PHYSICS is a high technology project with a total funding of about 5ML€ composed by 14 international partners of which GFT is coordinator. The project started in January 2021 and will end in December 2023.
The main goal of PHYSICS is to unlock the potential of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm for Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and for Application Developers. Specifically, it will enable application developers to design, implement and deploy advanced FaaS applications in the scope of advanced cloud application design environments, leveraging proven design patterns and existing libraries of cloud/FaaS components. Furthermore, PHYSICS will offer a novel Global Continuum Layer that will undertake to deploy functions in optimal ways that will optimize multiple application objectives at the same time, including for example performance, latency, and cost. The platform will offer a graphical view of the application flow, allowing through simple drag and drop commands to create pipelines of functions according to the FaaS model.
PHYSICS will validate the benefits of its Global Continuum Layer and tools, in the scope of user-driven application scenarios in three important sectors, namely healthcare, agriculture and industry.
Specifically:
- PHYSICS in Manufacturing: The PHYSICS industrial use cases will focus on manufacturing and production. It will be deployed in a smart plant testbed to demonstrate how FaaS model can be used to optimize production pipelines in environments where multiple edge devices are used. Specifically, FaaS enabled production pipelines based on heterogeneous devices that are currently available in the plant will be developed. The devices of the pilot plant include edge devices, several HPC (High-Performance Computing) Clusters or single HPCs, special GPU (Graphical Processing Units) enabled processing nodes, industrial PCs, PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), Single-board computers, Raspberry Pis, as well as devices that simulate Quantum-like processes. PHYSICS will facilitate the combination and use of services from these diverse setups in a seamless and integrated manner. Moreover, it will ensure that relevant FaaS functions for accessing the capabilities of these devices are assigned and used in optimally.
- PHYSICS in Healthcare: The PHYSICS healthcare use case will focus on the deployment of functions (FaaS) across multiple IoT edge devices and smartphones that provide Real-World Data and enable the extraction of novel biomarkers about certain diseases. The data received are divided into two main categories: measured (objective) and reported (subjective). Through different devices it will be possible, exploiting the FaaS paradigm and Machine Learning technologies, to make predictions on possible problems based also on clustering activities between patients with similar lifestyles. PHYSICS FaaS functions will be optimized to address diverse needs about data access interfaces, data harmonization, and transformation, as well as different privacy and data protection requirements.
- PHYSICS in Agriculture: The PHYSICS Agriculture Use Case will showcase how the FaaS paradigm can facilitate the implementation of many thousands of daily climatic simulations towards improving crop management and yield estimation. The scalable execution of thousands of simulations about each greenhouse is a key to manage meteorological uncertainty and correcting its trajectory with existing historical data. Specifically, FaaS will facilitate the optimal distribution and deployment of functions across different cloud environments and the local sites, in ways that ease (re)configuration of simulations towards an optimal distribution of computations across edge nodes and the cloud. Likewise, the use case will showcase a tangible performance improvement in the execution of simulation, including the possibility to execute simulations in near real-time.
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