The EU-funded Swarmchestrate project (Application-level Swarm-based Orchestration Across the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum) was officially launched in January 2024. This spring, the consortium of 14 partners, coordinated by HUN-REN SZTAKI, gathered in Budapest for their first face-to-face meeting to discuss the work plan of the project which aims to combine emerging technologies in the domains of Swarm computing, distributed AI, distributed ledger systems and decentralised identity management to create a completely decentralised, autonomous and self-organised application management system which supports the processing of large amounts of data generated at the network edges with the help of hyper-distributed and complex applications in the Cloud-to-Edge continuum.
The idea of Swarmchestrate is rooted in the ever-growing number of intelligent smart devices collecting huge amounts of data at the edges of the network, which currently require high-speed and highly accurate data transmission, pushing the centralised cloud processing functions to their limits. To alleviate such a situation, the need for processing this data in a heterogeneous computing environment, that spans across geographic distances, providers, connectivity types and network zones, comes to the forefront. Fog and edge computing move some of the processing from the cloud towards the edges of the network and closer to the end devices. These new, highly distributed paradigms require novel application management methods.
To overcome the limitations imposed by the current, primarily centralised application management approaches, Swarmchestrate will develop a novel, decentralised, application-level orchestrator, based on the notion of so-called swarms of interdependent units in a dynamic orchestration space. These swarms will be managed by distributed, AI-based orchestration agents, aided by blockchain-based trusted solutions, state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms, and privacy-preserving data analytics.
The three-year-long project will test and fine-tune this new approach as necessary via real-life demonstrators in flood prevention, parking space management, video analytics and a digital twin of the natural habitat.
The project coordinator is HUN-REN SZTAKI, a Hungarian research institute; among the 14 project partners, we find universities, research institutes and companies from 10 different EU countries, the UK and Korea. The technical coordination lies with the University of Westminster, represented in this project by the Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC), a centre of excellence and one of the leading and most successful research hubs within the University. The project is funded with €4,3 million from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme, with £938.271 coming from the UKRI and with €356.229 from the Seoul National University (Institute of Engineering Research) and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (funded by the Korea government, Ministry of Science and ICT -MSIT).
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