The Ministry of Digital Affairs and the National Centre for Research and Development presented four innovative projects selected for funding in the KPO IPCEI CIS competition, implemented from the funds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Gdańsk University of Technology and the companies Atende Industries, Oktawave and CloudFerro will receive a total of PLN 217 million in funding.
The cloud solutions sector is currently dominated by a few large companies from third countries, while European suppliers are highly fragmented and account for less than 13% of the global market. This leads to problems such as a lack of scalability or transparency of offers. This situation negatively affects competition and makes it difficult to fully exploit the high innovation potential of the European economy. The IPCEI CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services) is intended to solve this situation, a project within the framework of the European Union’s digital policy. Its aim is to strengthen Europe’s digital and technological sovereignty. It involves supporting research, development and first industrial implementation of advanced cloud and edge computing technologies across multiple providers in Europe.
On June 19, a conference was held in Warsaw to inaugurate the implementation of four projects in the field of infrastructure and cloud technologies. The selection of projects is the result of the KPO IPCEI CIS competition, implemented by NCBR from the funds of the National Reconstruction Plan. The Ministry of Digital Affairs is responsible for the investment.
– We invest the funds of the National Reconstruction Plan in areas that are strategically important for the country, including digital technologies powered by green energy. We are creating a country that is efficient, modern, friendly to citizens, and above all – safe in cyberspace. Projects implemented by the beneficiaries of the competition will bring us closer to this goal – said Krzysztof Gawkowski, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Digital Affairs.
The selected research and development projects fit into the IPCEI mechanism value chain and are characterised by a high level of innovation, a positive impact on the environment, while contributing to the increase in the competitiveness of the entire European industry and the further development of the common digital market.
– The competition implemented by NCBR serves the development and first industrial implementations of advanced research and development projects towards building data processing in the cloud and within edge processing. It is very important for us that the solutions created in the course of the work find their application on the market, thus increasing the technological and competitive potential of our country and, more broadly, the entire European Union – pointed out prof. Dr.-Ing. Jerzy Małachowski, director of the National Centre for Research and Development.
Bulk IoT data storage
Warsaw-based Atende Industries will implement the project “Highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database for critical real-time IoT applications” as part of the IPCEI CIS, for which it received funding of PLN 19 million (€4,273,965). TStorage is a distributed NoSQL database that allows for very efficient collection and processing of time series data, e.g. data on electricity consumption collected by smart meters. The database already has its applications in the energy market, and thanks to funding from IPCEI-CIS, it will be possible to expand it with functionalities necessary for cloud services in sectors such as industry 4.0, smart agriculture, aviation, space applications, health and smart cities.
– The main goal, within the framework of the implemented project, is to create a unique, reliable, secure and highly scalable distributed system for storing time-stamped data, which will be made available to technology recipients as a cloud service. The means to achieve this goal is to develop the existing version of the TStorage database currently installed on-site on the client’s side, by carrying out a number of research and development works – said Dominik Bocheński, Vice President of the Management Board of Atende Industries.
The database prepared as part of the project will find wide application in industry, which will be confirmed in the first industrial implementations together with partners from Poland, Italy, Spain, Germany and Hungary. The target users of the technology will be mainly professional entities (SMEs and large enterprises), research units and universities involved in processing large amounts of data.
Cloud Security
Oktawave’s “Next Gen Cloud” project takes on the challenge of developing a range of technologies to create a secure runtime environment for applications in the public cloud. The company will receive nearly PLN 47 million in funding for this purpose. The solution is to technically prevent cloud service providers from gaining access to data. The resulting technology should have universal application, i.e. secure the processing process in both global public cloud environments and private cloud environments located in local data centers. The scope of the project will focus on research into the possibility of using cryptographic techniques as a basis for building runtime environments and data storage spaces implemented in the GPU processor space.
– One of the challenges for companies planning to move sensitive data to the cloud is also the need to distribute, manage and secure encryption keys entrusted to the cloud. Our project will try to solve this problem by working on creating a secure enclave within the memory of classic, but virtualized CPUs. The solution will be used to store encryption keys and eliminate the need to use hardware devices such as HSM, which are usually incompatible with the public cloud. – said Maciej Kuźniar, CEO of Oktawave.
