Event Details

Edge accelerators, such as Nvidia Jetson, are enabling rapid inference of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models and computer vision algorithms through low-end Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) modules integrated with ARM-based processors. Their compact form factor allows integration with mobile platforms, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with onboard cameras, facilitating real-time execution of diverse scientific workflows, from wildfire monitoring to disaster management. The limited compute resources of mobile edge accelerators necessitate collaboration with remote servers in the cloud for processing compute-intensive workloads. These remote servers can include high-performance computers, serverless cloud platforms offering Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), or private GPU servers.

The work proposes and implements a scalable platform designed to support multiple mobile devices (UAVs) with edge accelerators, collaborating with remote servers to provide real-time performance for a novel social application of guiding the visually impaired. The platform incorporates deadline-driven scheduling heuristics, strategies for preemptively dropping tasks based on their earliest deadlines, migration of tasks from edge to cloud, work stealing from cloud back to edge, and adaptation to network variability, all while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS). Outputs from the servers can be used by other mobile devices or the planning platform itself to orchestrate the next set of tasks in the workflow. Evaluations against baseline algorithms and multiple workloads demonstrate that the proposed heuristics achieve an optimal balance between task completion and accrued utility.

Speaker Bio

Speaker Bio: Suman Raj is a Ph.D. Candidate and Prime Minister's Research Fellow at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc) under the supervision of Dr. Yogesh Simmhan. She works on research areas including distributed systems in the edge-cloud continuum applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Her research has resulted in several poster, workshop and conference publications at top venues such as SC, IROS, SIGCHI, CCGrid, HiPC and IRIA (Best Paper Award). She has been invited to attend ACM Pingala Interaction in Computing and ACM-ARCS 2024, and currently serves as the Chair of the IISc ACM Student Chapter. Prior to Ph.D., she worked in the Data Platforms Team of Goldman Sachs (a client of Publicis Sapient), and holds a B.Tech (First Class with Distinction) degree from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. Suman has been a recipient of multiple travel grants from ACM and IEEE, scholarships from REC Alumni Association, TEQIP, and INSPIRE fellowship.