Seminar: Edge-to-Cloud Virtualization and Applications in Ecological Forecasting
Renato Figueiredo
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Florida
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
10:00 - 11:00 AM
1100 Torgersen Hall
Abstract
Edge computing encompasses techniques that complement the widely adopted virtualization-based cloud computing model to significantly reduce resource requirements (and cost) of streaming large datasets across the Internet. Unlike cloud data centers, however, edge data centers are smaller, more widely distributed geographically, and often managed by different providers and in different private networks. Many emerging applications with significant potential societal impact (such as ecological forecasting for improved water quality management) stand to benefit from both processing near sensors at the edge (for low latency, increased privacy, and reduced bandwidth usage) and in the cloud (for high capacity, performance, and scalability). This talk presents an overview of inter-disciplinary research and development of systems supporting such emerging class of applications across the edge-to-cloud continuum, including network virtualization and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) event-driven deployment of containerized virtual environments in support of ecological forecasting workflows. First, this talk describes the design and implementation of EdgeVPN, a virtual private network (VPN) with an open-source implementation that addresses challenges at the networking layer. EdgeVPN is novel in how it: 1) spans across multiple edge providers while providing a unified virtual Ethernet address space, 2) enables seamless connectivity among participating nodes that join and leave the network dynamically, 3) enforces privacy in communications by tunneling over the public Internet, while supporting high-performance overlay links within edge/cloud data centers, and 4) supports unmodified applications and middleware platforms for application deployment and management, such as containers and their orchestration. EdgeVPN’s architecture combines a decentralized software-defined networking (SDN) control plane and a scalable structured peer-to-peer overlay of tunnels that form its datapath, while leveraging standards for authentication, messaging, and bootstrapping for NAT traversal. Its open-source software can be deployed as containers providing network function virtualization for edge and cloud platforms. Second, this talk overviews the cyberinfrastructure underpinning FLARE, a multi-year interdisciplinary collaboration between UF and VT that integrates data sensed, staged, and transferred from edge resources with FaaS cloud workflows and data storage to deliver event-driven ecological forecasts for lakes and reservoirs. The talk also describes ongoing efforts to generalize from lessons learned in FLARE towards FaaSr, a novel system that supports cross-provider FaaS platforms while reducing barriers to entry for ecologists/forecasters, and concludes with directions for future work.
Biography
Dr. Renato J. Figueiredo is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. His main interests are in resource virtualization techniques including virtual machines and software-defined networks across the continuum from edge to cloud computing, and their use as a foundation for cyberinfrastructure supporting interdisciplinary team-science to advance solutions with impact to the environment and society, in particular freshwater resources and biodiversity. His core work in computer systems has led to contributions to virtualization, with over 150 publications in conferences, workshops and journals that include two best paper awards and one of the 22 best papers of the ACM HPDC Symposium (selected for the conference’s 20-year celebration). Figueiredo graduated with a Ph.D. in ECE from Purdue University in 2001, joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in 2001, and subsequently the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor in 2002. His research has been funded by government and industry sponsors that include the National Science Foundation, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., NOAA, and NASA. He has published over 150 technical papers in conferences and journals, and served as Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC, 2010) and the International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC, 2013). He served as site co-director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC).