Since April 2004, Christof Fetzer is a full professor and head of the Systems Engineering Chair in the Computer Science Department at Technische Universität Dresden.
General Objectives
The group addresses several research issues in dependable and distributed systems:
- security and dependability of cloud infrastructures
- cost-effective resilience
- Edge cloud
- Reactive programming
Christof Fetzer is currently coordinating the H2020 project SERECA (http://www.serecaproject.eu), which aims to remove technical impediments to secure cloud computing, and thereby encourage greater uptake of cost-effective and innovative cloud solutions in Europe. It proposes to develop secure enclaves, a new technique that exploits secure commodity CPU hardware for cloud deployments, empowering applications to ensure their own security without relying on public cloud operators.
Moreover, the group participates in FP7 projects LEADS (www.leads-project.eu), and ParaDIME (www.paradime-project.eu). LEADS proposes Data-as-a-Service as a solution to the need for small actors to take advantage of big public data, by mutualizing the costs of extracting, storing and processing public data, while offering rich and extensible possibilities, including privacy-protecting querying on public and private data including data updated in real-time, and more. The objective of ParaDIME is to attack the power-wall problem by radical software-hardware techniques that are driven by future circuit and device characteristics on one side, and by a programming model based on message passing on the other side. From 2013 until April 2015 Christof Fetzer was the head of the Resilience Path in the cluster of excellence on advancing electronics (cfAED).
Christof Fetzer has published over 130 research papers in the field of dependable systems and is a member of the following program committees.
Approach within 5G Lab Germany
Within the 5G Lab the group will focus on the higher-level architecture of ‘edge-clouds’ that host services for applications based on ultra low latency communication.
‘Edge-Clouds’ are computational resources that will dynamically be relocated to always minimize the geographic distance to the user. Targeting communication with a latency of 1 – 10ms, services will proactively be replicated and migrated across multiple stations closest to the user. Thus, mobile users will be able to experience services that transparently follow them geographically to offer mobile dynamic applications the computational resources of a data-center.
The architecture of ‘edge-clouds’ needs to satisfy location-transparent computation and content distribution. The user should believe that the ‘cloud’ is always close by. Besides several security related topics the group will investigate techniques to move and replicate the user’s profile, session-data and other application relevant data without reducing the service quality at any time. Seeking ultra low latency communication automatically relocating the user’s data and creating self-adapting services will be a key challenge within the 5G Lab.
Additionally, the group anticipates that nodes used for the edge-cloud will be heterogeneous with regard to their level of security. Services provided by nodes with varying levels of trust (e. g. different communication providers) need to always satisfy high security standards. The group will investigate technologies to provide trusted computation within a potential untrustworthy environment.
Startups
- AO Terra GmbH, now Cloud&Heat Technologies GmbH, established 2011. Products: Cloud&Heat Technologies GmbH provides users with cloud-based computing power. The servers used for the cloud are installed into buildings which are to be heated with the byproduct heat energy, and are connected via internet to a virtual data center. This technology makes the difficult and energy-intensive traditional cooling method of the servers unnecessary.
- SIListra Systems GmbH, established in 2012, Products: The SIListra technologies reliably detect hardware failures in all safety critical parts of an application. They develop cost-effective and safe software-only solutions to these problems.