Everywhere & Nowhere: Envisioning a Computing Continuum for Science

TL;DR

This paper envisions a computing continuum that spans edge to core resources, proposing abstractions and middleware to enable distributed data-driven scientific workflows despite the challenges of resource discovery and orchestration.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual framework and recent research on programming abstractions and autonomic middleware for managing distributed scientific computations across a computing continuum.

Findings

Proposes a unified computing continuum for scientific workflows.

Introduces programming abstractions for data processing decisions.

Presents middleware solutions for resource discovery and orchestration.

Abstract

Emerging data-driven scientific workflows are seeking to leverage distributed data sources to understand end-to-end phenomena, drive experimentation, and facilitate important decision-making. Despite the exponential growth of available digital data sources at the edge, and the ubiquity of non trivial computational power for processing this data, realizing such science workflows remains challenging. This paper explores a computing continuum that is everywhere and nowhere -- one spanning resources at the edges, in the core and in between, and providing abstractions that can be harnessed to support science. It also introduces recent research in programming abstractions that can express what data should be processed and when and where it should be processed, and autonomic middleware services that automate the discovery of resources and the orchestration of computations across these resources.