Vertical workflows: Service orchestration across cloud & edge resources

Currently devices used for data capture often differ from those that are used to subsequently carry out analysis on such data. Many Internet of Things (IoT) applications today involve data capture from sensors that are close to the phenomenon being measured, with such data subsequently being transmitted to Cloud data centers for analysis and storage. Increasing availability of storage and processing devices closer to the data capture device, perhaps over a one-hop network connection or even directly connected to the IoT device itself, requires more efficient allocation of processing across such edge devices and data centers. We refer to these as "vertical workflows" – i.e. workflows which are enacted across resources that can vary in: (i) type and behaviour; (ii) processing and storage capacity; (iii) latency and security profiles. Understanding how a workflow pipeline can be enacted across these resource types is outlined, motivated through two scenarios. The overall objective considered is the completion of the workflow within some deadline constraint, but with flexibility on where data processing is carried out

Submission-Aware Reviewer Profiling for Reviewer Recommender System

Assigning qualified, unbiased and interested reviewers to paper submissions is vital for maintaining the integrity and quality of the academic publishing system and providing valuable reviews to authors. However, matching thousands of submissions with thousands of potential reviewers within a limited time is a daunting challenge for a conference program committee. Prior efforts based on topic modeling have suffered from losing the specific context that help define the topics in a publication or submission abstract. Moreover, in some cases, topics identified are difficult to interpret. We propose an approach that learns from each abstract published by a potential reviewer the topics studied and the explicit context in which the reviewer studied the topics. Furthermore, we contribute a new dataset for evaluating reviewer matching systems. Our experiments show a significant, consistent improvement in precision when compared with the existing methods. We also use examples to demonstrate why our recommendations are more explainable. The new approach has been deployed successfully at top-tier conferences in the last two years

State of the art baseband DSP platforms for Software Defined Radio: A survey

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an innovative approach which is becoming a more and more promising technology for future mobile handsets. Several proposals in the field of embedded systems have been introduced by different universities and industries to support SDR applications. This article presents an overview of current platforms and analyzes the related architectural choices, the current issues in SDR, as well as potential future trends.Peer reviewe

Deadline constrained video analysis via in-transit computational environments

Combining edge processing (at data capture site) with analysis carried out while data is enroute from the capture site to a data center offers a variety of different processing models. Such in-transit nodes include network data centers that have generally been used to support content distribution (providing support for data multicast and caching), but have recently started to offer user-defined programmability, through Software Defined Networks (SDN) capability, e.g. OpenFlow and Network Function Visualization (NFV). We demonstrate how this multi-site computational capability can be aggregated to support video analytics, with Quality of Service and cost constraints (e.g. latency-bound analysis). The use of SDN technology enables separation of the data path from the control path, enabling in-network processing capabilities to be supported as data is migrated across the network. We propose to leverage SDN capability to gain control over the data transport service with the purpose of dynamically establishing data routes such that we can opportunistically exploit the latent computational capabilities located along the network path. Using a number of scenarios, we demonstrate the benefits and limitations of this approach for video analysis, comparing this with the baseline scenario of undertaking all such analysis at a data center located at the core of the infrastructure.TS

Methods for compressible fluid simulation on GPUs using high-order finite differences

We focus on implementing and optimizing a sixth-order finite-difference solver for simulating compressible fluids on a GPU using third-order Runge-Kutta integration. Since graphics processing units perform well in data-parallel tasks, this makes them an attractive platform for fluid simulation. However, high-order stencil computation is memory-intensive with respect to both main memory and the caches of the GPU. We present two approaches for simulating compressible fluids using 55-point and 19-point stencils. We seek to reduce the requirements for memory bandwidth and cache size in our methods by using cache blocking and decomposing a latency-bound kernel into several bandwidth-bound kernels. Our fastest implementation is bandwidth-bound and integrates 343 million grid points per second on a Tesla K40t GPU, achieving a 3.6x speedup over a comparable hydrodynamics solver benchmarked on two Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 processors. Our alternative GPU implementation is latency-bound and achieves the rate of 168 million updates per second. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Edge-enhanced QoS aware compression learning for sustainable data stream analytics

Existing Cloud systems involve large volumes of data streams being sent to a centralised data centre for monitoring, storage and analytics. However, migrating all the data to the cloud is often not feasible due to cost, privacy, and performance concerns. However, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms typically require significant computational resources, hence cannot be directly deployed on resource-constrained edge devices for learning and analytics. Edge-enhanced compressive offloading becomes a sustainable solution that allows data to be compressed at the edge and offloaded to the cloud for further analysis, reducing bandwidth consumption and communication latency. The design and implementation of a learning method for discovering compression techniques that offer the best QoS for an application is described. The approach uses a novel modularisation approach that maps features to models and classifies them for a range of Quality of Service (QoS) features. An automated QoS-aware orchestrator has been designed to select the best autoencoder model in real-time for compressive offloading in edge-enhanced clouds based on changing QoS requirements. The orchestrator has been designed to have diagnostic capabilities to search appropriate parameters that give the best compression. A key novelty of this work is harnessing the capabilities of autoencoders for edge-enhanced compressive offloading based on portable encodings, latent space splitting and fine-tuning network weights. Considering how the combination of features lead to different QoS models, the system is capable of processing a large number of user requests in a given time. The proposed hyperparameter search strategy (over the neural architectural space) reduces the computational cost of search through the entire space by up to 89%. When deployed on an edge-enhanced cloud using an Azure IoT testbed, the approach saves up to 70% data transfer costs and takes 32% less time for job completion. It eliminates the additional computational cost of decompression, thereby reducing the processing cost by up to 30%

Edge enhanced deep learning system for large-scale video stream analytics.

Applying deep learning models to large-scale IoT data is a compute-intensive task and needs significant computational resources. Existing approaches transfer this big data from IoT devices to a central cloud where inference is performed using a machine learning model. However, the network connecting the data capture source and the cloud platform can become a bottleneck. We address this problem by distributing the deep learning pipeline across edge and cloudlet/fog resources. The basic processing stages and trained models are distributed towards the edge of the network and on in-transit and cloud resources. The proposed approach performs initial processing of the data close to the data source at edge and fog nodes, resulting in significant reduction in the data that is transferred and stored in the cloud. Results on an object recognition scenario show 71\% efficiency gain in the throughput of the system by employing a combination of edge, in-transit and cloud resources when compared to a cloud-only approach.N/