2024-08-06 06:30:31
The sovereignty of IT infrastructures has become France’s hobbyhorse. For many players, GAFAM’s cloud offerings are considered a Trojan horse to get their hands on the sensitive data of French companies.
In order to offer an alternative to American Big Tech, France has launched PEPR Cloud. Scientifically co-led by the CEA and INRIA, this Priority Research Program and Equipment has a budget of 51 million euros over 7 years. Its objective is to offer significant advances in the performance, security and frugality of cloud infrastructures and services while focusing on the transfer of innovative solutions resulting from research to industry. Explanations with Jean-Noël Patillon, head of PEPR for the CEA.
Jean-Noël Patillon is Deputy Director of the CEA List Institute, in charge of research and programs. He co-pilots the PEPR Cloud with Adrien Lebre (INRIA).
Engineering Techniques: What is the main objective of this program?
Jean-Noël Patillon: The volume of data produced by companies continues to increase. But more and more data is hosted in infrastructures belonging to American companies and it is essential to ensure that all data from French companies is not exploited by the United States. To meet this challenge, it is necessary to increase research in the field of clouds and therefore also French manufacturers specializing in this field. The PEPR thus aims to develop a sovereign alternative.
The ultimate goal of the PEPR Cloud is that the entire cloud chain (from data to computing technologies) is distributed. It would be a sort of “distributed operating system” like Windows, but available and accessible on each of the Edge computing that will have been deployed.
What is this Edge computing?
It is not enough to say that we are “sovereign” to be so. French players cannot play in the same league as GAFAM. It would take colossal investments to be able to reach the critical masses of an Amazon for example. No French industrialist has such capacities. It is therefore necessary to exploit another path, in this case the decentralization of clouds with this Edge computing. The data would remain in the companies, which would guarantee data sovereignty. Information could be shared, but it would be anonymized beforehand.
Beyond the issue of data sovereignty, this solution would reduce the impact of the cloud on the environment.
Yes, the carbon footprint of this type of distributed cloud would be reduced, because there would be less data transiting through these local clouds. Generally speaking, it would be a question of reducing costs across the entire chain thanks to a decentralized cloud. A study published by MIT demonstrated that on the data transport part, we can gain a factor of 1,000 between using a centralized cloud like Amazon’s and a completely distributed solution.
The PEPR cloud is not the only initiative going in this direction. Manufacturing X (the “X” stands for “Exchange” and symbolizes the exchange of data) is a European initiative (supported in particular by the German federal government) which consists of having Edge computing in companies, therefore as close as possible to the data, and that these mini data centers are federated within a cloud.
Finally, this desire to reduce the energy impact is also shared by another program. PEPR Artificial Intelligence, tackles mathematical problems to design algorithms that are less energy-intensive than current genAI. This would involve in particular a “transport” of data that is as frugal as possible and calculation architectures to optimize these artificial intelligences.
The PEPR Cloud provides for the implementation of a test bench in the form of a distributed experimental infrastructure. What will be the role of this platform?
It will play a key role in providing the first elements of the French node of the European SLICES initiative (Scientific Large-Scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies). The French brick, called SLICESFR, is built from a PEPR cloud project called SILEX. The latter is based on existing computing and Internet of Things infrastructures. These two infrastructures will be reinforced by complementary equipment.
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