Software Technologies and Engineering Institute (ITIS Software) (ITIS Software)

NICS lab team

NICS Lab owns two Dell PowerEdge R440 rack servers. Each of these racks features 2 blades powered by 2.2GHz 12-core Intel Xeon Silver 4214 processors, 128GB of RAM, and 4.5TB of RAID storage, dedicated to the deployment of Blockchain nodes. Currently, NICS has several Blockchain technologies running among which it is worth highlighting a node connected to the Alastria T Network, which is based on Quorum and a Blockchain network based on Hyperledger Besu. In this infrastructure, the UMA gives supports to the Association of Science and Technology Parks of Spain (APTE) by  hosting Alastria nodes for Science and Technology Parks members of APTE.

Additionally, NICS owns a laboratory for the development of prototypes and security tests. In this laboratory NICS has diverse malware and forensic tools as well as computing resources for performing very different tasks, including reverse engineering, malware execution and analysis, digital evidence recovery, forensic examination of memory, hard disk and network traffic. For this purpose, NICS owns top-quality software tools like IDA Pro, Encase Forensic Deluxe and AccessData Forensic Toolkit. The laboratory also has a large number of development kits for analysing wireless communications, operating in different frequencies and covering protocols like ZigBee, Bluetooth Low Energy, 6LoWPAN, RFID, NFC and SDR transceptors, etc., as well as tools for analysing serial communications, Modbus, Rs-232, USB and Ethernet.

Furthermore, NICS Lab also has access to a complete SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) testbed containing a selective set of state-of-the-art technological components (CPS, IoT, Cloud/Fog and Blockchain components). The testbed was originally designed for specific Industry 4.0 scenarios based on heterogeneous critical environments, including a Digital Twin for manufacturing that interact with the diverse IoT/CPS devices and a Blockchain server (Hyperledger Besu). The testbed is configured with a number of development platforms/single board computers (PLC SIMATIC S7-1200, SIMATIC IOT2040, Intel Galileo, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Wasmote, RFduino, Intel Edison, sensors based on TinyOS and Contiki) for multi-technology wired (ModbusTCP and ModbusRTU, S7 de Siemens, Profibus, IO-Link, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP and EtherCAT) and wireless communication (WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, 802.15.4, BLE, 6LowPAN, RFID and NFC), and it is connected to a Blockchain server to manage anomalies. In addition to this, NICS has experimentation capabilities through simulators and emulators (Matlab, NS3, mininet), and virtualization systems for the modelling of complex interconnection scenarios.

KHAOS team

Khaos team operates a HW/SW environment for deploying and serving Big Data integration and analysis tasks. The HW infrastructure has been obtained through financing for an amount of more than 700,000 € from a singular infrastructure acquisistion project [UNMA 15-CE-3196] (co-financed by FEDER funds). This equipment added to that already existing in the building has reached more than 6,000 cores, 32Tb of memory for processing, and 1.2Pb of disk. The physical platform comprises an IBM Chassis BladeCenter H type and BULL server with a high-performance VMX5300, unified CPU, memory and storage. It also contains a NovaSvale Blade BL265 only for storage. The general characteristics of this virtualization installation are: a processor with 256 cores and 578.94 GHz, 2.75 TB RAM, 84.41 TB storage space, 10 Gbps LAN network, 1 Gbps internet network, iSCSI 10 Gbps and FC 8 Gbps storage network.

This infrastructure provides a development environment for Big Data analysis applications based on the use of OpenStack and Docker containers to put services into production. This infrastructure currently hosts development clusters for experimental approaches with technologies, such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Neo4J, MongoDB, and HDFS. Moreover, this environment is being integrated within the European Science Open Cloud (EOSC) in the context of Lifewatch ERIC, concretely with the Internal Joint and Collaborative Initiative (Lifewatch IJI). The end user and visualization ecosystem comprises a series of tools and services (TITAN, BIGOWL) for supporting research and industry for Big Data workflow generation and deployment. It currently constitutes a key Virtual Research Environment (VREs) for service orchestration in the development of e-Labs and e-Services, which are acting as demonstration cases for the LifeWatch ERIC e-Infrastructure. Additional yet important services include Web Semantic multi-source harmonisation, clinical and biomedical data integration and analysis, as well as Earth Observation (Copernicus Program) satellite product collection, processing and analysis for agro-environmental services.

NEO lab

NEO lab operate the Exascale Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Modeling. This is a unique initiative that will place the University of Málaga (UMA) and Andalusia among the leaders of high-performance parallel computing. The joint power of the current Supercomputing Service and Bioinformatics (SCBI) plus this platform will take us to the PetaFLOPS range, and allow then to scale up to Europe's goal in supercomputing: Exascale. The shared use of the infrastructure is ensured by its installation in the SCBI at UMA, recognized as a Singular Scientific-Technical Infrastructure and node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES).The propos al benefits 11 UMA groups (71 researchers), an international community already identified (200 researchers) and has the support of 16 companies. The impact is in 14 lines of research on challenges for society and creation of knowledge of excellence, supporting 4 European projects, 19 national projects, 6 Andalusian projects and 15 contracts with companies, all of them active (more than 5 million). For those projects, high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) are indispensable: first, to extract knowledge from a large data set (TB) using AI; second, for numerical simulation, a massively parallel activity. We include Industry 4.0 and Smart Cities because they are of a huge present importance. Our proposal is to connect multiple servers connected with Infiniband having 8 GPUs each running the very latest technology in the market, an infrastructure hard to find in any modern laboratory at present, with direct future scalability (both, in processors and memory).