While the digital twins paradigm has attracted the interest of several research communities over the past twenty years, it has also gained ground recently in industrial environments, where mature technologies such as cloud, edge and IoT promise to enable the cost-effective implementation of digital twins. In the industrial manufacturing field, a digital model refers to a virtual representation of a physical product or process that integrates data taken from various sources, such as application program interface (API) data, historical data, embedded sensor data and open data, and that is capable of providing manufacturers with unprecedented insights into the product’s expected performance or the defects that may cause malfunctions. The EU-funded IoTwins project aims to build a solid platform that manufacturers can access to develop hybrid digital twins (DTs) of their assets, deploy them as close to the data origin as possible (on IoT gateway or on edge nodes) and take advantage of cloud-based resources to off-load intensive computational tasks such as, e.g., big data analytics and machine learning (ML) model training. In this paper, we present the main research goals of the IoTwins project and discuss its reference architecture, platform functionalities and building components. Finally, we discuss an industry-related use case that showcases how manufacturers can leverage the potential of the IoTwins platform to develop and execute distributed DTs for the the predictive-maintenance purpose.

Cloud computing opens new perspectives for small-medium biotechnology laboratories that need to perform bioinformatics analysis in a flexible and effective way. This seems particularly true for hybrid clouds that couple the scalability offered by general-purpose public clouds with the greater control and ad hoc customizations supplied by the private ones. A hybrid cloud broker, acting as an intermediary between users and public providers, can support customers in the selection of the most suitable offers, optionally adding the provisioning of dedicated services with higher levels of quality. This paper analyses some economic and practical aspects of exploiting cloud computing in a real research scenario for thein silicodrug discovery in terms of requirements, costs, and computational load based on the number of expected users. In particular, our work is aimed at supporting both the researchers and the cloud broker delivering an IaaS cloud infrastructure for biotechnology laboratories exposing different levels of nonfunctional requirements.

Energy consumption is one of the major issues in today’s computer science, and an increasing number of scientific communities are interested in evaluating the tradeoff between time-to-solution and energy-to-solution. Despite, in the last two decades, computing which revolved around centralized computing infrastructures, such as supercomputing and data centers, the wide adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is currently inverting this trend due to the huge amount of data it generates, pushing computing power back to places where the data are generated—the so-called fog/edge computing. This shift towards a decentralized model requires an equivalent change in the software engineering paradigms, development environments, hardware tools, languages, and computation models for scientific programming because the local computational capabilities are typically limited and require a careful evaluation of power consumption. This paper aims to present how these concepts can be actually implemented in scientific software by presenting the state of the art of powerful, less power-hungry processors from one side and energy-aware tools and techniques from the other one.