Robo-line storage: Low latency, high capacity storage systems over geographically distributed networks

Rapid advances in high performance computing are making possible more complete and accurate computer-based modeling of complex physical phenomena, such as weather front interactions, dynamics of chemical reactions, numerical aerodynamic analysis of airframes, and ocean-land-atmosphere interactions. Many of these 'grand challenge' applications are as demanding of the underlying storage system, in terms of their capacity and bandwidth requirements, as they are on the computational power of the processor. A global view of the Earth's ocean chlorophyll and land vegetation requires over 2 terabytes of raw satellite image data. In this paper, we describe our planned research program in high capacity, high bandwidth storage systems. The project has four overall goals. First, we will examine new methods for high capacity storage systems, made possible by low cost, small form factor magnetic and optical tape systems. Second, access to the storage system will be low latency and high bandwidth. To achieve this, we must interleave data transfer at all levels of the storage system, including devices, controllers, servers, and communications links. Latency will be reduced by extensive caching throughout the storage hierarchy. Third, we will provide effective management of a storage hierarchy, extending the techniques already developed for the Log Structured File System. Finally, we will construct a protototype high capacity file server, suitable for use on the National Research and Education Network (NREN). Such research must be a Cornerstone of any coherent program in high performance computing and communications

Optimal association of mobile users to multi-access edge computing resources

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) plays a key role in fifth-generation (5G) networks in bringing cloud functionalities at the edge of the radio access network, in close proximity to mobile users. In this paper we focus on mobile-edge computation offloading, a way to transfer heavy demanding, and latency-critical applications from mobile handsets to close-located MEC servers, in order to reduce latency and/or energy consumption. Our goal is to provide an optimal strategy to associate mobile users to access points (AP) and MEC hosts, while contextually optimizing the allocation of radio and computational resources to each user, with the objective of minimizing the overall user transmit power under latency constraints incorporating both communication and computation times. The overall problem is a mixed-binary problem. To overcome its inherent computational complexity, we propose two alternative strategies: i) a method based on successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques, proven to converge to local optimal solutions; ii) an approach hinging on matching theory, based on formulating the assignment problem as a matching game

Dialogue Games for Crosslingual Communication

We describe a novel approach to crosslingual dialogue that supports highly accurate communication of semantically complex content between people who do not speak the same language. The approach is introduced through an implemented application that covers the same ground as the chapter of a conventional phrase book for food shopping. We position the approach with respect to dialogue systems and Machine Translation-based approaches to crosslingual dialogue. The current work is offered as a first step towards the innovative use of dialogue theories for the enhancement of human–human dialogue

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities