Meet the scientific coordinator of the project: University of Westminster
The University of Westminster has started out 180 years ago as the first polytechnic in London and one of the first in the UK, established to educate the working people of London. Today the university continues to build on this reputation, helping students from a variety of backgrounds to realise their full potential. The UoW has 19,000 students, representing 169 nationalities and collaborates with more than 180 partners from industry.
Within Swarmchestrate, the UoW is represented by the Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC), a center of excellence and one of the leading and most successful research hubs within the University. The CPC is specialized in developing solutions for the optimal utilization of distributed computing architectures, such as cloud, fog and edge computing resources, and science and business gateways. The CPC has participated in 13 EU funded projects during the past 10 years, including both core distributed computing related research, and also applied research in application areas such as space physics, healthcare and manufacturing.
What is the University of Westminster role in the project?
As one of the main initiators of the core project idea, the University of Westminster team acts as Scientific Coordinator for Swarmchestrate. In this role it assumes responsibility for the overall scientific progress and direction of the project. The UoW team also leads Work Package 2 on Decentralised Orchestration and as such responsible for one of the most important modules of the overall Swarmchestrate framework. The UoW team also significantly contributes to the design and development of the AI-driven decentralised intelligence component.
Why is this project important for the University of Westminster?
Being a core distributed computing research centre, research and development of fundamental technologies in this area is the primary focus of the CPC. Within the H2020 COLA project (https://project-cola.eu/) the UoW team developed the MiCADO application level cloud orchestrator (https://micado-scale.eu/) that was further enhanced in several follow-up projects, e.g. ASCLEPIOS (https://www.asclepios-project.eu/) and DIGITbrain (https://www.digitbrain.eu/) and applied by a diverse set of user communities (manufacturing, local governments, healthcare, etc.). In Swarmchestrate, the UoW team aspires to put MiCADO into the next level by creating a fully decentralised orchestration framework that fits better to the cloud-to-edge compute continuum.
Who are the key people involved?
The UoW team is led by Tamas Kiss who also acts as Project Scientific Coordinator and WP2 leader. The team consists of experienced researchers, such as Gabor Terstyanszky, Francesco Tusa and James DesLauriers, and will also be extended with two postdoc researchers.