RHR talks: PHYSICS EU project

Join Red Hat Research for the next Research Days event, PHYSICS EU Project: Advancing FaaS applications in the cloud continuum on November 16, 2022, from 3PM to 4:30PM CEST.

The Function-as-a-Service (Faas) paradigm offers cloud service providers and application designers speed, simplicity, and efficiency, so long as they have accessible tools and techniques to implement it. For this month’s research presentation, Georgios Kousiouris, Harokopio University of Athens, will give an overview of PHYSICS, a large-scale EU Horizon-funded research collaboration that aims to unlock the potential of FaaS in the cloud continuum. Luis Tomás Bolívar, Red Hat, and Yiannis Georgiou, Ryax Technologies, will lead the conversation. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in the live discussion.

Abstract

PHYSICS is a high technology EU Horizon research project with a total funding of about five million euros composed of 14 international partners. The project started in January 2021 and will end in December 2023. PHYSICS aims to unlock the potential of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm for cloud service providers and application developers. When realized, it will enable application developers to design, implement, and deploy advanced FaaS applications through abstract and visual design environments, leveraging proven design patterns and integrated DevOps pipelines.

PHYSICS also offers a novel Global Continuum Layer aimed at exploiting the cloud (including edge and multi-cloud locations) for optimizing the deployment and execution of functions based on aspects such as latency, performance, cost, locality, and other constraints. It does so by extending the needed infrastructure components (the Kubernetes scheduler, for example), offering novel ways of container management that target optimized operation of the infrastructure cluster in the form of container scheduling and co-allocation mechanisms.

In this talk, we will discuss the goals and current status of the PHYSICS EU Horizon project before exploring some of the main research areas of focus and open source development. Specifically, we will describe how visual flow programming and ready-made patterns can enhance abstract function development, and we will investigate different function orchestration means and trade-offs in terms of capabilities and performance. We will also explore the function execution in different clusters while highlighting differences in cluster setup from macroscopically examined load generation and how these map to the observed measurements. Finally, we will look at the task placement and scheduling optimizations that are being developed and how they can be beneficial, in particular, for FaaS-based applications.

Speaker

• Georgios Kousiouris, Harokopio University of Athens

Conversation Leaders

• Luis Tomás Bolívar, Red Hat
• Yiannis Georgiou, Ryax Technologies

Visit the PHYSICS project website for more information.