TECoSA Seminar – Edge computing concepts, motivations, and challenges

We aim to bring you a TECoSA Seminar at kl.15 on the first Thursday of each month. This Autumn they will be via on-line, and all are welcome to join. Each invited speaker will talk for about 40 minutes, followed by a panel discussion coordinated by TECoSA members.

The series kicks-off with a presentation from Prof Erik Elmroth, Head of the Computer Science Department at Umeå University (and also a member of TECoSA’s International Scientific Advisory Board). See the Biography below, and read more about his research at: https://people.cs.umu.se/elmroth/

Panel: Martin Törngren (Chair), Lars-Berno Fredriksson (Kvaser), Elena Fersman (KTH)

Please email tecosa-admin@kth.se to register!

Edge computing concepts, motivations, and challenges

ABSTRACT: Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm which brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is produced or needed, to improve response times, save bandwidth, or enforce data locality policies. The concept is still in rapid development and under constant change, but as a general principle it combines remote mega-scale cloud datacenters with virtually unlimited capacity, rather small regional datacenters, and local edge nodes with very limited capacity and tough power constraints. Typically, the large and regional datacenters comprise mainly general-purpose hardware whereas edge nodes tend to be more heterogeneous and tailored for particular applications.

Drivers for edge cloud development are, e.g., latency-critical industrial IoT applications with machine-to-machine interaction and data-intensive applications where massive data volumes of only local relevance are produced and processed.

Although early edge clouds are already being deployed, it is still to be seen what will be the dominating deployments and who will be the winning stakeholders, as, e.g., both cloud datacenter provides are interested to broaden their services to cover also the last mile whereas telecom providers see opportunities to extend their services beyond sending bits and bytes. Moreover, hand-in-hand with edge cloud developments is the development of the 5G infrastructure, with virtualized network functions running alongside edge cloud applications.

From a scientific point of view, the edge clouds come with numerous challenges, e.g., regarding how to design and efficiently operate the infrastructure and manage applications in a geographically distributed multi-stakeholder infrastructure; what programming models to use; how to address the new security and privacy challenges; etc.

BIOGRAPHY: Erik Elmroth is Professor in Computing Science and Head of the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University. He is leading the Umeå University research on distributed systems, focusing on the autonomous management of ICT resources, spanning from individual servers to large scale cloud datacenters, federated clouds, highly distributed edge clouds, and software-defined infrastructures. Elmroth’s has been principal investigator for numerous large-scale projects including, e.g., the VR framework grant project Cloud Control, the eSSENCE strategic research program, several EU FP7 and H2020 projects, an 8 postdoc project in autonomous systems funded by the Kempe Foundations, etc.

Elmroth’s extensive leadership experience includes over ten years as Head and Deputy Head of department and 13 years as Deputy Director for a national supercomputer center (HPC2N). International experiences include a year at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and one semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA.

Elmroth is member of the Swedish Royal Academy for Engineering Sciences and vice chair for its section on Information Technology. Previously, he has chaired the Board of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), the VR’s expert group on e-science infrastructures and been member of VR’s Council for Research Infrastructures (RFI). He has also produced two international research strategies for the Nordic Council of Ministers. He received the Nordea Scientific Award 2011 and the SIAM Linear Algebra Prize 2000.

Elmroth is founder and chair of the Cloud Control Workshops series (www.cloudresearch.org/workshops). He is also co-founder of Elastisys AB.

Dates in the Seminar Series include: 1 October, 5 November, 3 December, 4 February, 4 March, 1 April, 6 May, 3 June