IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center has officially started cooperation in the international EVEREST project. The project aims at developing a holistic approach for co-designing computation and communication in a cutting-edge and primarily secure system for high-performance data analysis (HPDA). This approach will be tested using a weather analysis-based prediction model for the renewable energy trading market, an application for air-quality monitoring of industrial sites, and a real-time traffic modelling framework for intelligent transportation in Smart Cities.

The distributed and heterogeneous nature of the data sources in High Performance Big Data Analytics (HPDA) applications, as well as the required computational power, are the aspects pushing designers towards novel computing systems that combine high performance computing (HPC), Cloud services, and IoT solutions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. “The EVEREST project focuses on finding a match between application requirements and the characteristics of the underlying hardware system because only an optimal match leads to efficient computation. In particular, we forecast that future systems will not only reflect requirements based on data but will also be featuring complex architectures that must be redesigned and customized based on the nature and locality of the data, and the type of learning or decisions to be performed,” explains Kateřina Slaninová.

The EVEREST project aims at developing a holistic approach for co-designing computation and communication in a heterogeneous, distributed, scalable and secure system for HPDA. This is achieved by simplifying the programmability of heterogeneous and distributed architectures through a “data-driven” design approach, the use of hardware-accelerated AI, and through an efficient monitoring of the execution with a unified hardware-software paradigm. The EVEREST project proposes a design environment that combines state-of-the-art programming models and emerging communication standards, with novel and dedicated domain-specific extensions.

In order to validate the proposed approach within the EVEREST project, three application scenarios will be used, focused on particular industries:

  1. a weather analysis-based prediction model for the renewable energy trading market,
  2. an application for air-quality monitoring of industrial sites, and
  3. a real-time traffic modelling framework for intelligent transportation in Smart Cities.

IT4Innovations and the company Sygic will be responsible for the third application scenario mentioned, which models traffic in real time. “Traffic modelling based on large amounts of data using advanced AI technologies seems to us to be a forward-looking way to develop relevant transport solutions for cities. We believe that this project and collaboration with IT4Innovations will help us bring such solutions to the market,” said Radim Cmar, Solution architect at Sygic. “Apart from this, we will also be ensuring the technical part engaging in the further development of programming models for the orchestration of complex workflows and exploitation and dissemination of the results emerging from within the project,” specified Kateřina Slaninová.

The three-year long project was launched on 1st October 2020 by an online kick-off meeting of the project partners. Among the 10 partners from six European countries are not only research institutions but also commercial companies, with IBM Research GmbH from Switzerland acting as the Key Coordinator. EVEREST has received financial support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and its overall budget is EUR 5 037 372.50. For more information, see the following link: https://everest-h2020.eu

This project has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement No 957269.