The Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) has signed a research collaboration agreement with Huawei Technologies Inc. for funding the new research project “Storage Data Flow Management based on Machine Learning” (SMML), which aims at advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in large-scale data storage solutions.

Huawei is a leading global company in the development of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices, and supports educational and scientific developments in the applied fields. Huawei invests heavily in basic research and development, concentrating on technological breakthroughs that drive the world forward.

SMML is an 18-month research project that started in November 2021 with a budget of 138 thousand EUR fully-funded by Huawei. The SMML project is coordinated by the Data Intensive Computing Research Lab at the Cyprus University of Technology, under the guidance of Assistant Professor Herodotos Herodotou, in collaboration with the Huawei Data Algorithm Technology Center of Huawei Russian Research Institute.

The general objective of the SMML project is to automate data flow management for caching and storage tiering in hybrid data storage solutions, while relying on newly-developed artificial intelligent algorithms, in order to achieve optimal performance to cost ratio under different capacity storage media. The proposed methodology involves combining mathematical modeling with streaming machine learning for the first time, for guiding the decisions of data storage systems.

The expected outcome of the project will be instrumental in meeting the increasing data storage and I/O demands of modern large-scale data analytics and high-performance computing workloads, as it could offer sustainable high performance with lower cost.

Contact: Assistant Professor Herodotos Herodotou, herodotos.herodotou@cut.ac.cy