Golden Owl

BASIC INFORMATION

Short name: Golden Owl
Long name: GoldenOwl – Testing the Scalability of DLTs for Education Certificates

Company: U-Hopper
Country: Italy

Call Stage 1: F4Fp-SME-COD1 (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-SME-COD200526-03
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Call Stage 2: F4Fp-SME-2 (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-SME-STAGE 2- 08M15

SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS

U-Hopper is developing a product (GoldenOwl) for higher education institutions and certified training providers. The problem we address relates to how education/training certificates are managed. In most cases, they are issued in paper form; those using digital technology are often locked into vendor-specific solutions. GoldenOwl leverages distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to store a digital, verifiable version of an education/training certificate in a tamper-proof, immutable registry. A prototypical implementation is available (used in a commercial PoC in Italy). One key obstacle on our way to product launch relates to the scalability of the solution, in the technical sense (performance/robustness as the size of the DLT increases and the number of requests grows) as well as in the economic one (cloud resource consumption). Grid’5000 is ideally positioned to enable us to carry out scalability experiments–significantly speeding up the go-to-market of our solution.

In the Stage 1 experiment, we performed a comprehensive assessment of the scalability of GoldenOwl on Fed4FIRE+ – in particular leveraging the capabilities of the Grid’5000 experimental testbed. We wanted indeed to test the scalability of the solution, in the technical sense (performance/robustness as the size of the network increases and the number of requests grows) as well as in the economic one (cloud resource consumption and associated cost).

The experiment results highlighted a number of scalability bottlenecks in the current GoldenOwl framework, which were mapped back to specific software (design/implementation) issues. A comprehensive product development roadmap has been elaborated by U-Hopper, which will lead to a new, scalable version of GoldenOwl. In this enhancement process, we would like to make use of Fed4FIRE+ facilities to be able to implement a set of six rapid, agile build/deploy/measure loops (sprints). This would allow us to reduce the risks associated with the introduction of new features/capabilities and to ensure our ability to deliver a scalable product to market.