SkyRider: An Inexpensive and Clean Way for Super Scale Mobile Cloud Computing

Speaker:        Dr. Pan HUI
                Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-labs)
                Germany

Title:          "SkyRider: An Inexpensive and Clean Way for Super Scale
                Mobile Cloud Computing"

Date:           Friday, 2 December 2011

Time:           3:00pm  - 4:00pm

Venue:          LTF (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Smartphones have exploded in popularity in recent years, becoming ever
more sophisticated and capable. As a result, developers worldwide are
building increasingly complex applications that require ever increasing
amounts of computational power and energy. In this talk, I will first give
a general overview of the SkyRider project which is a federation of mobile
cloud computing and computation harvesting. And then I will  focus on the
ThinkAir subproject, a framework that makes it simple for developers to
migrate their smartphone applications to the cloud. ThinkAir exploits the
concept of smartphone virtualization in the cloud and provides
method-level computation offloading. Advancing on previous work, it
focuses on the elasticity and scalability of the cloud and enhances the
power of mobile cloud computing by parallelizing method execution using
multiple virtual machine (VM) images. We implement ThinkAir and evaluate
it with a range of benchmarks starting from simple micro-benchmarks to
more complex applications. In the evaluation part, I will first show that
the execution time and energy consumption decrease two orders of magnitude
for a N-queens puzzle application and one order of magnitude for a face
detection and a virus scan application. I will then show that a
parallelizable application can invoke multiple VMs to execute in the cloud
in a seamless and on-demand manner such as to achieve greater reduction on
execution time and energy consumption. Finally, I will use a memory hungry
image combiner tool to demonstrate that applications can dynamically
request VMs with more computational power in order to meet their
computational requirements.


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Biography:

Dr. Pan HUI is a senior technical staff member in Deutsche Telekom
Laboratories (T-labs), Berlin Germany. He is currently leading the
SkyRider mobile cloud computing project.  He received his PhD from
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.  During his PhD, he was also
an affiliated researcher with Intel Research Cambridge. His Mphil and
bachelor degrees were both from University of Hong Kong. His current
research interests include cloud computing, mobile networking and systems,
social networking and computing, and the application of complex network
science in communication systems design. Dr. Hui has published more than
80 international papers and book chapters, and have accumulative more than
2,500 citations. He has founded 3 and have chaired 9 IEEE/ACM
conferences/workshops, and served on the technical program committee of 32
international conferences and workshops including IEEE Infocom, SECON,
MASS and Globecom. More information about his profile and his research
work can be found at http://www.deutsche-telekom-laboratoriesde/~panhui/