London, 30 April 2013 – Maxeler Technologies, pioneer of Maximum Performance Computing, today announced it has joined 5 other organizations across Europe in a multi-national research project to dramatically improve the efficiency of cloud computing data centers.
The dominant approach in offering cloud services today is based on homogeneous commodity resources: large numbers of inexpensive machines, interconnected by off-the-shelf networking equipment, supported by stock disk drives. However, today’s cloud platforms are missing out on the revolution in new heterogeneous hardware and network technologies such as many-core processors, Maxeler dataflow engines, programmable network routers and solid state disks. These technologies offer the opportunity to realize vastly richer computation, communication, and storage capabilities.
HARNESS, funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Technological Development, is a 3 year research program that brings together 6 organizations from the commercial and academic world. HARNESS brings heterogeneous resources into cloud platforms through developing a sophisticated Platform as a Service (PaaS) framework allowing cloud providers to profitably offer and manage heterogeneous hardware resources and cloud users to seamlessly integrate specialized technologies into the design and execution of their cloud-hosted applications.
About HARNESS
HARNESS (Hardware- and Network-Enhanced Software Systems for Cloud Computing) is a multi-national research project funded by European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Technological Development. Universities participating in the project are École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Imperial College London, Université de Rennes 1 and Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin . The commercial partners are Maxeler Technologies and SAP. Please see http://www.harness-project.eu for more information.
About Maxeler
Maxeler Technologies, Inc. pioneers Maximum Performance Computing. It combines high performance computing (HPC) consulting with custom dataflow computing technology to deliver competitive advantage. Its complete and scalable solutions include hardware platforms, software programming tools and complete applications. Maxeler’s technology enables organizations to speed up processing times by 20-50x, with over 90% reduction in energy usage and over 95% reduction in data center space.