July 2025: The CAPE team finished CAPE’s Architectural Blueprint and submitted it in the first public deliverable. The Architectural Blueprint outlines a cohesive, open-source architecture that enables European innovators to deploy, orchestrate, and manage demanding applications seamlessly, from the cloud to the edge. It couples a modular software stack — centered on workflow-based design, Kubernetes-native orchestration, and AI-assisted Infrastructure-from-Code tools.
CAPE’s On-Premises Edge Servers deliver a composable server infrastructure, where CPUs, GPUs, FPGA- and GPU-based SoCs,
pooled memory, and high-speed networking can be combined on the fly, thereby raising utilization, reducing energy consumption, and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Applications can either be executed on well-known data center providers or leverage CAPE’s modular hardware platforms based on the COM-HPC standard, PCIe Gen 6 switching, and emerging Compute Express Link (CXL) technology. The deployment is simplified by a cognitive layer of optimized open-source LLMs and SLMs, which enhance accessibility by generating IaC artifacts, tuning resource allocation, and supporting continuous optimization and observability.
In short, CAPE’s innovations lie in (See figure, bottom-up)
- On-premises Edge hardware platforms, based on COM-HPC with CXL, featuring the tightly coupled interconnection between heterogeneous computing nodes
- Open, vendor-agnostic server management via openMPMC, based on Redfish
- Multi-Cluster Orchestrator for dynamic deployment of complex applications on heterogeneous servers in changing environments
- A Cognitive Framework supporting developers to prepare the automatic, AI-assisted deployment of appliances, leveraging techniques like Infrastructure from Code (IfC), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Large Language Models (LLM).
- Three challenging use cases demonstrating the full CAPE stack from development, deployment, and processing in a cloud-edge environment
- All efforts will be open-sourced and result in upcoming standards for next-generation Edge-Cloud data centers, strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty
The overall CAPE architecture will be presented in detail during the 28th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD) 2025, held in Salerno from September 10 to 12, 2025.
This article is a part of a monthly update series in CAPE and will be published on LinkedIn and CAPE’s project website.
