The increasing quantities of data generated by modern industrial and business processes pose enormous challenges for organizations seeking to glean knowledge and understanding from the data. Combinations of HPC, Cloud and Big Data technologies are key to meeting the increasingly diverse needs of large and small organizations alike. Critically, access to powerful compute platforms for SMEs - which has been difficult due to both technical and financial reasons - may now be possible. LEXIS (Large-scale EXecution for Industry & Society) project will build an advanced engineering platform at the confluence of HPC, Cloud and Big Data which will leverage large-scale geographically-distributed resources from existing HPC infrastructure, employ Big Data analytics solutions and augment them with Cloud services. Driven by the requirements of the pilots, the LEXIS platform will build on best of breed data management solutions (EUDAT) and advanced, distributed orchestration solutions (TOSCA), augmenting them with new, efficient hardware capabilities in the form of Data Nodes and federation, usage monitoring and accounting/billing supports to realize an innovative solution. The consortium will develop a demonstrator with a significant Open Source dimension including validation, test and documentation. It will be validated in the pilots - in the industrial and scientific sectors (Aeronautics, Earthquake and Tsunami, Weather and Climate) – where significant improvements in KPIs including job execution time and solution accuracy are anticipated. LEXIS will promote the solution to the HPC, Cloud and Big Data sectors maximizing impact through targeted and qualified communications. LEXIS brings together a consortium with the skills and experience to deliver a complex multi-faceted project, spanning a range of complex technologies across seven European countries, including large industry, flagship HPC centres, industrial and scientific compute pilot users, technology providers and SMEs.

OPERA project aims at supporting these ambitious challenges with technological innovation on three main aspects: • Design next generation Low Power (LP) and Ultra-Low Power (ULP) systems, • improve energy efficiency in computing by means of heterogeneous architectures, • and provide smart and energy efficient solution for the interaction between embedded smart systems and remote small form-factor data centers OPERA project fits into the mission and scope of the H2020 ICT workplan for 2014 and 2015 aspiring to the European leadership in industrial technologies for the Ultra-Low Power computing devices and sensors enabling an ecosystem of heterogeneous devices and small form factor data centers In this context, OPERA’s vision is to deliver innovation on highly parallel, heterogeneous, reliable, low power, and secure systems leveraging both low power server-class processors and reconfigurable devices. While the former provide energy efficient processing power for the majority of the workloads, the latter offer the possibility of customizing and adapting hardware solutions over time to specific needs. The targets of innovation in OPERA are next generation LP servers and highly parallel embedded computer systems based on ULP architectures. Adopting a mechanism for selecting the best processing element for a specific task is fundamental for achieving good levels in energy efficiency. OPERA aims at exploiting such kind of mechanisms to orchestrate both general-purpose and reconfigurable devices. The OPERA vision is to integrate ULP smart devices into a platform that uses next-generation LP servers to remotely process the data and offering cloud-based services. OPERA's added value to the project is the validation of the technological solutions on three different real-life workloads use-cases. By integrating and optimizing computing systems for energy efficiency at different levels of the computing continuum, OPERA envisages the creation of big opportunities for Europe