NSF

The context aware, on-demand and distributed nature of next generation applications designed for Mobile-Cloud and Internet of Things scenarios, puts high pressure on devices and infrastructure due to sheer amount of generated traffic while simultaneously requiring even lower response latencies for their interactive nature. The resource contraints in temrs of computation, storage, I/O extension, etc are inherent to the mobile and end-user devices and pose additional challenges to meet above demands. We are exploring the provisioning and use of emerging 'Edge Cloud' tier situated only 1 physical hop away from end user devices (e.g., traditional PCs, homeservers, Wi-Fi routers, Small Cells etc.), which can be provisioned seamlessly on-demand by the backend cloud or by end user devices in ad-hoc manner via device discovery.

Heterogeneous Platforms and Systems are becoming the norm for mobile devices, server systems, and large-scale machines. This project investigates system support to exploit and deal with heterogeneity, at levels of abstraction ranging from middleware, to toolchains, to instrumentation, and operating systems. Concerning individual platforms, our research targets heterogeneous platforms with multicore CPUs and/or integrated and discrete GPUs, and the complex memory systems of future large-memory servers with on-chip fast RAM, die-stacked RAM, NVRAM, and SSD memories. Concerning larger-scale systems, we are considering cloud-hosting datacenters and high end machines like those planned for the exascale era.

GlassBox is a National Science Foundation-funded project with a goal of enabling application developers to improve performance on future high end computing (HEC) machines for their scientific and engineering processes. The basic approach of the project is to offer an open, transparent software infrastructure - a Glass Box system - for creating and tuning large-scale, parallel applications. “Opening up” the tools and services used to create and evaluate peta- and exa-scale codes will involve developing interfaces and methods that make available tool-internal information and the tools will be accessible for new performance management services that improve developer productivity and code efficiency.