In parallel, the Company will work on techniques for authorization, consolidation, and tracking changes in data sets distributed between cloud processing centers (between central and edge-type centers) as part of the project. The goal will be to obtain a consistent view of distributed data. The development of automation and the dynamics of resource migrations visible in real time between centers have revealed the need to create a uniform view for observing this data. A consistent view, which will be equipped with standard industrial data access interfaces, will enable existing applications and those created for classic server architecture to fully utilize the benefits of the cloud.
Data processing
Another company that received funding is CloudFerro, and its “Gateway” project was supported by nearly PLN 97 million. It was created in response to the huge increase in the amount of data generated in recent years. Its goal is to create the first European dataspace, a coherent platform for exchanging, storing and processing spatial data, ensuring control and security. Thanks to an innovative approach to managing the computing infrastructure, users will be able to use resources in a more efficient way, without location restrictions.
– Our goal is to build the largest spatial dataset in Europe, based on next-generation cloud computing services, which will be available to both public administration officials and commercial companies throughout Europe. One of the projects within the Gateway is, for example, preparing a set of services for managing a smart city – explains the president of CloudFerro, Dr. Maciej Krzyżanowski.
The aim of the project is to intelligently manage data and computing resources, while limiting the negative impact on the environment. Thanks to a flexible approach to resource management, services will be tailored to the individual needs of users, while ensuring sustainable development. Work on the project has been divided into two phases: research, development and innovation and industrial implementation. Each phase ends with a commercial implementation, which precedes research and development work. They include user and access management, integration of spatial data and development of a distributed computing infrastructure.
Collaboration with foreign partners, both within the project and outside of it, aims to ensure the widest possible adoption of solutions and attract users at the stage of implementation in industry. The Gateway project aims to create an integrated ecosystem that will enable secure sharing, use and storage of spatial data.
University for Smart Services
“Cloud platform (CAISE – Cloud Artificial Intelligence Service Engineering) for the production of universal intelligent services for various application areas”, for which it will receive funding in the amount of almost PLN 55 million. The platform will be located on the TASKcloud computing cloud developed in CI TASK for several years. TASKcloud will be enriched with further open software creating an environment for the execution of services and applications. On this basis, an environment supporting the production of intelligent cloud services and applications will be built. Additionally, the functionality of the platform will be complemented by services for effective management of clients, their applications and cloud resources, so as to minimize both the time of service execution and energy consumption.
– The CAISE platform will offer new categories of cloud services related to the processing of digital documents, such as: analysis of the content of digital text documents written in Polish, such as the interpretation of a business note, processing of images available in DICOM format, for example for recognizing medical problems, and hybrid documents composed of text descriptions and images – for example, automatic analysis of the structure of a book page – says Prof. Henryk Krawczyk, CAISE project manager from the Gdańsk University of Technology.
Thanks to the use of high-performance computing (HPC), the possibilities of using deep learning methods and Big Data methods providing appropriate data for machine learning will significantly increase. The quality of both the data provided and machine learning methods, as well as the entire process of creating intelligent services, will be controlled. For this purpose, specialized mechanisms for monitoring both the process of creating intelligent services and the functioning of the CAISE platform will be offered.
In the project, the university assumes cooperation with four foreign companies in the field of creating multi-cloud solutions and three Polish companies, whose task will be to fully verify the functioning of the platform. Thanks to these companies, real sector data for machine learning will be obtained, as well as specific use cases will be considered, with the help of which the University of Technology will test the comprehensive operation of the platform. Such verification will ensure that the platform achieves the highest level of technological readiness and its use in at least three sectors of public administration: justice, health care and education. This will be an original implementation of a cloud AI solution, constituting a significant product innovation. The possibility of using the CAISE platform in a multi-cloud environment will contribute to the development of not only the national digital economy in the area of public activity, but will also allow for further digital transformation in the EU sectors considered.
The National Centre for Research and Development implemented the KPO IPCEI CIS competition as a Unit supporting the development plan. The funds allocated for the support of the projects in the competition come from the European Recovery and Resilience Fund.
