Evolving into success in Europe.

Launched officially in December 2018, EVOLVE is a €14 million innovation action comprising of 19 organisations from 11 European countries.

EVOLVE platform at BULL/Atos headquarters

The EVOLVE project is funded by the European Union under Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It aimed to take concrete steps in bringing the big data, high-performance computing, and cloud worlds in a unique platform that increases the ability to extract value from massive and demanding datasets. EVOLVE is European Commission’s answer to the unprecedented data growth currently experienced.

Back in 2017, when EVOLVE was designed, proposing a software environment to ensure the convergence of Cloud, HPC and Big Data was already a complex task. But once a software layer is able to conceal the border between these worlds, nothing prevents it from hiding more, in EVOLVE’s specific case the hardware heterogeneity of the platform, from the computing elements to multiple storage tiers. The rise of virtualization and the need for convergence was easy to predict, but betting on the right technologies was much harder.

EVOLVE’s consortia has been supporting from the start containers, micro-services and notebooks as key enablers for convergence. The market has proven EVOLVE right. EVOLVE was an early adopter of the AI wave, and rode this wave quite continuously (which means rewriting some applications, in Tensorflow, then Pytorch, then TF2) during the last 3 years.

The platform is now a success. EVOLVE’s converged heterogeneous platform is on-line with innovative applications fully ported and the results at scale have been fully demonstrated through several pilots and use cases. Application end-users can now drive everything through a notebook interface, and thanks to an array of microservice they can orchestrate complex pipelines and visualise their results.

The project itself has led to more than 36 scientific contributions, which means 1 scientific paper (conference, workshop and journal) per month. Some of these papers were published in the most prestigious conferences or journals. Together with other projects funded by the same H2020 ICT call a book was written on the topic of “HPC, Big Data, AI Convergence Towards Exascale – Challenge and Vision."

Additionally, during these three years, EVOLVE has been an innovation incubator it was designed to foster innovation, with a state-of-art platform and a consortium made of a carefully balanced selection of industrial and academic partners. The project has delivered at least 12 innovations. Some are already on the market, such as Earth Observer, or are hosted by the Linux Foundation; and some are helping to address global challenges, for instance you can check the climate.gov website powered by the visualization technologies matured in EVOLVE. The project has achieved many things on-premise, within the data-centre, and now the new frontier is on the Edge and in the Fog. This trend is already addressed by some of EVOLVE's innovations, such as DataShim to transparently move a container jointly with its data set; or MemoPort to accelerate multi-cloud transfer. The whole list of innovations is available on EVOLVE’s website here.

With the project now ending in November, the project coordinator Jean-Thomas Acquaviva from DDN Storage France remarks: “We hope that EVOLVE innovations will bear the heritage of this great moment spent between multiple organizations across Europe... and get ready for the next one!”

@Evolve_H2020 @EU_Commission @NOAAClimate #Research #Innovation #Europe

"Data is power" examined.

Manufacturing companies are working on a European data infrastructure in which they shall have full control over their data and in which real-time processing and artificial intelligence (AI) for the digital transformation and networking of industry are possible. Gaia-X is the name of the project, and it calls for new solutions.

The Friedhelm Loh Group is playing a leading role in it and showcased a turnkey application for Gaia-X at the start of October. Learn more about the Gaia-X digital large-scale project and other solutions for the challenges of digital transformation in the new issue of “be top” – in the printed magazine or online.

“Knowledge is power and if you have power over data, you have power over processes, economic and political developments, and even people. If you have data, you have the best chance of gaining an edge on your competitors and being successful in business, ” states Prof. Friedhelm Loh, Owner and CEO of the Friedhelm Loh Group in the editorial of the new “be top” customer magazine.

How can companies safeguard this data and, by extension, their technological know-how at the same time? The cover story of the new “be top” magazine investigates this question and shows how the Friedhelm Loh Group, together with partners, is already supporting customers today with concrete solutions to overcome these and other challenges of the digital transformation.

Further topics of issue 02/2019 are:

• Influencers: Influential experts for purchasing decisions
• Electromobility: An ultra-strong future
• Science: Brain research at the speed of light
• Switchgear engineering: A far-sighted trio

#Pauto @Rittal @Rittal_Ltd @PresseBox

Enabling innovation for Industrie 4.0.

In the Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, and Big Data environment, industrial communication is of central importance. The close networking of automation components, machines, systems, and IT systems needed for this, including across locations or even between different companies, is only possible with standardised and integrated communication.

In recent years, PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI) has brought about numerous developments that meet these requirements. An important boundary condition in this regard is the openness of the technologies. That is, specifications and guidelines are available to any interested party for implementation in products or use in systems and applications. This has been a foundation pillar for the success of PI technologies since the beginning.

Industry 4.0 calls for easy-to-handle solutions that are characterised by high performance capability for real-time, availability, flexible topologies, and integration – even over great distances – and that also make use of the many possibilities of the digital world. Solutions in conjunction with the Internet of Things require transmission of large data quantities in real time. The developments concerning all aspects of PROFINET are particularly noteworthy in this regard. PROFINET is currently the only standard that supports the complete real-time bandwidth, from hard real-time requirements in high-performance machines with the necessary openness for IP communication all the way to transmission of large data quantities in real-time within automation systems and with higher-level IT systems.

The PROFINET developments for the process industry are being approached under the perspective of Industry 4.0. The purpose of the integrated information flow is to improve networking of processes, for instance, to enable more effective maintenance activities. Today's intelligent field devices already supply not only measured quantities and manipulated variables but also information regarding, for example, the amount of wear still available and process-related conditions. The meaning of this status and diagnostic information must be clear in order for relevant, sound decisions to be made from it. Here, the technologies of PROFIBUS and PROFINET offer practical solutions such as transmission of device status according to NAMUR recommendation 107.

The finalisation of the FDI Specification, in which PI was significantly involved, at the end of last year was crucial for the process industry. This marked an important step towards easier, cross-vendor device integration – a primary requirement for integrated communication between devices and systems. The vendor-neutral OPC-UA interface has already been specified proactively in FDI. This satisfies another precondition for straightforward read out of information – the basis for innovative ideas in the context of Industry 4.0. In the Industry 4.0 Implementation Strategy, FDI is also indicated as the single approach for realisation of functional and information layers.

Big Data defined!

One of the most authoritative magazines in the Automation sector is InTech, published by the International Society of Automation. An article in the current issue has won high praise indeed from Bob Lederer of RBDRChannel. RBDR is produced Monday-Thursday on a youTube site and presents news, commentary and insights on important research issues and innovators. It is a free service.

He states in this edition of their video that the definition of BigData by Sanat Joshi, is the best he has seen. The article Big Data is on line if you want to read it.

Definition A simple definition would be that data becomes big data, or rather a big data problem, when the volume, velocity, and/or variety of the data exceeds the abilities of your current IT systems to ingest, store, analyze, or otherwise process it. Sanat Joshi, (InTech, May/June 2013)

The lead article in this issue is on Asset Management systems, and there are more articles on Batch, Safety, and a special section on security.

Check out the InTech site to see if you qualify for your own personal copy.