Accelerated EuRopean clOud (AERO) Horizon Europe Research Project

AERO to enhance the software ecosystem for cloud computing infrastructures under EU Processor Initiative (EPI)

The main EU Processor Initiative's (EPI) objective is to lead the development of the first EU processor, aiming at finally achieving European sovereignty in chip design and computing infrastructure for cloud computing. However, for this challenging objective to succeed, a production ready software ecosystem needs to be ready when the EU processor hits the market.

AERO aims at facilitating an easy migration of existing cloud customers to an EU processor based cloud infrastructure, with a strong push on open source technologies. More in details, AERO works to extend the existing cloud computing software ecosystem to fully exploit the heterogeneity, security and energy-efficiency aspects of the EU processor. As a matter of facts, components like operating systems, drivers, compilers, firmwares, hypervisors and software runtimes will be ported and optimized on an EPI compliant CPU.

As an AERO consortium member, Virtual Open Systems (VOS) will work on virtualization solutions for the EU processor, aiming to enhance system performance and security. As for the former, EU processor hardware accelerators will be virtualized with extensions targeting KVM, rust-vmm and emerging open-source lightweight virtual machines (VMs). For what concerns security, a cloud computing based version of the VOS VOSySmonitor product will be developed aiming at providing VMs with a secure enclave to process sensitive data. Space explorations and automotive use cases will be used to showcase the AERO results business value.