Customised and low energy computing - ICT-05-2017

Deadline: Apr 25, 2017  
CALL EXPIRED

Specific Challenge:

Information and Communication Technologies are becoming a core component of products in all market sectors. The trend towards “Smart Anything Everywhere” must be supported by innovations allowing a very significant reduction of the cost and complexity of software development for modern architectures, and of the energy footprint of computation and communication.

Software development is the key challenge, because current programming tools do not fully support emerging system architectures. Massively parallel and heterogeneous systems are difficult to program and to optimise dynamically for the multiple conflicting criteria imposed by the application domain like performance, energy efficiency, dependability, real-time response, resiliency, fault tolerance and certifiability.

The reference markets are cyber-physical systems, industrial and professional applications, Internet of Things, connected smart objects and all the application areas where very low energy consumption is essential and where non-functional requirements like guaranteed performance, high reliability levels or hardware-enforced security may be critical.

Scope:

a. Research and Innovation Actions

Programming environments and toolboxes for low energy and highly parallel computing: Proposals will provide programming environments and tools optimised for specific application domains of significant economic value, covering the complete software stack from runtime systems to application programming. The solutions proposed will support modern system architectures possibly including those based on heterogeneous processors while allowing for optimization of energy, performance, reliability, time predictability and system cost. All the activities needed in software development should be addressed when relevant; e.g.: remote collaboration, debugging and bug tracking, runtime software analysis. Model-based approaches and reuse and extension of existing platforms, libraries, frameworks and tools are encouraged, resulting ideally in complete solutions which are practically usable for application development for real-world use cases.

Security by design features allowing applications to be resilient to cyber-attacks are encouraged to be part of the proposed technology, as well as features for energy-aware solutions and for tolerating hardware and software errors while guaranteeing the required service level.

Solutions will be demonstrated in real-life applications through at least two different use cases complementing each other, and will provide significant and measurable improvements over state-of-the-art methods and technologies in productivity, software quality and energy consumption.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 4 and 6 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

b. Coordination and Support Activities for structuring and connecting the European academic and industrial research and innovation communities. Activities will include (e.g.) cross-sectorial industrial platform-building, constituency building and consultations, clustering of related projects, and road-mapping for future research and innovation agendas.

Expected Impact:

Proposals should address one or more of the following impact criteria, providing metrics to measure success where appropriate.

• Reinforce and broaden Europe's strong position in low-energy computing by reducing the effort needed to include digital technology inside any type of product or service, including outside the traditional “high-tech” sectors.
• Availability of software development environments and tools allowing easy development of applications for parallel and heterogeneous architectures. Tools should be usable in realistic use cases, and should significantly increase the productivity in efficiently programming and maintaining advanced computing systems as compared to the state of the art at the time of proposal writing.
• Higher share of European SMEs and mid-caps in the reference markets, both on the supply and the demand side.