based backend
❖Creates the deployable artefacts (docker function images)
❖Log collector from the various stages of the process
❖Registration of the final function in the target OW environment

Three ways of using Node-RED

Function editor and deployer to the OW case
❖OW execution- OW orchestration
❖Applies to sequences only
❖Function execution runtime
❖All functions embedded inside a NR container that is executed as a function (NR-NR)
❖Combination of inner NR functions execution and choreography of external available OW actions (OW-NR)
❖NR flow (executed as service or function)
❖Invokes any other type of action

ETL Data Collection Abstraction

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: https://fcrlab.unime.it/ccgrid22/

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post PHYSICS participated in the EU date of the CCGRID 2022 appeared first on PHYSICS.

The PHYSICS project General Assembly meeting was held on March 30th & 31st. The meeting was hosted by Red Hat in Israel. During the meeting the partners had the opportunity to participate at meeting in person or join virtually to discuss the overall progress of the project. The agenda included the project overview as well as a technical overview, including Work Packages related: to QoS and orchestration mechanisms and trust; smart contracts and decision support mechanisms; integration, pilots and evaluation. Discussions on planning the next steps of the project were also held.

The PHYSICS project coordinator, Fabrizio Di Peppo also presented the PHYSICS project to the Red Hat staff during lunchtime.

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Press Release: PHYSICS General Assembly appeared first on PHYSICS.

Application period is about to start!

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program designed to bring new, excited contributors into open source communities, with the hope that they will continue to contribute to open source communities long after their GSoC program ends. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program designed to bring new, excited contributors into open source communities, with the hope that they will continue to contribute to open source communities long after their GSoC program ends.

Partners of the PHYSICS project will be mentoring through ELLAK, the greek free and open source community, with a focus on implementing workflow, parallelization and cloud design patterns in Node-RED for Function as Service coordination:

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Press Release: Google Summer of Code 2022 – PHYSICS representatives will be mentoring on FaaS appeared first on PHYSICS.

5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing Performance (HotCloudPerf 2022) at ICPE 2022

9. April, 2022 – Virtual Conference

Overview

The HotCloudPerf workshop proposes a meeting venue for academics and practitioners, from experts to trainees, in the field of cloud computing performance. The new understanding of cloud computing covers the full computational continuum from data centers to edge resources to IoT sensors and devices. The workshop aims to engage this community and to lead to the development of new methodological aspects for gaining a deeper understanding not only of cloud performance, but also of cloud operation and behavior, through diverse quantitative evaluation tools, including benchmarks, metrics, and workload generators. The workshop focuses on novel cloud properties such as elasticity, performance isolation, dependability, and other non-functional system properties, in addition to classical performance-related metrics such as response time, throughput, scalability, and efficiency.

You may follow the PHYSICS project activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Acceptance of a new paper: Measuring Baseline Overheads in Different Orchestration Mechanisms for Large FaaS Workflows appeared first on PHYSICS.

Modern cloud computing advances have been pressing application modernization in the last 15 years, stressing the need for application redesign towards the use of more distributed and ephemeral resources. From the initial IaaS and PaaS approaches, to microservices and now to the serverless model (and especially the Function as a Service approach), new challenges arise constantly for application developers. This paper presents a design and development environment that aims to ease application evolution and migration to the new FaaS model, based on the widely used Node-RED open source tool. The goal of the environment is to enable a more user friendly and abstract function and workflow creation for complex FaaS applications. To this end, it bypasses workflow description and function reuse limitations of the current FaaS platforms, by providing an extendable, pattern-enriched palette of ready-made, reusable functionality that can be combined in arbitrary ways. The environment embeds seamless DevOps processes for generating the deployable artefacts (i.e. functions and images) of the FaaS platform (Openwhisk). Annotation mechanisms are also available for the developer to dictate diverse execution options or management guidelines towards the deployment and operation stacks. The evaluation is based on case studies of indicative scenarios, including creating, registering and executing functions and flows based on the Node-RED runtime, embedding of existing legacy code in a FaaS environment, parallelizing a workload, collecting data at the edge and creating function orchestrators to accompany the application. For the latter, a detailed argumentation is provided as to why this process should not be constrained by the “double billing” principle of FaaS.

Authors

• George Kousiouris, 
• Szymon Ambroziak, 
• Domenico Costantino, 
• Stylianos Tsarsitalidis, 
• Evangelos Boutas, 
• Alessandro Mamelli, 
• Teta Stamati

The post Combining Node-RED and Openwhisk for Pattern-based Development and Execution of Complex FaaS Workflows appeared first on PHYSICS.