GLACIATION
Green responsibLe privACy preservIng dAta operaTIONs
GLACIATION was a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action that developed energy-efficient, privacy-preserving data operations across the edge–core–cloud continuum. The project combined a distributed knowledge graph, AI-assisted placement, and a privacy- and trust-aware metadata framework to reduce data movement and the energy consumed by data processing.
The consortium comprised the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (coordinator), Dell Technologies, HIRO Microdatacenters, Leibniz University Hannover, the Lisbon Council, the University of Milan, the University of Bergamo, ERCIM, EURECOM, SAP, University College Cork, Sogei, Lakeside Labs, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, ETH Zurich, and the Independent Power Transmission Operator. The University of Bergamo led the work package on protection techniques.
Project Information
- Programme: Horizon Europe, Research and Innovation Action
- Grant agreement: 101070141
- Duration: 1 October 2022–30 September 2025
- Total cost: €8,580,038.75
- EU contribution: €8,580,038.75
- Coordinator: Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance
Research and Results
GLACIATION addressed the environmental and privacy costs of moving and processing large volumes of data across heterogeneous infrastructures. Its work included:
- a distributed knowledge graph and metadata model spanning edge, core, and cloud resources;
- a secure, AI-enabled placement engine that selected where data and analytics should run while minimising data movement;
- power-measurement and energy-efficient data-management techniques for scheduling, caching, and task execution;
- policy models, sanitisation methods, and other protection techniques that incorporated privacy and trust into distributed data operations;
- an integrated platform evaluated in public-service, manufacturing, energy, and enterprise-data-analytics scenarios.
The complete platform architecture and its implementations are available in the GLACIATION GitHub organisation. The IceStream repository documents the platform components, while the GitOps deployments repository provides the configuration for automated deployment of the GLACIATION platform to Kubernetes clusters.
Deliverables
The European Commission catalogues 26 public GLACIATION deliverables: seven software or platform results and 19 documents and reports. They cover:
- the architecture, GLACIATION kernel, distributed-knowledge-graph services, and final integrated platform;
- intermediate and final releases of the secure AI-enabled placement engine;
- power measurement, energy-efficient data management, dynamic power allocation, and workload analysis;
- the reference metadata model, standard queries, privacy assessment, and data protection tools;
- use-case integration, validation, demonstration, communication, and exploitation.
The complete catalog and downloadable material are available on the CORDIS results page. The project deliverables page provides the project's own grouping of the public outputs, while the periodic report summarises the project's objectives and progress.
Project Publications
- Scalable Distributed Data Anonymization for Large Datasets
- Cage4Deno: A Fine-Grained Sandbox for Deno Subprocesses
- POSTER: Leveraging eBPF to enhance sandboxing of WebAssembly runtimes
- NatiSand: Native Code Sandboxing for JavaScript Runtimes
- Lightweight Cloud Application Sandboxing
- Multi-Dimensional Flat Indexing for Encrypted Data
- Supporting Data Owner Control in IPFS Networks
- POSTER: Policy-driven security-aware scheduling in Kubernetes
- POSTER: Transparent Temporally-Specialized System Call Filters
- Secure Kubernetes Workload Deployment with Automated Enforcement of Cluster-Defined Policies