Data centres, and the networks and systems that surround them are the future work horse of digitised economies. The data processing that they provide is a well-known driver for economic growth, providing cutting edge storage and computing systems that increasingly underpin all aspects of business and society. These data centres are huge system of systems, comprising thousands of components coming from a diverse, global supply chain. To account for the ever growing amount and complexity of data that needs to be processed these systems are becoming more complex and have started to incorporate novel chip sets within heterogeneous architectures to provide more efficient training of machine learning problems. Quantum technologies, has long been described as the solution to the world's most challenging data problems. Quantum computing has the ability to significantly enhance our ability to process optimisation, machine learning and sorting problems which are beyond the reach of today's computers, and quantum communications provides the answer to ever-increasing challenges of security. However, to date, very little activity has taken place to understand from a systems perspective how quantum technologies can integrate with existing data centres. Quantum computers and communications systems are often described in isolation, more or less at-odds with the direction of the industry for the last 50 years. This misses the possibility for very significant near term value to be created with quantum/classical hybrid systems. For the first time ever, this project seeks look at quantum technologies through the lens of the existing industry. It brings together experts in classical data centres and networking, quantum computing and quantum communications and will develop a blueprint for a quantum/classical hybrid data centre and a quantum internet.

The evolution from local towards virtualised data storage, computation, network management, applications and workspaces has changed the way we use our digital services and brought some clear benefits over traditional systems, such as easy management, universal availability and decreased hardware requirements for devices. We are witnessing a change from separate person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine (IoT) computing towards Internet of Everything (IoE) computing. The foreseen next step in the evolution of wireless communication technologies is the evolution towards the 6th, generation networks. This transition will boost network sharing in cities and indoor spaces, and -- especially -- drive the local computing paradigm. In today's cloud systems, data processing and decision-making logic is handled at data centres, which is not optimal from the viewpoint of performance, efficiency and reliability, security or privacy. Edge computing is a key technology to unleash the full potential of 5G technologies, since it enables the deploying of computational tasks near the end-devices and therefore opens novel business opportunities around real-time cloud services for wirelessly connected mobile and IoT nodes. It provides computational capacity near the source of the data, allowing various data pre-processing, refining and analysis functions to reduce the amount of data to be sent to cloud servers and therefore reducing the load inflicted on core networks and data centres. This project will take the concept of edge computing to a new level by introducing the third, local, tier in addition to the data centre and multi-access edge computing (MEC) tiers. We will utilise Artificial intelligence to unleash the full potential of each Edge architectural tier to meet different application requirements. This project focuses on developing an intelligent three-tier Edge IoT architecture for enabling novel services around business areas such as smart transportation, Industry 4.0 and entertainment.