One of the main challenges facing next generation Cloud platform services is the need to simultaneously achieve ease of programming, consistency, and high scalability. Big Data applications have so far focused on batch processing. The next step for Big Data is to move to the online world. This shift raises the requirements for transactional guarantees when updating data.

CumuloNimbo: Highly Scalable Transactional Multi-Tier PaaS (http://cumulonimbo.eu) is a recently completed (2010-2013) EC-funded project that addresses these issues by building a highly scalable multi-tier transactional platform as a service (PaaS) that bridges the gap between OLTP and Big Data applications. It was carried out by the following organisations / institutions: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain – Coordinator; Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Greece; Yahoo Iberia, Spain; University of Minho, Portugal; McGill University, Canada; SAP, UK; and Flexiant, UK.

FORTH's contributions in CumuloNimbo address challenges in the scalability of the NoSQL data store layer and in efficient network access to shared storage in support of the CumuloNimbo software stack. The new NoSQL data store layer designed by FORTH exhibits the levels of scalability and elasticity required to achieve transactional rates necessary in Big Data applications (in the range of one million update transactions per second). FORTH’s efficient network storage protocol achieves scalability and low-overhead for access to storage by properly managing many cores and multiple links in modern servers, opening the way towards increased storage consolidation and improved data-centre efficiency.

The CumuloNimbo project is part of the portfolio of the Software & Service Architectures and Infrastructures Unit, Directorate General Information Society (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai).

Contact Persons from FORTH: Kostas Magoutis, magoutis@ics.forth.gr; Angelos Bilas, bilas@ics.forth.gr