February 2025: Trusted Volunteer Edge-Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows
The unprecedented growth in networked edge devices (e.g., scientific instruments, sensors) has caused a data deluge in scientific application communities. The data processing is increasingly relying on distributed computing to cope with the heterogeneity, scale, and velocity of the data. At the same time, there is an abundance of low-cost computation resources that can be used for “volunteer edge-cloud computing” (VEC), where collaborators in a community (e.g., bioinformatics, manufacturing) contribute their resources to form a distributed infrastructure to execute scientific workflows. In this talk, a VEC management reference architecture and a related framework implementation will be presented for support of trusted resource allocation in VEC environments for scientific data-intensive workflows. We demonstrate how our novel scheduling approach optimizes task allocation on VEC nodes by balancing workflow requirements and resource preferences, improving latency, task completion times, and resource utilization efficiency. Lastly, we outline our recent efforts to ensure privacy-preservation of the scientific workflow execution in VEC environments by adopting principles from the confidential computing paradigm.
Speaker Bio:
Prasad Calyam is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor and the Greg L. Gilliom Professor of Cybersecurity in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Missouri-Columbia, and Director of the Center for Cyber Education, Research and Infrastructure (Mizzou CERI). His research and development areas of interest include: Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. He has published over 235 peer-reviewed papers in various conference and journal venues. As the Principal Investigator, he has successfully led teams of graduate, undergraduate and postdoctoral fellows in Federal, State, University and Industry sponsored R&D projects sponsored by National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Security Agency and others. His basic research and software on multi-domain network measurement and monitoring has been commercialized as ‘Narada Metrics’.