European Heterogeneous Cloud/Edge Infrastructures for Next Generation Hybrid Services

The HIGHER project follows the Open Compute Project (OCP) Server family of standards to build processor modules for computation and acceleration, alongside a system security/control module. The project aims to build modular rack-scale systems, running with fully-featured operating systems and runtimes, and incorporating reusable standards-based infrastructure that encompasses hardware, low-level firmware, and systems software, while 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.