Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RAPID (Heterogeneous Secure Multi-level Remote Acceleration Service for Low-Power Integrated Systems and Devices)
Período documentado: 2016-07-01 hasta 2017-12-31
Many low-power devices, such as smartphones or tables, as well as several other embedded systems cannot always cope with the increased demand for processing power, memory and storage required by modern applications. As a result, most of these applications are only executed on high-end servers. According to Ericsson Mobility Report, there have been 7.3 billion mobile subscriptions in 2015, with an estimation of 5% increase for the next 5 years. Furthermore, the smartphone data traffic is expected to increase by 8.9% in the following 5 years. Users keep demanding more features and services from mobile applications developers. To be able to satisfy users’ demands, developers offload the heavy operations of an application to more resourceful machines, such as private or public cloud, giving birth to a new research area known as Mobile Cloud Computing.
RAPID tackles this challenge by taking advantage of high-performance accelerators and high-bandwidth networks. Following our approach, compute or storage intensive tasks are seamlessly offloaded from the low-power devices to more powerful heterogeneous accelerators, supporting multiple virtual CPUs and GPUs. We have developed, for the first time, a secure unified model where almost any device or infrastructure, ranging from smartphone, notebook, laptop and desktop to private and public cloud can operate as an accelerated entity and/or as an accelerator serving other less powerful devices in a secure way.
RAPID offers a registration mechanism, which permits the accelerated entities to automatically find and connect to nearby accelerators with the required resources. Next, a runtime system, running on each such accelerated entity, takes into account several parameters such as the local status, the environmental conditions, the task requirements, and the status of the accelerators it is connected to in order to decide whether local tasks (or incoming tasks if the entity also acts as an accelerator) should be executed locally or remotely. Service Level Agreements are employed to serve multiple accelerated applications efficiently on heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. Moreover, compared to the existing cloud solutions, the RAPID-based infrastructure will be the first to offer virtual GPUs (i.e. a physical GPU can be used by many virtual machines in parallel) in order to share more efficiently the cloud resources between several mobile applications.
By improving the efficiency of mobile devices (ranging from smart phones, smart glasses, smart watches to robots, smart cameras and laptops), RAPID can play an important role in society. RAPID will contribute to the evolution of energy-efficient devices by making them smarter (i.e. more power efficient) and by extending their battery lifetime. These devices have impacted and will continue to impact all walk of human life. The prominent areas, where the impacts of smart devices are obvious include business, education, health and social life. Several applications in entertainment, security, vision, and robotics such as gaming, antivirus, augmented reality, face and speech recognition, movement detection, biometrics, and CCTV can take advantage of the RAPID infrastructure.
RAPID targets to make it technically feasible and economically viable to conceive, design and deploy an innovative heterogeneous cloud acceleration service for low-power devices. To do this, the main objectives of the project are the following:
• Produce a novel platform providing the necessary technical support, and acting as an open, common basis for both developers and end-users.
• Carry out support activities promoting widespread acceptance and adoption of this highly innovative platform. These activities form an integral part of the project and will start at an early stage.
RAPID tackles this challenge by taking advantage of high-performance accelerators and high-bandwidth networks. Following our approach, compute or storage intensive tasks are seamlessly offloaded from the low-power devices to more powerful heterogeneous accelerators, supporting multiple virtual CPUs and GPUs. We have developed, for the first time, a secure unified model where almost any device or infrastructure, ranging from smartphone, notebook, laptop and desktop to private and public cloud can operate as an accelerated entity and/or as an accelerator serving other less powerful devices in a secure way.
RAPID offers a registration mechanism, which permits the accelerated entities to automatically find and connect to nearby accelerators with the required resources. Next, a runtime system, running on each such accelerated entity, takes into account several parameters such as the local status, the environmental conditions, the task requirements, and the status of the accelerators it is connected to in order to decide whether local tasks (or incoming tasks if the entity also acts as an accelerator) should be executed locally or remotely. Service Level Agreements are employed to serve multiple accelerated applications efficiently on heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. Moreover, compared to the existing cloud solutions, the RAPID-based infrastructure will be the first to offer virtual GPUs (i.e. a physical GPU can be used by many virtual machines in parallel) in order to share more efficiently the cloud resources between several mobile applications.
By improving the efficiency of mobile devices (ranging from smart phones, smart glasses, smart watches to robots, smart cameras and laptops), RAPID can play an important role in society. RAPID will contribute to the evolution of energy-efficient devices by making them smarter (i.e. more power efficient) and by extending their battery lifetime. These devices have impacted and will continue to impact all walk of human life. The prominent areas, where the impacts of smart devices are obvious include business, education, health and social life. Several applications in entertainment, security, vision, and robotics such as gaming, antivirus, augmented reality, face and speech recognition, movement detection, biometrics, and CCTV can take advantage of the RAPID infrastructure.
