Imad Sousou, vice president and general manager of Intel Corporation, delivered a keynote presentation titled “How Open Source Powers the Cloud to the Edge” at this year’s Open Source Summit North America.
As vice president, Sousou oversees Intel’s open source software efforts, from virtualization to the cloud. In Sousou’s eyes, open source has become so popular that talking about it is no longer necessary. Instead, he focused on new projects and ideas that have already started, particularly within the realm of cloud and edge computing. “From an Intel perspective it’s simple, you know, we want our customers to have the best experience running their software on our hardware, and our customers want open source,” he said.
With the massive amount of information collected by smart devices, big data is being driven to the edge, noted Sousou. “This data gets treated, it gets transmitted, it needs to get stored,” he said. “This is where taking this massive amount of data back-in-forth in the cloud isn’t really practical. So this is where edge computing, computing at the edge of the device, becomes seemingly very important.”
The processing of smart devices is driving different types of software, which Sousou said open source needs to get a move on. Autonomous cars, for instance, will be embedded with hundreds of computers, making them a kind of transportable data center. If someone could figure out how to do over-the-air software updates for these kinds of cars, it could collectively save operators $25 million. “So there is a fundamental change in the economy, and a fundamental change in how people live their lives,” Sousou said. “These things require truly a different type of software that we need to think about.”
Among the projects Intel is currently invested in is combining the benefits of containers with the benefits of virtual machines. While the lightweight nature of containers allows users to run multiple applications on a single kernel, the entire batch can easily be compromised in return. This isn’t the case with virtual machines, which have a hypervisor separating them from the host operating system. “We started a project where you will no longer have to pick between the security of virtual machines and the speed of containers,” Sousou said.
Sousou added Intel has been invested in Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator (ciao), a workload scheduler made to address limitations in current cloud operating system projects. In addition, he said Intel engineers have been considering the idea of making the Linux a functionally safe operating system, which could potentially run underneath an autonomous vehicle.
