The Role of Smartphones in Cloud Computing
by Mahadev SATYANARAYANAN

Related to Satya's talk, please see this paper "The Case for VM-Based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing" appearing in Pervasive Computing Magazine, IEEE Computer Society, October, 2009.
View from IEEE Digital Library here.

Abstract

Two very different computing trends are visible today. One trend is the increasing sophistication of smartphones through convergence of functionality (cell phones, PDAs, Blackberries, iPods, and so on). The focus here is enriching the capabilities of a small personal device with limited resources. The other trend is cloud computing. This is a vague term that means many things to many people, but broadly signifies consolidation of computing resources in large data centers. At first glance, these two trends seem to be divergent: one towards autonomy and the other towards centralization --- freedom versus dependence. But closer examination reveals that mobile devices, particularly smartphones, have an important role to play in some aspects of cloud computing by improving user experience. Conversely, a nearby instantiation of the cloud (called a "cloudlet") can enable a new class of resource-rich mobile applications with tight latency requirements. In this talk, I will explore these trends and report on two relevant implementations from our research. Virtual machine technology plays a central role in both these implementations.

About the speaker

Satya is an experimental computer scientist who has pioneered research in mobile and pervasive computing. One outcome is the open-source Coda File System, which supports distributed file access in low-bandwidth and intermittent wireless networks through disconnected and bandwidth-adaptive operation. The Coda concepts of hoarding , reintegration and application-specific conflict resolution can be found in the hotsync capability of PDAs today. Key ideas from Coda have been incorporated by Microsoft into the IntelliMirror component of Windows 2000 and the Cached Exchange Mode of Outlook 2003.  Another outcome of Satya's work is Odyssey, a set of open-source operating system extensions that enable mobile applications to adapt to variation in critical resources such as network bandwidth and energy. Coda and Odyssey are building blocks in Project Aura, a research initiative at Carnegie Mellon to explore distraction-free ubiquitous computing. His most recent work in this space is Internet Suspend/Resume, a hands-free approach to mobile computing that exploits virtual machine technology to liberate personal computing state from hardware.  Satya is a co-inventor of many supporting technologies relevant to mobile and pervasive computing, such as data staging, lookaside caching, translucent caching and application-aware adaptation . He is also a co-inventor of the Diamond approach to interactive, non-indexed search of complex and loosely-organized data such as digital photographs and medical images. Early in his career, Satya was a principal architect and implementor of the Andrew File System (AFS) which pioneered the use of scalable file caching, ACL-based security, and volume-based system administration for enterprise-scale information sharing. AFS was commercialized by IBM, is in widespread use today as OpenAFS, and has heavily influenced the NFS v4 network file system protocol standard that was published in April 2003.

Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. From May 2001 to May 2004 he served as the founding director of  Intel Research Pittsburgh, one of four university-affiliated research labs established worldwide by Intel to create disruptive information technologies through its Open Collaborative Research model. Satya received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing.