€500k European Funding for the Department of Computer Science

The Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, is participating in an important EU research and innovation project which aims in the development of UniServer "A Universal Micro-Server Ecosystem by Exceeding Energy and Performance Scaling Boundaries". The UniServer project has been awarded €4.8million from the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program and began in February 2016. The University of Cyprus has received approximately €500K.
The principal aim of UniServer is to facilitate the evolution of the Internet from an infrastructure where data is gathered in centralized data-centres widely known as The Cloud, to an infrastructure where data is handled in a distributed and localized manner close to the data sources enabling essentially Edge Computing. UniServer will realize its bold goal by greatly improving the energy efficiency, performance, dependability and security of the current state-of-the-art micro-servers, while reinforcing the supported system software.
UniServer aspires to deliver, by 2019, a unique fully working prototype that will turn the opportunities in the emerging Big Data and IoT markets into real, smarter products that can improve the everyday life and lead to a substantial financial and employment growth. The unique blend of expertise of UniServer's consortium consisting of world's leading low-power processor and Server-on-Chip suppliers (ARM, Applied-Micro) as well as system software developer (IBM), a set of emerging application drivers (Worldsensing, Sparsity and Meritorius) and established research organisations (Queen's University, University of Cyprus, University of Athens and University of Thessaly), guarantees the successful realization of the ambitious goals, while reinforcing Europe's strong position in traditional and new multi-billion euro markets.
The UniServer contribution at UCY will be led by Associate Professors Yiannakis Sazeides and Pedro Trancoso. The UCY team will be leading the characterization of the noise margins at the hardware layer, the effort of the development of the UniServer Firmware, as well as the development of an end-to-end TCO tool for exploring the benefits and trade-offs of UniServer for cloud only and mix fog-cloud internet applications deployments.