Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Carnegie Mellon

Friday, April 29, 2016

3:00 pm

Lindley Hall, Rm. 102

Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

Abstract: is new paradigm in which the resources of a small data center are placed at the edge of the Internet, in close proximity to mobile devices, sensors, and end users. Terms such as "cloudlets," "micro data centers," "fog," and "mobile edge cloud" have been used in the literature to refer to edge-located data centers. Located just one wireless hop away from associated mobile devices, they offer ideal placement for low-latency offload infrastructure to support emerging applications. They are optimal sites for aggregating, analyzing and distilling bandwidth-hungry sensor data from devices such as video cameras. In the , they offer a natural vantage point for organizational access control, privacy, administrative autonomy and responsive analytics. In vehicular systems, they mark the junction between the well-connected inner world of a moving vehicle and its tenuous reach into the cloud. For , they enable fallback cloud services in hostile environments. Starting from the widely-used OpenStack platform for cloud computing, we describe our extensions for cloudlet discovery, just-in-time provisioning, and VM handoff. These mechanisms lay the foundation for the future emergence of a rich and diverse multi-vendor ecosystem of applications and instrastructure for edge computing.

Biography: Satya is an experimental computer scientist who has pioneered research in distributed systems, mobile computing and pervasive computing. Early in his career, Satya was a principal architect and implementor of the (AFS) which pioneered the use of scalable file caching, ACL-based security, and volume-based system administration for enterprise-scale information sharing. AFS was commercialized by IBM, is in widespread use today as OpenAFS, has heavily influenced the NFS v4 network file system protocol standard, and was the inspiration for DropBox. Building on the AFS work, Satya was a principal architect of the File System which introduced the concepts of disconnected operation and bandwidth-adaptive weakly- connected operation in distributed file systems. The Coda concepts of hoarding, reintegration and application- specific conflict resolution can be found in the hotsync capability of mobile devices today. Key ideas from Coda were incorporated by Microsoft into the IntelliMirror component of Windows 2000 and the Cached Exchange Mode of Outlook 2003. The Odyssey project explored the partitioning of responsibility between the operating system and applications in adapting to wide variability in critical resources such as wireless network bandwidth and energy in mobile computing. Through these and other projects such as Aura and Chroma, Satya was a co- inventor of many supporting technologies for mobile computing such as such as cyber foraging (also known as "cloud offload"), data staging, lookaside caching, translucent caching and application-aware adaptation. In the Internet Suspend/Resume system, his team has explored the role of virtual machine (VM) technology in seamless mobility of legacy software. In the Diamond project. his team has explored interactive deep search of unindexed complex data such as digital photographs and medical images in domains such as pathology, dermatology and anomaly detection in drug discovery. The creation of OpenSlide, a widely-used vendor-neutral software library for digital pathology was a by-product of the Diamond work. His most recent work in distributed systems has focused on the Olive project, which is exploring the streaming and prefetching of virtual machines over the Internet as the foundational mechanism for archived executable content. At the convergence of cloud computing and mobile computing, his most recent work in the Elijah project is exploring the role of cloudlets, which are decentralized cloud computing elements located close to edge of the Internet. Cloudlets enable mobile devices to offload resource-intensive computation at low latency and high bandwidth, thus pointing the way to futuristic applications such as wearable cognitive assistance on devices such as Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens.

Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He was the founding Program Chair of the HotMobile series of workshops, the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing, and the Area Editor for the Synthesis Series on Mobile and Pervasive Computing. He was the founding director of Intel Research Pittsburgh, and was an Advisor to Maginatics, which has created a cloud-based realization of the AFS vision and was acquired by EMC in 2014.