Toward System-of-Systems Integration for Composable Cloud-HPC-Edge AI Platforms

2026-09-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the coordination challenges arising from independent control across cloud, high-performance computing (HPC), and edge AI infrastructures. Conceptualizing the AI platform as a "system of systems," this work proposes an architectural paradigm characterized by usage fusion and federated control. Methodologically, it adopts a systems engineering framework that achieves cross-domain coordination through interface contracts while preserving native control planes. The approach incorporates boundary testing, responsibility models, and seven integration facets, leveraging interface mapping, policy contexts, and operational evidence to guide integration design. The primary contribution lies in establishing a unified framework for evaluating interoperability, governance capabilities, and fault isolation, thereby delineating clear directions for future research.

Abstract

Modern AI platforms increasingly combine infrastructure stacks and operating models designed around different assumptions, including cloud-style service platforms, HPC workload-management systems, cloud-native orchestration, data and artifact systems, managed connectivity, observability, and edge or cyber-physical environments. Existing work demonstrates effective bridges between selected stacks, but a general way to reason about composition across independently controlled systems remains underdeveloped. We argue that such platforms can be usefully viewed as systems of systems (SoS) when independently useful systems retain their own control, management, lifecycles, policies, and failure semantics while contributing to a higher-level AI platform capability. We frame composable integration as an approach to cross-system coordination based on interfaces, contracts, mappings, references, policy context, and operational evidence, while preserving native control planes and avoiding dependence on a single topology or orchestration stack. The resulting direction is converged in use and federated in control. The paper presents a peer constituent-system view, a boundary test for distinguishing constituent systems from components, local dependencies, and independently useful systems outside the current SoS boundary, a local, shared, and scoped responsibility model, seven integration surfaces, and a representative cross-system workflow. It concludes with evidence classes and research questions for evaluating interoperability, governance, observability, fault containment, evolution, and reuse.

Problem

• System-of-Systems
• Composable Integration
• Cloud-HPC-Edge AI Platforms
• Interoperability
• Federated Control

Innovation

• System-of-Systems
• Composable Integration
• Cloud-HPC-Edge AI
• Federated Control
• Integration Surfaces