The Internet is on the verge of a turning point due to the ever increasing Internet-connected intelligent devices that in the upcoming decade will be in the orders of tens of billions forming the Internet of Things (IoT). Each intelligent device is pushing a little data to the Internet, and a little data pushed by billions of smart devices in Homes, Cities and Environments will be aggregated to become Big Data, stored and processed currently in huge central data-centres. “Big Data driven innovation forms a key pillar in 21st century sources of growth.
These large data sets are becoming a core asset in the economy, fostering new industries, processes and products and creating significant competitive advantages. The Big Data rush is on! The development of the required Big Data infrastructure and technologies is expected to generate thousands of specialist jobs alone and hundreds of thousands of jobs across markets where Big Data can change the way business intelligence is acquired and used. Big Data analytics technology alone for instance has potential annual value of €250 billion to Europe’s public sector administration and can generate over €600 billion of annual consumer surplus.
Turning this opportunity into products and employment growth critically depends on overcoming a formidable obstacle: harnessing efficiently the imminent data flood in the Future Internet. This is contingent on improving the performance of servers that run internet/cloud based services, while reducing their design and implementation cost as well as power consumption. This is very important for reducing the running costs in a server farm that support today’s data-centres and cloud providers, while at the same time it enables the placement of servers co-located with the origin of the data (e.g. sensors) where power is limited. In addition, all these new efficient servers need to be able to support useful attributes of today’s popular software stacks of cloud service providers that facilitate migration and programmability. What is more, there is a need to rethink the architecture model of Internet in terms of sustainability and security since communication of petabytes per second to/from massive data-centres in remote locations over the existing network might be infeasible or at best result in long unpredictable latencies and pose increased security and privacy threats.
The primary mission of the UniServer project is to develop a unique energy-efficient and error-resilient server ecosystem that will allow to address the above challenges and facilitate the evolution of the Internet.