Prof. Parashar presented a Vision Talk titled “Harnessing the Computing Continuum for Urgent Science” at the International Workshop on Distributed Cloud Computing (DCC 2020) held in conjunction with ACM SIGMETRICS 2020, May 2020.
Abstract: Urgent science describes time-critical, data-driven scientific workflows that can leverage distributed data sources in a timely way to facilitate important decision making. In spite of the exponential growth of available digital data sources and the ubiquity of non-trivial computational power for processing this data, realizing such urgent science workflows remains challenging — while our capacity for generating data is expanding dramatically, our ability for managing, analyzing, and transforming this data into knowledge in a timely manner has not kept pace. In this talk I will explore how the computing continuum, spanning resources at the edges, in the core and in-between, can be harnessed to support urgent science. Using an Early Earthquake Warning (EEW) workflow, which combines data streams from geo-distributed seismometers and GPS sensors to detect tsunamis, as a driver, I will explore a system stack that can enable the fluid integration of distributed analytics across a dynamic infrastructure spanning the computing continuum and discuss associated research challenges. I will describe recent research in programming abstractions that can express what data should be processed and when and where it should be processed, middleware services that automate the discovery of resources and the orchestration of computations across these resources. I will also discuss open research challenges.