• H2020
• Industrial Leadership
• ICT

A UK-based cloud ICT firm has announced its participation in a Horizon 2020 project aimed at simplifying the creation of lightweight and highly optimised virtual machine (VM) images tuned for functional descriptions of applications.

Flexiant is participating in the ‘Decentralized repositories for transparent and efficient virtual machine operations’ or ENTICE project. The venture will decompose and distribute VM images based on multi-objective optimisation (performance, economic cost, storage size, and QoS needs), and develop a knowledge base and reasoning infrastructure to meet application runtime requirements.

The project also seeks to research elastic autoscale applications on cloud resources based on their fluctuating load with optimised VM interoperability across cloud infrastructures. Without provider lock-in, its intended that this will help achieve the potential that virtualisation technology has to offer.

Speaking about Flexiant’s involvement in ENTICE, the company’s head of research, Craig Sheridan, said: “Many service providers face barriers to effectivity using cloud resources and virtualisation environments for their computing and data processing needs. Optimising VMs is important both for the cloud applications running on them and also the cloud providers offering the resource. ENTICE seeks to remove these barriers making it easier for service providers to access optimised VMs.”

Other partners involved in the consortium include the University of Innsbruck, Austria; SZTAKI, Hungary; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Wellness Telecom and DEIMOS, both in Spain. The venture is receiving just over €2.7m of funding from the European Commission through Horizon 2020 and began in February; it is set to run until 2018.