We are proud to highlight the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), a key research partner in the HIGHER project and a leading research organization in computational science and engineering.
Founded in 1989, ICCS is an independent, non-profit research institute dedicated to advancing the values, mission, and strategic goals of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Over the years, ICCS has exemplified NTUA’s commitment to scholarly excellence by fostering the close integration of research and teaching, while contributing significantly to Greece’s scientific and technological achievements. Its activities span a broad range of domains, including hardware and software technologies, computer networking, digital communications, automation, and photonic technologies for communications, among others.
Role in the Project
Within the HIGHER project, ICCS leads the disaggregated memory activities, while also contributing to dissemination and communication tasks. ICCS plays a central role in the development of a pilot application that demonstrates the efficiency and flexibility of CXL-based memory disaggregation in HIGHER servers. This work focuses on the demonstration and evaluation of Compute Express Link (CXL) industry-standard solutions within cloud software stacks, enabling low-latency, cache-coherent links between processors, accelerators, and memory devices and supporting next-generation disaggregated computing architectures.
A key contribution of ICCS is the design and implementation of rack-level memory pool management, including access control mechanisms to safeguard sensitive data. This capability enables the dynamic adaptation of memory capacity to time-varying workload demands, while also providing isolation for workloads that require enhanced security guarantees, particularly in support of in-memory data stores. ICCS will initially demonstrate this functionality on FPGA-based platforms, with a subsequent port to the full HIGHER hardware platform once available. The final platform will be validated in collaboration with other project partners using applications optimized for multi-tier memory architectures, such as graph processing and in-memory data stores leveraging CXL and RDMA technologies.
Through these contributions, ICCS plays a critical role in validating the scalability, efficiency, and security of disaggregated memory solutions within the HIGHER platform.