CLOUDLIGHTNING – Self-Organising, Self-Managing Heterogeneous Cloud

CloudLightning aims to address the problems surrounding cloud infrastructure management, service specification, access to, and provisioning of, cloud resources faced by both consumers and providers of cloud services. CloudLightning’s initial target application domains are the oil and gas industry, genomics, and sectors that use ray tracing.
Currently, from a cloud service provider perspective, cloud service delivery models typically rely on over-provisioning to guarantee quality of service and accommodate unpredicted peaks in demand. The typical cloud server operates at approximately 20% computing capacity. The output capacity could be increased to 80% using heterogeneous processing resources with no change to the server’s energy consumption. This represents a model of inefficiency, coalescing in ongoing sub-optimal energy consumption and related costs for the service provider and ultimately the consumer. Additionally, service providers must grant users access to resources to allow them to configure the service to meet their requirements, thus requiring security and access protocols to manage user access and permissions.
From a cloud consumer perspective, when interfacing with their chosen cloud service provider, they are tasked with the provisioning, configuring and optimisation of resources to meet their requirements. This requires a commensurate level of IT expertise and knowledge of the provider’s infrastructure.
Small & medium enterprises, Open Source developers, Large companies, Technology providers, National government agencies, Research institutions, Other.
Consumers now have improved accessibility to heterogeneous cloud resources. The self-organising, self-managing principles used by CloudLightning provide consumers with a user-friendly service level interface to explicitly declare their requirements for service delivery. They can do this by specifying their exact workflow, dataset and time deadline. Through the assembly of dynamic resource coalitions, the self-organising and self-managing system automatically and intelligently locates the required resources and presents the most appropriate configuration of that service to the user for selection.
Cloud service providers now enjoy power-efficient, scalable management of their cloud infrastructures and better overall utilisation of service. CloudLightning’s new standard in-service description language is not only easy to implement, but means that the service configuration presented by the self-organising, self-managing system will always be within the constraints of the service provider’s resources, thereby providing optimal resource allocation and energy consumption. The coalition formation and service deployment processes negate the need to grant users access to manually configure their service description, thus providing an additional layer of security to the provider.
CloudLightning benefits service providers with the freedom to use its resources optimally and frees the consumer of the need and expertise required to configure cloud service delivery.
Digital health, Energy, Media, Other.