The mF2C project is now reaching its first year of successful activities that have turned into remarkable contributions, mostly dealing as of today, with conceptual aspects of the mF2C architecture, what is in short the key objective of the project. From a formal perspective, the project has met all major milestones and also submitted deliverables after running the project internal checking for quality and correctness, in due time. A brief report of the main achievements is included next, split into two domains, technical and dissemination.
From a technical perspective three ongoing activities have gathered main project efforts:
Main functional blocks definition
The mF2C project started early January leveraging a preliminary architecture for the management model in mF2C, as envisioned in the project proposal document. Within the first year of the project, WP2 activities have focused on deeply defining main blocks in the architecture (agent controller and platform manager), the envisioned functionalities for each block, the mapping of this set of functionalities into functional blocks and the connectivity rules among them all. This effort turned out into a more elaborated design of the architecture (D2.6 available at http://www.mf2c-project.eu/d2-6-m6/), aligned to current technologies and other ongoing efforts, that is now on the coding stage through WP3 and WP4, in the first project efforts devoted to implementation. Additionally, the core set of functionalities for the Agent Controller and Platform Manager, as designed to meet the expected mF2C performance, are defined in D3.3 (http://www.mf2c-project.eu/d3-3-m9/) and D4.3 (http://www.mf2c-project.eu/d4-3-m9/), and later deployed in D3.5 and D4.5 respectively.
Finally, the project has also identified the main rules for the whole mF2C system control and governance. This relates to the required processes to set the system up, maintain the system working, react to a service query or to a topology change, including the strategy for installing the mF2C system.
Workflows for core mF2C functionalities
The project has already identified a set of functionalities that will be used for the first validation process to be handled in M18 over the three use cases included in the mF2C project. Indeed, recognized the large set of opportunities inherent to the mF2C concept, but also keeping in mind that the project seeks for a real deployment on real-world use cases, WP3, WP4 and WP5 have been working on identifying the core set of functionalities seed of the whole mF2C system, including for example the registration process or the service execution process, considering transversal constraints such as security or QoS guarantees.
So far, 20 workflows have been designed to map the envisioned functionalities into the designed functional blocks.
Use cases description
The project is committed from the early beginning in deploying a real prototype of the proposed mF2C architecture, to show clear evidences of the benefits brought by deploying a mF2C system. Aligned to such essence, the project included three real-world scenarios where the project must be validated on three well-defined services as:
– Emergency Situation Management in Smart City (ESM);
– Smart Boat Use Case (SB);
– Smart Fog-Hub Service (SFHS).
The main concept behind deploying mF2C in these three scenarios is to highlight the benefits brought by mF2C and so analysing the services performance with and without mF2C. This analysis is key and mandatory to promote the mF2C need and thus its deployment into a real product. To that end, the project is working on describing a comprehensive storyboard for the three use cases, describing services and expected functionalities. Although a high level description of the use cases was included in D2.6, current efforts are in digging into the services details to ease its deployment at in-lab premises for a preliminary deployment in IT-1 in M18.
Finally, and intended to ease the real deployment of the mF2C prototype, during this year the project has set a developers team encompassing members from all project partners responsible for coding the blocks identified in the design phase. This team meets weekly to sync up and its results are stored in a public software repository.
From the dissemination perspective, main events and results handled during the first project year are the following.
Project Meetings
After the kick-off meeting organized early January by Atos in Barcelona, two General Assembly meetings have been organized within the project.
mF2C First General Assembly Meeting
The meeting was held successfully in May 3-4, 2017 in Braunschweig, Germany and was organized by TUBS.
mF2C Second General Assembly Meeting
The meeting was held successfully in September 19-20, 2017 in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain and was organized by UPC.
1st mF2C workshop
Named as F2C-DP Workshop it was collocated with the Euro-Par Conference, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in August 2017, with 20 participants. The workshop put together a technical session with several papers (six accepted and presented papers) in the mF2C thematic area as long as a keynote by John Kennedy (Intel Labs) “The emerging edge – drivers, technologies and challenges – an industry perspective”; and finally, a very interesting panel discussion with reputed experts on the project areas as well.
Training sessions and topic-oriented workshops
Different sessions and events have been organized by mF2C partners intended to both increase the knowledge on some fields closely related with the project and to train attendants on tools and solutions brought by them.
- Nuvla & SlipStream Training day, Geneva, April 4-5, 2017, organized by SIXSQ, 18 attendants, including 6 external participants from industry
- COMPS and DataClay Workshop, Vilanova i la Geltrù, September 18, 2017, trained delivered by BSC, 20 attendees
- Security Workshop, Abingdon, November 13-14, 2017, organized and hosted by STFC, 15 attendants.
Attendance to other related meetings
The project, through some of its partners, has participated in several related meetings in different domains, as briefly introduced next:
- Europe: Atos at Net Futures 2017 and Concertation meetings organized by CloudWATCH2; XLAB at ICT proposers’ day, and; ENG at EC NEM Summit.
- Standard bodies: Intel and ATOS at the Workshop to promote practical collaboration between Cloud Open Source and Standardization and Cloud – Select Industry Group on cloud standards: ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market
- Industrial: Intel at the DC Transformation Manchester; SIXSQ at the CeBIT trade fair in Hamburg; ENG at IOTHINGS Rome 2017, WSO2Con Europe 2017, European Big Data Value Forum 2017 and the EIT Digital Italian Innovation Day 2017.
Dissemination actions:
In this year the project consortium has notably contributed to spread the project concepts and the preliminary results obtained from the first evaluation activities.
Scientific papers.
The mF2C project partners have submitted and published 8 papers, out of which 5 papers were presented at the 1st mF2C workshop.
Project presentations.
Different actions have been done to make the mF2C visible in different venues:
- A poster of the mF2C project was presented in the IEEE/ACM IWQoS conference in June 2017.
- The UPC team presented the mF2C project in a meeting of the H2020 CIPSEC in June 2017.
- The mF2C project was also introduced in a Workshop organized by the Spanish thematic network: Elastic Networks, in June 2017.
- STFC presented the mF2C project both internally (based on the prototype) and at a couple of UK-based events for scientific software developers.
Collaboration with other projects
The project has set stable collaborations with ongoing EU projects, including CloudWATCH2, RECAP, and CIPSEC. In addition the project has also identified a list of potential projects, in common thematic areas, where collaboration may be mutually beneficial.
Blog and Newsletter
This is the second mF2C newsletter aimed at broadly disseminate the project activities. Even more relevant, the project has set a blog on topics related to the project, and has also established a procedure to keep the blog active. The project webpage already includes 6 entries on different aspects mixing industrial and academic contributions. http://www.mf2c-project.eu/blog/blog/
Promotion material
The mF2C project has recorded 3 videos during the 2nd General Assembly Meeting, intended to both increase project visibility and facilitate project concepts and progress understanding. The videos emphasize three key aspects as follows:
- Video about project overview and objectives
- Video about the expected industrial impact
- Video about the scientific challenges of this project
All videos are made available on both the mF2C YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHLm6stUM9UaOw66Qn3dwdQ) and the open repository owned by the UPC, UPCommons Research Portal (https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/109563)
Finally, all project information and promotion material (poster, project presentation, flyers, videos) may be found at the project website at http://www.mf2c-project.eu