RAPID targets to make it technically feasible and economically viable to conceive, design and deploy an innovative heterogeneous cloud acceleration service for low-power devices. To do this, the main objectives of the project are the following:
• Produce a novel platform providing the necessary technical support, and acting as an open, common basis for both developers and end-users.
• Carry out support activities promoting widespread acceptance and adoption of this highly innovative platform. These activities form an integral part of the project and will start at an early stage.
During the first period the requirements and the detailed specifications of the platform were derived in W2 and WP3. Moreover, the Implementation phase started in WP4, providing at this stage a first simplified version of the RAPID platform which was demonstrated during the first review meeting in Brussels in September 2016. During the second period the RAPID components including the Acceleration Client, the Acceleration Server, the compiler, the Directory Server (DS), the Service Level Agreement Manager (SLAM), the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and the GPU Bridger based on GVirtuS were implemented and tested thoroughly. The components were made publicly available on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/RapidProjectH2020). By M30 the components were integrated providing the first integrated RAPID platform which was available on SILO’s private cloud. The first RAPID-based public service was deployed on the public Open Telekom Cloud of Deutsche Telekom in M35. In parallel the three RAPID applications (3D Hand Tracking, BioSurveillance and Antivirus) were developed and used to evaluate the RAPID platform and cloud infrastructure.
RAPID provides modular architecture. All the modules are available under github.
Main Repository: https://github.com/RapidProjectH2020
The user can follow the instructions under the Download web page of the RAPID web site.
RAPID provides modular architecture. All the modules are available under github.
Main Repository: https://github.com/RapidProjectH2020
The user can follow the instructions under the Download web page of the RAPID web site.
RAPID does not simply provide another cloud-based offloading engine but it goes beyond the state of the art proposing and developing a peer-to-peer CPU and GPU sharing infrastructure where any device can offload tasks to other more powerful devices and clouds or it can become an accelerator itself. RAPID provides for the first time an heterogeneous infrastructure which can automatically offload demanding power-hungry GPU-based tasks from low-power devices to remote GPUs. This functionality is offered to the programmer through a user-friendly programming model and API.
In particular RAPID provides the following:
• Multi-Level Distributed Cloud infrastructure: The RAPID framework will be the first that can handle seamlessly different processing systems and decide where each task will more efficiently be executed based on a set of criteria including CPU and network energy consumption, latency, throughput etc.
• Unified acceleration model: RAPID will be the first to use a unified acceleration scheme where, apart from using a smartphone as an accelerated device and a private or a public cloud as an accelerator, almost any entity (device, embedded system or infrastructure) can operate as an accelerated entity and/or as an accelerator serving other less powerful entities.
• Heterogeneous acceleration for mobile devices: The RAPID platform will be the first to provide a runtime system and a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure, which will permit remote offloading of heterogeneous CPU-based and GPU-based tasks over a heterogeneous network (3G, wifi, Ethernet, etc.).
• Acceleration as a service: RAPID will be the first to provide acceleration as a service. Remote acceleration as a service with quality of service support will be provided based on the demands of each application as well as the service-level agreement (SLA) between the client and the service provider. In this way, the RAPID will also provide a commercially exploitable solution.
• Automatic discovery and registration of RAPID entities: Similar to a peer-to-peer file sharing RAPID will provide a Directory Server which monitors the status and the position of the RAPID devices. Any RAPID client and server has to register to the Directory Server in order to discover nearby resources.
In particular RAPID provides the following:
• Multi-Level Distributed Cloud infrastructure: The RAPID framework will be the first that can handle seamlessly different processing systems and decide where each task will more efficiently be executed based on a set of criteria including CPU and network energy consumption, latency, throughput etc.
• Unified acceleration model: RAPID will be the first to use a unified acceleration scheme where, apart from using a smartphone as an accelerated device and a private or a public cloud as an accelerator, almost any entity (device, embedded system or infrastructure) can operate as an accelerated entity and/or as an accelerator serving other less powerful entities.
• Heterogeneous acceleration for mobile devices: The RAPID platform will be the first to provide a runtime system and a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure, which will permit remote offloading of heterogeneous CPU-based and GPU-based tasks over a heterogeneous network (3G, wifi, Ethernet, etc.).
• Acceleration as a service: RAPID will be the first to provide acceleration as a service. Remote acceleration as a service with quality of service support will be provided based on the demands of each application as well as the service-level agreement (SLA) between the client and the service provider. In this way, the RAPID will also provide a commercially exploitable solution.
• Automatic discovery and registration of RAPID entities: Similar to a peer-to-peer file sharing RAPID will provide a Directory Server which monitors the status and the position of the RAPID devices. Any RAPID client and server has to register to the Directory Server in order to discover nearby resources.