Several European flagship projects have emerged towards European sovereignty in chip design and computing infrastructure. Among them, the EU Processor Initiative (EPI) spearheads the development of the first EU processor. To ensure the successful integration of the EU processor into the cloud computing ecosystem and strengthen even more EU data sovereignty, it is necessary to develop the software support at the same pace with the hardware development. The harmonic relationship of the developed software and hardware is of paramount importance in order to establish an EU cloud platform able to compete with the mainstream solutions which are currently delivered by US companies.

AERO aims to upbring and optimize an open-source software ecosystem that encompasses a wide range of software components ranging from operating systems to compilers, runtimes, system software and auxiliary software deployment services for cloud computing. The AERO software stack combines the aforementioned software components with novel software and hardware interfaces as a means to seamlessly exploit the heterogeneity aspects of the EU processor with regards to high performance, energy efficiency, and security. The ultimate objective of AERO is to facilitate easy migration of existing cloud customers to a cloud infrastructure that harnesses the capabilities of the EU processor. To showcase early adoption and the potential business value, the developed software and hardware technologies will be piloted by use cases representative of important EU industrial domains, such as automotive and space exploration.