Initial Press Release

Launch of TeamPlay project

Imagine if your smartphone would run for hours longer on the same charge. Or if your smartphone treated games and banking apps differently, making games run fast while making banking apps run securely to defend them against hackers. It might seem out of reach, but these are some of the ambitious outcomes of the newly launched EU Horizon 2020 project, TeamPlay.

Energy efficiency is increasingly important, as mobile applications, the internet of things, and cyber-physical systems become more and more prevalent in everyday life. At the same time, we are not ready to compromise on other properties of our software, such as the degree of security or the ability to react in a timely fashion. Such concerns are however often treated as secondary compared to performance. Software designers need tools that help them optimise performance while meeting energy constraints, reaction times and security requirements of an application.

Energy, time and security as first-class design goals

TeamPlay will take a radically new approach that will enable energy, time and security transparency at the source code level. This will turn energy usage, time, security level and other important non-functional program properties into first-class citizens at design time. Application programmers will be able to manipulate and reason about energy, time, and security as normal program requirements, directly interacting with analytical and optimization frameworks. TeamPlay’s energy-aware software development tools will have a positive impact on the environment, while at the same time revolutionizing domains where energy-efficiency and time-criticality are of utmost importance.

Industrial use cases

A driving factor for TeamPlay is applying the developed tools to real-life use cases of the industrial partners, working in domains where energy usage, time and security level are critical factors such as computer vision, satellites, flying drones, medical applications, and cybersecurity. Working with these industrial partners, the TeamPlay tools will be tested on a variety of real-life use cases, such as drones that perform search and rescue, and are in critical need of lowering their energy usage in order to increase flight time without compromising security or the reaction time of the flight controller.

As the TeamPlay tools have the potential to revolutionize the industry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the impact of TeamPlay is expected to go beyond single industrial cases by ultimately advancing green software and contributing to the solution to the environmental issues of our time.

Societal Impacts

ICT is estimated to represent 10% of the world’s energy consumption, which is 50% more energy than the aviation sector. By making energy, time and security first-class system design goals, TeamPlay will pave the way for low-energy, high-performance and high-security products and services including apps running on smartphones, web browsers, GPS systems in cars, to become reality. At the same time, TeamPlay will make it possible for developers to explicitly prioritize security or reaction time over other properties, ensuring that these products and services provide new levels of security and remain responsive in a wide range of scenarios.

Today we purchase light bulbs, kitchen white goods, and cars based on energy ratings. In future, consumers should also be able to demand low-power, highly secure, and high-performance ICT products. The EU has committed to cutting CO2 emissions by 2020 to 20% below the 1990 level. The EU also strives to offer its citizens high-performance and high-security products. The TeamPlay project goal of enabling greener, more performant and more secure software supports this ambition. Ultimately, TeamPlay aims to lay the foundation for Europe to lead the low-power, high-performance and high-security computing revolution.

Leading experts

The TeamPlay consortium of 11 partners from 8 EU countries brings together world-leading expertise on types, energy modelling and analysis, timing analysis and worst-case execution time, compilation, optimization, coordination, and cybersecurity. This enables the TeamPlay consortium to consider energy usage, time and security systematically at all abstraction layers.

Project at a glance