The Power of Cloud Computing Comes to Mobile Phones, Tablets, and Laptops

In this Knowledge Sharing article, authors Neeraj .B. Bharwani and George Phillip propose a novel architecture that addresses the challenges imposed by limited computation, memory, and energy reserves by seamlessly—but partially—off-loading execution from the smartphone to a computational infrastructure hosting a cloud of smartphone clones. Through a Clone Cloud architecture, smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and laptops realize significant benefits.

Enabling a smartphone to host its expensive, exotic applications requires an execution engine that augments the smartphone’s capabilities by seamlessly off-loading some tasks to a nearby computer, where they are executed in a cloned whole-system image of the device, reintegrating the results in the smartphone’s execution upon completion. The authors address augmented execution—i.e. Primary Functionality Outsourcing,  Background Augmetation,  Mainline Augmetation, Hardware Augmetation, and Augmetation Through Multiplicity—which overcomes smartphone hardware limitations, and is provided (semi)-automatically to applications whose developers need few or no modifications to their applications.

The authors also look at look at how Rapid Virtual Machine Cloning for Cloud Computing can be used to boost augmentation.

Snow Flock is covered at length. An implementation of the VM fork abstraction, Snow Flock focuses on the demanding scenario of services requiring on-the-fly creation of hundreds of parallel workers in order to solve computationally intensive queries in seconds. These services are prominent in fields such as bioinformatics, finance, and rendering. Snow Flock provides sub-second VM cloning, scales to hundreds of workers, consumes few cloud I/O resources, and has negligible runtime overhead. In particular, Snow Flock is of immediate relevance to users wishing to test and deploy parallel applications in the cloud.

This Knowledge Sharing article describes how the smartphone’s potential can be drastically improved to achieve ultimate performance. The same idea can be imposed on laptops, tablets, and netbooks.

Read the full article here.