ACTiCLOUD: Enabling the Next Generation of Cloud Applications

Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently. Resources are stranded and fragmented, ultimately limiting cloud systems' applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. Eliminating current technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources is essential to strengthen cloud computing's role as a critical cornerstone for the digital economy. ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud architecture that breaks the existing scale-up and share-nothing barriers and enables the holistic management of physical resources both at the local cloud site and at distributed levels. Specifically, it makes advancements in the cloud resource management stacks by extending state-of-the-art hypervisor technology beyond the physical server boundary and localized cloud management system to provide a holistic resource management within a rack, within a site, and across distributed cloud sites. On top of this, ACTiCLOUD will adapt and optimize system libraries and runtimes (e.g., JVM) as well as ACTiCLOUD-native applications, which are extremely demanding, and critical classes of applications that currently face severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements to state-of-the-art cloud offerings

A Practical and Scalable Privacy-preserving Framework

ENCRYPT is an EU funded research initiative, working towards the development of a scalable, practical, adaptable privacy-preserving framework, allowing researchers and developers to process data stored in federated cross-border data spaces in a GDPR-compliant way. ENCRYPT proposes an intelligent and user-centric platform for the confidential processing of privacy-sensitive data via configurable, optimizable, and verifiable privacy-preserving techniques. Research and development activities leverage, improve, and complement technologies and cryptographic schemes that represent the current state-of-the-art in the field of data-in-use protection. Hence, ENCRYPT builds on top of cutting-edge technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multi-Party Computation, Differential Privacy, Trusted Execution Environment, GPU acceleration, knowledge graphs, and AI-based recommendation systems, making them configurable in terms of security and, most importantly, performance. The ENCRYPT framework is being designed taking into consideration the needs and preferences of relevant actors and will be validated in realistic use cases provided by consortium partners in three sectors, namely healthcare (oncology domain), fintech, and cyber threat intelligence domain. This position paper provides an overview of ENCRYPT by presenting project objectives, use cases, and technology pillars

Minimal ownership for active objects

htmlabstractActive objects offer a structured approach to concurrency, encapsulating both unshared state and a thread of control. For efficient data transfer, data should be passed by reference whenever possible, but this introduces aliasing and undermines the validity of the active objects. This paper proposes a minimal variant of ownership types that preserves the required race freedom invariant yet enables data transfer by reference between active objects (that is, without copying) in many cases, and a cheap clone operation where copying is necessary. Our approach is general and should be adaptable to several existing active object systems