European Heterogeneous Cloud/Edge Infrastructures for Next Generation Hybrid Services: HIGHER

Programme(s): 
HORIZON.2.4 - Digital, Industry and Space
HORIZON.2.4.2 - Key Digital Technologies

Grant agreement ID: 101189612

Topic(s): HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-21 - Open Source for Cloud/Edge to support European Digital Autonomy (RIA)

Call for proposal: HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-CNECT

Funding Scheme: HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

Objective:
HIGHER brings together 11 partners from industry and academia to jointly develop and validate open-source designs for high-density rack-scale systems capable of supporting cloud and edge services at scale in standards-based data center environments. Starting with the ARM RHEA2 and RISC-V EPAC processors from EPI and the RISC-V EUPilot processor chip, HIGHER adopts the Open Compute Project (OCP) Server family of standards to build processor modules for computation and acceleration, alongside a system security/control module, all operating with fully- featured operating systems and runtimes. HIGHER aims to design OCP server mechanics to provide modular rack systems incorporating reusable standards-based infrastructure, encompassing hardware, low-level firmware, and systems software, ensuring trustworthy functionality for managing, securing, and controlling servers. The project's open-source hardware and software outcomes will enhance European Digital Autonomy and facilitate wide adoption. Furthermore, the project will assemble representative software stacks supporting a range of use cases, including accelerated data processing and analysis for converged Cloud and HPC platforms, Infrastructure-as-a-Service with standardized management and monitoring, Platform- as-a-Service facilitating large-scale data processing for ML inference and data analytics, and memory pool management at the server rack level, with access control safeguards aligned with maturing CXL standards.