Uploaded November 2022 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
PHYSICS is a high technology EU Horizon research project with a total funding of about five million euros composed of 14 international partners. The project started in January 2021 and will end in December 2023. PHYSICS aims to unlock the potential of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm for cloud service providers and application developers. When realized, it will enable application developers to design, implement, and deploy advanced FaaS applications through abstract and visual design environments, leveraging proven design patterns and integrated DevOps pipelines.
PHYSICS also offers a novel Global Continuum Layer aimed at exploiting the cloud (including edge and multi-cloud locations) for optimizing the deployment and execution of functions based on aspects such as latency, performance, cost, locality, and other constraints. It does so by extending the needed infrastructure components (the Kubernetes scheduler, for example), offering novel ways of container management that target optimized operation of the infrastructure cluster in the form of container scheduling and co-allocation mechanisms.
In this talk, we will discuss the goals and current status of the PHYSICS EU Horizon project before exploring some of the main research areas of focus and open source development. Specifically, we will describe how visual flow programming and ready-made patterns can enhance abstract function development, and we will investigate different function orchestration means and trade-offs in terms of capabilities and performance. We will also explore the function execution in different clusters while highlighting differences in cluster setup from macroscopically examined load generation and how these map to the observed measurements. Finally, we will look at the task placement and scheduling optimizations that are being developed and how they can be beneficial, in particular, for FaaS-based applications.
Visit the PHYSICS project website[1] for more information.
Speakers
Georgios Kousiouris, Harokopio University of Athens
Conversation Leaders
Luis Tomás Bolívar, Red Hat
Yiannis Georgiou, Ryax Technologies
[1] https://physics-faas.eu/
PHYSICS is a high technology EU Horizon research project with a total funding of about five million euros composed of 14 international partners. The project started in January 2021 and will end in December 2023. PHYSICS aims to unlock the potential of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm for cloud service providers and application developers. When realized, it will enable application developers to design, implement, and deploy advanced FaaS applications through abstract and visual design environments, leveraging proven design patterns and integrated DevOps pipelines.
PHYSICS also offers a novel Global Continuum Layer aimed at exploiting the cloud (including edge and multi-cloud locations) for optimizing the deployment and execution of functions based on aspects such as latency, performance, cost, locality, and other constraints. It does so by extending the needed infrastructure components (the Kubernetes scheduler, for example), offering novel ways of container management that target optimized operation of the infrastructure cluster in the form of container scheduling and co-allocation mechanisms.
In this talk, we will discuss the goals and current status of the PHYSICS EU Horizon project before exploring some of the main research areas of focus and open source development. Specifically, we will describe how visual flow programming and ready-made patterns can enhance abstract function development, and we will investigate different function orchestration means and trade-offs in terms of capabilities and performance. We will also explore the function execution in different clusters while highlighting differences in cluster setup from macroscopically examined load generation and how these map to the observed measurements. Finally, we will look at the task placement and scheduling optimizations that are being developed and how they can be beneficial, in particular, for FaaS-based applications.
Visit the PHYSICS project website[1] for more information.
Speakers
Georgios Kousiouris, Harokopio University of Athens
Conversation Leaders
Luis Tomás Bolívar, Red Hat
Yiannis Georgiou, Ryax Technologies
[1] https://physics-faas.eu/
