What is ColonyOS?

In a rapidly digitalizing world, seamless interoperability and robust large-scale computing aren’t just luxuries—they’re essential. Yet, as we shift towards decentralized and diverse computing landscapes, developing cross-platform applications becomes a daunting task. Imagine a world where AI workloads can easily be developed and run seamlessly across any platform, including Cloud, Edge, and HPC. Welcome to ColonyOS!

ColonyOS is an open-source research project developed by RISE AB, and is used by ENCCS to foster greater High-Performance Computing (HPC) adoption. It is also used by RockSigma AB to implement a compute engine designed for seismic processing in underground mines. RockSigma AB has contributed to the development of ColonyOS.

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Use Cases

Distributed Compute Engines

Implement distributed compute engines that optimize data processing across diverse platforms. Perform intensive computations on one platform and then effortlessly merge the results with an external business system. This is particularly useful in many IoT or remote sensing applications (such as seismic processing), which require both heavy computations and system integration.

Streamlined HPC

ColonyOS offers modern APIs and cloud integration, expanding supercomputers’ reach and accessibility. HPC Executors enables easy, platform-agnostic deployment of workloads, boosting global collaboration and making HPC universally accessible across academia, industry, and beyond.

Virtual Supercomputing

Harness and combine computational power of multiple disparate computing systems, whether HPC, cloud-based infrastructures, or other computing resources, to function as a single, unified supercomputer. This virtual supercomputer can execute large-scale tasks, simulations, or calculations that would be beyond the capability of any single system within the combined network.

Compute Continuums

Compute Continuums refer to a unified computing framework spanning across cloud, edge, and IoT. By ensuring cohesive computing, computations can migrate seamlessly between centralized cloud servers, edge servers closer to data sources, and interconnected IoT devices, optimizing performance, latency, and resource utilization.

Energy-aware Computing

With a brokering model, the process of executing computations is kept separate from actually obtaining compute resources. This offers flexibility. This can be used to set constraints on computations, for example only execute certain processes on Executors powered by green energy, when such become available.

Digital Sovereignty

Maintain strict control and autonomy by executing computations without moving data. For instance, securely process medical data at a local hospital server and integrate less-sensitive results into external systems, all within one workflow. Additionally, monitor process execution history to identify and prevent misuse.

Features

ColonyOS is a Meta-OS, offering functionalities like a traditional operating system, but functions as an overlay on top of existing platforms. This unique capability bridges the gap between various computing environments, enabling seamless integration and operation. ColonyOS offers a suite of features suited for heterogeneous computing landscapes.

ColonyOS is somewhat similar to grid computing, but takes another approach in grid network creation and resource allocation. Unlike traditional grid computing, which typically focuses on establishing a single, extensive grid computing network, ColonyOS is based on cloud-computing and adopts an application-centric approach where each application operates its own smaller, self-contained grid, referred to as a colony. A colony is provisioned with only the resources necessary to efficiently execute a certain application, avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach of larger grid networks. From this point of view, a colony can also be viewed as a distributed service mesh to enable development of a decentralized microservice architecture.

Zero-trust security

Deploy and Run anywhere

Compute Brokering

Cross-Platform Workflows

Execution Resilience

Meta-Filesystem

Execution Ledger

Executors

Tools
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