[open-edge] Open Edge Computing progress and updates

[Mahadev Satyanarayanan]

ACTION

Bookmark https://owncloud.cmusatyalab.org/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=c9f5bf1c36948d874459dea2fa50e57a

DETAILS

Hi everyone,
 After our kickoff meeting on Open Edge Computing at CMU in early June,
we have had a very productive summer with lots of action on many
fronts.  This email is to give everyone an update on the progress.
There is a lot to cover, so apologies for the length of this email.

SHARED STORAGE:
Please bookmark the URL above.  This is web-accessible storage located
at http://owncloud.cmusatyalab.org.  It is being used a working
storage repository for shared documents.  Anyone with the above URL
can download, upload and view documents.  From now own we'll just use
"owncloud storage area" to mean the above.   Feel free to look in there
at any time to find out what is going on.

NEW PEOPLE:
We have some new people who have joined our team.  Ashlee Young from
Huawei is helping us in software development efforts to get our
OpenStack extensions integrated into mainstream.  Junjue Wang is
joining our research group at CMU as a first-year PhD student.  Please
welcome them to our team.  Their email addresses are in the
spreadsheet below.  In addition to Ashlee's time, Huawei is also
contributing the time of two external software developers in India to
assist in our OpenStack efforts.  Many thanks to Yunchao Hu and
Prakash Ramachandran of Huawei for their help in these efforts.

MAILING LISTS:
In addition to this "open-edge" mailing list which is an "all hands"
group, we have two working groups that are meeting regularly.
"oe-sync" is an oversight group that meets every two weeks to keep
things moving forward.  "oe-devel" is a software development group
that meets every week to drive intergration with OpenStack forward.
Attached are lists of the members of all these mailing lists.  Up to
date versions of these files are always available in our owncloud
storage area.  In addition, Babu Pillai is starting up another working
group to investigate how the concept of "low latency" should be
segmented so that different hardware/software combinations and
deployment strategies can be created for many different use cases.

CLASS PROJECTS:
Intel has generously arranged for a substantial donation of hardware
to CMU that we can use as cloudlets in a Fall 2015 course on Mobile
and Pervasive Computing (15-821/18-843).  Many thanks to Valerie Young
for her help in this.  This will enable students in the class to
stress test our open edge computing infrastructure and to come up with
creative new applications that leverage that infrastructure.  A number
of our team members (Kiryong Ha, Zhuo Chen, Wenlu Hu, Brandon Amos,
Babu Pillai and possibly others) will serve as mentors to student
projects.  Junjue Wang will be taking the class as a student.  The
mobile devices used in these projects will include Google Glass
devices and smartphones.  "Demo Day" for this class is on Tuesday,
December 1, 3-6pm and is open to the public.  You are all welcome to
attend and see the cool projects created by students.

MEC REQUIREMENTS:
At our kickoff meeting in early June, a key concern that emerged was
that the MEC requirements specification being pursued by the ETSI
group was not a superset of cloudlet requirements.  In other words,
there were important cloudlet requirements that were not MEC
requirements.  Provisioning of an MEC with third party software
without a rigorous approval process, and the ability to migrate VMs
into and out of an MEC were the two key missing requirements.  With
their inclusion, we are on track to be able to say "Every MEC is a
cloudlet" (of course, the reverse is not true: an MEC may have
functionality beyond what is expected of every cloudlet).  Thanks to
the efforts of Patrice Hede of Huawei, Joe Cahill of Intel, and
possibly others from Vodafone, Huawei and Intel for achieving this
important step in the standardization process.

EXTERNAL VISIBILITY AND MINDSHARE:
We have a number of upcoming opportunities to showcase our vision and
progress, and build momentum.   Here are a few:
 - Next week (August 27-28) a number of us (Kiryong Ha, Babu Pillai,
   Mike Kozuch, myself) will be at Intel, Portland to attend a retreat
   on cloud computing.  Both Valerie Young and I will be giving talks
   on open edge computing, and Kiryong and Babu will be manning
   posters.   This will give visibility of our work to a wider Intel audience.

 - On September 29-30, the first Mobile Edge Congress
   (http://meccongress.com/) will be held in London.  A number of us
   (Rolf Schuster from Vodafone, Caroline Chan from Intel, myself, and
   possibly others are speakers at this industry event).  Here is an
   interview by the organizers where I share my thoughts on the need
   for creating an open ecosystem
   http://meccongress.com/professor-mahadev-satyanarayanan-carnegie-mellon-university/

 - On October 27-28, 2016 the First IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing
   will be held in Washington, DC
   (http://conferences.computer.org/SEC/).  A number of us are on the
   program committee (Rolf Schuster, Babu Pillai, and myself as
   founding program chair).  The push for creating this conference
   came from people outside this mailing list, so it is a good
   independent validator of the importance of this emerging topic and the
   impact that our work and evangelism has already had.

MAJOR EXTERNAL SUPPORT
The National Science Foundation just announced an award of $2.8M over
4 years for research in "Wearable Cognitive Assistance" to a
multidisciplinary team of CMU faculty in computer vision/robotics
(Martial Hebert), human computer interaction (Dan Siewiorek and Bobby
Klatzky), and computer systems (myself).  This is very strong external
validation of the new class of applications that has been an
inspiration and driving force for our efforts on Open Edge Computing.
As you can imagine, the competition was fierce :-) 
Here is the official public announcement.
>
> NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
> 4201 WILSON BOULEVARD, ARLINGTON, VA 22230
> OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
>
> Award Date:   Aug. 07, 2015
> Award No.:     1518865
>
> We are pleased to notify you regarding a recent National Science
> Foundation (NSF) award made to Carnegie-Mellon University with an
> intended total amount of $2,807,787.00.  This project, entitled "CSR:
> CHS: Large: Wearable Cognitive Assistance," is under the direction of
> Mahadev Satyanarayanan. The award starts Aug. 01, 2015.  The abstract
> and other information regarding this award will soon be publicly
> available via the NSF Award Abstracts database at
> http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1518865 . Any
> questions regarding this notification should be addressed to NSF’s
> Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at 703-292-8070.

(Before you get too excited, keep in mind that roughly 57.3% (yes,
fifty-seven) of the amount vanishes as "CMU overhead".  Only the rest
is available to support the direct costs of the research such as PhD
student support. Even with this caveat, the funding is much
appreciated and will be a big boost to our efforts. )  Many thanks to
NSF and all American taxpayers.  Many thanks also to Vodafone,
especially to Rolf Schuster and Guenter Klas (and their boss, Luke Ibbetson) 
whose early and sustained championship of our vision has 
brought us this far.

That's all I can think of. If any of you have additional thoughts to
share with this group, please feel free to do so.  It is amazing how
much we have accomplished as a team in just a few months since we
kicked off our collaboration.  Fall 2015 promises to be even more
exciting for our progress!

           -- Satya
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