DECICE: AI-Driven Scheduling and Digital Twin Integration for the Cloud-HPC-Edge Compute Continuum

Abstract: This paper presents the DECICE project (Device Edge Cloud Intelligent Collaboration framEwork), a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action (Grant No. 101092582, December 2022 to November 2025) that developed an open-source framework for intelligent workload scheduling across the cloud-HPC-edge compute continuum. A consortium of 12 partners across 6 European countries organized the work into six work packages covering AI-driven scheduling, digital twin infrastructure, system architecture and integration, monitoring, use case validation, and dissemination. The two core technical contributions are an Integrated AI Scheduler (IAIS) employing RNN-based prediction and formal workflow modeling for constraint-aware workload mapping, and a Digital Twin aggregating real-time metrics with carbon intensity and anomaly prediction for energy-aware scheduling. The framework operates within Kubernetes environments, supports unified workflow ingestion from multiple formats, and bridges cloud-native and HPC orchestration through a Slurm integration layer. We present the project vision, the overall architecture, contributions from each work package, quantitative evaluation results, and the open-source release.