The Role of Edge Offload for Hardware-Accelerated Mobile Devices

This position paper examines a spectrum of approaches to overcoming the limited computing power of mobile devices caused by their need to be small, lightweight and energy efficient. At one extreme is offloading of compute-intensive operations to a cloudlet nearby. At the other extreme is the use of fixed-function hardware accelerators on mobile devices. Between these endpoints lie various configurations of programmable hardware accelerators. We explore the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and conclude that they are, in fact, complementary. Based on this insight, we advocate a software-hardware co-evolution path that combines their strengths.

[1]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  A Reconfigurable Energy Storage Architecture for Energy-harvesting Devices , 2018, ASPLOS.

[2]  M. Hansen,et al.  Participatory Sensing , 2019, Internet of Things.

[3]  Gordon Erlebacher,et al.  Porting a high-order finite-element earthquake modeling application to NVIDIA graphics cards using CUDA , 2009, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[4]  Nicholas D. Lane,et al.  DeepEye: Resource Efficient Local Execution of Multiple Deep Vision Models using Wearable Commodity Hardware , 2017, MobiSys.

[5]  Nicholas D. Lane,et al.  MobiSR: Efficient On-Device Super-Resolution through Heterogeneous Mobile Processors , 2019, MobiCom.

[6]  James D. Herbsleb,et al.  Simplifying cyber foraging for mobile devices , 2007, MobiSys '07.

[7]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  Intermittent Computing: Challenges and Opportunities , 2017, SNAPL.

[8]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Agile application-aware adaptation for mobility , 1997, SOSP.

[9]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  Camaroptera: a Batteryless Long-Range Remote Visual Sensing System , 2019, ENSsys@SenSys.

[10]  M. Taylor,et al.  Moonwalk : NRE Optimization in ASIC Clouds or , accelerators will use old silicon , 2017 .

[11]  Jason Flinn,et al.  Cyber Foraging: Bridging Mobile and Cloud Computing , 2012, Cyber Foraging: Bridging Mobile and Cloud Computing.

[12]  Matt Callanan,et al.  DevOps: Making It Easy to Do the Right Thing , 2016, IEEE Software.

[13]  Jerome H. Saltzer,et al.  End-to-end arguments in system design , 1984, TOCS.

[14]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  An empirical study of latency in an emerging class of edge computing applications for wearable cognitive assistance , 2017, SEC.

[15]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  The Case for VM-Based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing , 2009, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[16]  Kunle Olukotun,et al.  Plasticine: A reconfigurable architecture for parallel patterns , 2017, 2017 ACM/IEEE 44th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).

[17]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Pervasive computing: vision and challenges , 2001, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[18]  Tommi Mikkonen,et al.  DevOps in practice: A multiple case study of five companies , 2019, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[19]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  Supporting peripherals in intermittent systems with just-in-time checkpoints , 2019, PLDI.

[20]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Self-tuned remote execution for pervasive computing , 2001, Proceedings Eighth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems.

[21]  Karthikeyan Sankaralingam,et al.  Stream-dataflow acceleration , 2017, 2017 ACM/IEEE 44th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).

[22]  Gregor Kiczales,et al.  Aspect-oriented programming , 2001, ESEC/FSE-9.

[23]  John Wawrzynek,et al.  Chisel: Constructing hardware in a Scala embedded language , 2012, DAC Design Automation Conference 2012.

[24]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Towards scalable edge-native applications , 2019, SEC.

[25]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  Orbital Edge Computing: Nanosatellite Constellations as a New Class of Computer System , 2020, ASPLOS.

[26]  Michael J. Flynn,et al.  Some Computer Organizations and Their Effectiveness , 1972, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[27]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Edge Computing for Legacy Applications , 2020, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[28]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  The Impact of Mobile Multimedia Applications on Data Center Consolidation , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E).

[29]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  MANIC: A Vector-Dataflow Architecture for Ultra-Low-Power Embedded Systems , 2019, MICRO.

[30]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  Intelligence Beyond the Edge: Inference on Intermittent Embedded Systems , 2018, ASPLOS.

[31]  John Cocke,et al.  The Evolution of RISC Technology at IBM , 1990, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[32]  Jinjun Xiong,et al.  DNNBuilder: an Automated Tool for Building High-Performance DNN Hardware Accelerators for FPGAs , 2018, 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD).

[33]  Michael I. Hill,et al.  Generalizeability of Latency Detection in a Variety of Virtual Environments , 2004 .

[34]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  The ITC distributed file system: principles and design , 1985, SOSP '85.

[35]  Ying Gao,et al.  Quantifying the Impact of Edge Computing on Mobile Applications , 2016, APSys.

[36]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  The Seminal Role of Edge-Native Applications , 2019, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing (EDGE).

[37]  Nicholas D. Lane,et al.  DeepX: A Software Accelerator for Low-Power Deep Learning Inference on Mobile Devices , 2016, 2016 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN).

[38]  Karthikeyan Sankaralingam,et al.  Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling , 2012, IEEE Micro.

[39]  Troy Bryan Downing.  Java RMI , 1998 .

[40]  Alec Wolman,et al.  MAUI: making smartphones last longer with code offload , 2010, MobiSys '10.

[41]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Towards wearable cognitive assistance , 2014, MobiSys.

[42]  Christoforos E. Kozyrakis,et al.  Understanding sources of inefficiency in general-purpose chips , 2010, ISCA.

[43]  Gerhard Fettweis,et al.  5G-Enabled Tactile Internet , 2016, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[44]  Brandon Lucia,et al.  A Power-Aware Heterogeneous Architecture Scaling Model for Energy-Harvesting Computers , 2020, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters.

[45]  James C. Hoe,et al.  Single-Chip Heterogeneous Computing: Does the Future Include Custom Logic, FPGAs, and GPGPUs? , 2010, 2010 43rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture.

[46]  Symeon Chatzinotas,et al.  Toward Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era: Recent Advances, Current Issues, and Future Directions , 2019, IEEE Access.

[47]  Landon P. Cox,et al.  LevelUp: A thin-cloud approach to game livestreaming , 2020 .

[48]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  The Computing Landscape of the 21st Century , 2019, HotMobile.

[49]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  The case for cyber foraging , 2002, EW 10.