Work Package 1 – Project Coordination
Overall, the main objective of WP1 is to ease the seamless development of the ACCORDION project towards its scientific and technological goals while guaranteeing the delivery of highlevel outcomes. WP1 is committed to letting the project run smoothly. It is in charge of identifying potential threats and risks to avoid them, supporting the leveraging of the consortium’s strength, and supporting the consortium in taking the opportunities that may occur. WP1 also aims to ensure that ACCORDION is well-aligned and positioned to its ambitions in terms of innovation. The Project Coordination WP is called to adopt and provide all the technological and methodological instruments to improve the collaboration between partners. Moreover, this work package deals with the definition and operation of the policies related to the Open Access dissemination of results and the management of data created and leveraged by the project. Finally, WP1 must promptly react to unforeseeable situations to avoid those unexpected issues that may hinder the project outcomes.
Work package 2 – Requirements & System Design
WP2 deals with the definition of the directions for research and development that the technical WPs (WP3-5) must take to implement the project’s ambitions. It focuses its work on three distinct levels:
- the definition of requirements that are to be met by the ACCORDION platform and other technical artefacts
- the identification of the functionality to be supported and the analysis of state of art in the relevant sectors
- the definition of an architecture and of the subsequent component specifications
Work Package 3 – Edge infrastructure pool framework
WP3, led by HPE, aims to study methods and implement components to build an Edge infrastructure pool framework, or mini cloud, which is dynamic, cloud-enabled and optimizes the use of the underlying heterogeneous resources. The WP3 tasks aim to provide enablers that will contribute to discovering, characterizing and monitoring the underlying resources based on their capacity, aggregate available storage resources providing a first-class object store service, and develop lightweight virtualization technologies to obtain the best results from the available resource-constrained infrastructure. A Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) suitable for edge environments will be provided to support the various enablers so that the edge mini clouds will form “islands” at the respective sites, holding together and normalizing the underlying resources.
Work package 4 – Edge/Cloud continuum management framework
WP4, led by TID, aims to build a framework that efficiently orchestrates the resources in the federation, to optimize the deployment and runtime management of the ACCORDION applications and to infuse applications with end-to-end resilience, security, and privacy properties. The WP4 tasks will provide enablers that will contribute to providing:
- The necessary functionalities for managing all types of ACCORDION resources;
- The allocation plans for deploying ACCORDION applications while considering their KPIs;
- A proactive fault tolerance mechanism using continuous resource usage features by the resource monitoring system;
- Technologies and tools applicable to the Edge/Cloud continuum framework to improve the security of CI/CD development pipelines in a Security by Design approach;
- The secure and private execution of containers, the creation of privacy-preserving machine learning models and the detection and prevention of user data leakage;
The ACCORDION Intelligent Orchestrator (AIO) is the core component to manage the “continuum” of resources belonging to Edge Mini clouds (EM) or public Central Clouds (CC). The approach adopted is based on the definition of a baseline AIO, mainly with the computational resource orchestration and network orchestration. The other components that would help the AIO will be integrated smoothly during the next period.
Work Package 5 – Application management framework
The primary goal of Work Package 5 (WP5) is to define the process and provide the tools necessary to efficiently and adequately deploy applications across the ACCORDION platform. Specifically, this means providing tools in order to:
- facilitate the smooth migration and deployment of NextGen applications within the ACCORDION system
- assess the performance of applications running in ACCORDION at a high level
- and manage the complexity of the ACCORDION system.
Work package 6 – Integration, Pilot Implementation & Evaluation
The main aim of WP6 is to evaluate the ACCORDION system and feed new development rounds that will incorporate the evaluation outcomes. To facilitate this process, the WP collects and integrates the models, components, and frameworks delivered by the R&D WPs (WP3-5) into the ACCORDION system.
Work Package 7 – Impact-maximization activities
The main aim of WP7 is to ensure wide dissemination and communication of the project results to audiences like the scientific, business, and the general public, in order to maximize the impact of the project, while at the same time prepare the roll-out activities after the successful conclusion of the project. In order to achieve these goals, a set of well-structured tasks was proposed to manage different aspects of ACCORDION’s impact maximization goals, including the planning and implementation of Dissemination & Exploitation activities , the communication for large-scale awareness , the monitoring of impact KPIs , the planning and realization of Collaboration and Standardization activities and investigating the appropriate Federation Models and Business Logic .