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.
