The staff of the chair Systems Engineering

The Systems Engineering (SE) group headed by Prof. Christof Fetzer was founded in April 2004 and funded by an endowment from the Heinz Nixdorf Foundation. The group addresses various research questions in the area of reliable and distributed systems:
* security and reliability of distributed and cloud infrastructures
* fault-tolerant computing in WANs
* cost-effective resilience
Recently, the group has conducted research on the use of Intel SGX technology to provide security solutions for cloud-based applications.

Prof Fetzer coordinated two EU H2020 projects in the context of confidential computing: SERECA (https://www.serecaproject.eu) and SecureCloud. The research focus was on the use of confidential computing in the context of clouds. This leads to a novel platform for confidential computing called SCONE.
The Systems Engineering group has participated in several other projects: EU H2020 ATMOSPHERE (Resilient Cloud Computing), EU H2020 SELIS (Logistics Domain) and EU H2020 AI-SPRINT (Combining Machine Learning and Confidential Computing). In addition, the group is currently involved in two SFBs (TR-96 and CPEC) and a Cluster of Excellence (CeTI).

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Important Topics

Cloud-Kritis

This project pursues to build a cognitive cloud continuum platform which uses AI/ML to optimize workloads, resources, energy, and network traffic for a rapid adaptation to changes in application behavior and data variability, re-configuring the "sweet spot" between the cloud and the edge in the face of the rapid varying conditions. The platform will also help users to achieve “stack identicality” across the Cloud-edge continuum, whereby the same (legacy) software stacks (e.g., MPI programs) running in data centers can seamlessly run at remote edges.

NEARDATA

The main goal is to design an extreme near-data platform to enable consumption, mining and processing of distributed and federated data without needing to master the logistics of data access across heterogeneous data locations and pools. We go beyond traditional passive or bulk data ingested from storage systems towards next generation near-data processing platforms both in the Cloud and in the Edge. In our platform, Extreme Data includes both metadata and trustworthy data connectors enabling advanced data management operations like data discovery, mining, and filtering from heterogeneous data sources.

6G-Lilfe

With 6G, the focus is on humans and their communication and interaction with machines and the virtual world. To this end, innovative concepts in the areas of scalable communication, novel methods, flexible software concepts and adaptive hardware are being researched holistically. Important fields of application include Industry 4.0 and healthcare. Four key points are always considered: Latency (Delay - how do we make communication even faster?), Resilience (How do we maximize resilience?), Security and Sustainability (How do we decisively reduce the extreme energy consumption of digital communication?).

CeTI

We advocate establishing the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI) at Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) to achieve significant breakthroughs for enhancing collaborations between humans and machines or, more generally, cyber-physical systems (CPS) in real, virtual, and remote environments. CeTI’s vision is to enable humans to interact with co-operating CPS over intelligent wide-area-communication networks to promote equitable access to remote work and learning environments for people of different genders, ages, cultural backgrounds, or physical limitations.

CPEC

The SFB/ Transregio 248 „Foundations of Perspicuous Software Systems“ is a cooperation of the University of Saarland, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the Max Planck Institut Informatik and is financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. This project lays the fundamtental scientific foundations for cyber-physical systems of the future, which explain their functionality and their behaviour. A deep and applicable theory of explanations of all facets of system behavior as well as their development through visual and verbal expantions for different user groups is being researched.

AI-SPRINT

AI-SPRINT defines a novel framework for the design and operation of A(rtificial) I(ntelligence) applications in computing continua. AI-SPRINT goes beyond supporting AI applications development by enabling the seamless design and partition of AI applications among the plethora of cloud-based solutions and AI-based sensor devices, providing security and privacy guarantees.

SFB/Transregio 96 - Thermo-energetic design of machine tools

Die Herausforderung der Forschung im SFB/TR 96 ergibt sich aus dem Versuch, dem Zielkonflikt zwischen der Reduzierung des Energieverbrauchs und der Erhöhung der Genauigkeit und Produktivität bei der Bearbeitung gerecht zu werden. Der verfolgte Lösungsansatz basiert auf Maßnahmen, die es ermöglichen, unter thermisch transienten Umgebungsbedingungen und unter Betriebsbedingungen, die durch Einzel- und Kleinserienfertigung gekennzeichnet sind, die Prozessgenauigkeit trotz steigender Energieverluste ohne zusätzliche energetische Maßnahmen zu gewährleisten.