Artificial intelligence is increasingly pervasive in many sectors. In this regard, IT operations are having a big deal on extracting useful information from the large amount of resources' datasets available (e.g., CPU, memory, disk, energy). The issue is bigger if we consider multiple cloud tiers. Artificial intelligence is a key technology when the main goal is to improve microservice migration through offload management. However, it struggles to facilitate distributed contexts where both data transfer needs to be reduced and data privacy needs to be increased. There is therefore a need for novel solutions that resolve the problem of prediction resource utilization (e.g. CPU) while maintaining data privacy and reducing data communication. In this paper, we present a Bi-LSTM model with attention trained in Federated Learning on CPU historical data. The dataset comes from multiple Microsoft Azure trace. The results are compared with the literature and showcase a good generalization and prediction results for metrics collected by multiple virtual machines. The model is evaluated in terms of R-squared, MSE, RMSE and MAE.

IoT-Cloud environments are being increasingly adopted for the deployment of applications and particularly resource-oriented ones. However, ensuring correct communications during the execution of IoT applications is not guaranteed. In fact, a substantial class of applications is intended to run on constrained IoT networks. Moreover, IoT devices exchange the data derived from various Cloud providers and in accordance with different protocols. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to model and verify the applications deployed over IoT-Cloud environments. The proposed model encompasses four verification levels: the Structural, Functional, Operational and Behavioral levels. Therefore, we opted for the Event-B formal method that allows gradual problems decomposition by relying on its refinement capabilities. The proposed approach has proven its efficiency for the modeling and the verification of IoT applications. We applied mathematical proof-based method to verify the model since it provides rigorous reasoning. We also employed the ProB animator to proceed in the validation of the model.

Low latencies connections and decentralized servers are currently showcasing a new potential for distributed computing. By moving away from traditional centralized cloud models and toward edge computing, which allows for more autonomy and decision-making at the network’s edge, almost any physical thing can be turned into an Internet of Things (IoT) device that can elaborate on data it senses from its environment. In this context, service management and adaptation routines in a highly dynamic and geographically distributed federation depends on a large number of factors ranging from performance to cost and the fluctuation of the data quality.

TEMA project is a Horizon Europe funded project that aims at addressing Natural Disaster Management by the use of sophisticated Cloud-Edge Continuum infrastructures by means of data analysis algorithms wrapped in Serverless functions deployed on a distributed infrastructure according to a Federated Learning scheduler that constantly monitors the infrastructure in search of the best way to satisfy required QoS constraints. In this paper, we discuss the advantages of Serverless workflow and how they can be used and monitored to natively trigger complex algorithm pipelines in the continuum, dynamically placing and relocating them taking into account incoming IoT data, QoS constraints, and the current status of the continuum infrastructure. Therefore we presented the Urgent Function Enabler (UFE) platform, a fully distributed architecture able to define, spread, and manage FaaS functions, using local IOT data managed using the Fiware ecosystem and a computing infrastructure composed of mobile and stable nodes.

With increasing availability and use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors and video cameras, large amounts of streaming data is now being produced at high velocity. Applications which require low latency response such as video surveillance, augmented reality and autonomous vehicles demand a swift and efficient analysis of this data. Existing approaches employ cloud infrastructure to store and perform machine learning-based analytics on this data. This centralized approach has limited ability to support real-time analysis of large-scale streaming data due to network bandwidth and latency constraints between data source and cloud. We propose RealEdgeStream (RES) an edge enhanced stream analytics system for large-scale, high performance data analytics. The proposed approach investigates the problem of video stream analytics by proposing (i) filtration and (ii) identification phases. The filtration phase reduces the amount of data by filtering low-value stream objects using configurable rules. The identification phase uses deep learning inference to perform analytics on the streams of interest. The phases consist of stages which are mapped onto available in-transit and cloud resources using a placement algorithm to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints identified by a user. We demonstrate that for a 10K element data streams, with a frame rate of 15–100 per second, the job completion in the proposed system takes 49 percent less time and saves 99 percent bandwidth compared to a centralized cloud-only based approach.

Deep Learning has shifted the focus of traditional batch workflows to data-driven feature engineering on streaming data. In particular, the execution of Deep Learning workflows presents expectations of near-real-time results with user-defined acceptable accuracy. Meeting the objectives of such applications across heterogeneous resources located at the edge of the network, the core, and in-between requires managing trade-offs between the accuracy and the urgency of the results. However, current data analysis rarely manages the entire Deep Learning pipeline along the data path, making it complex for developers to implement strategies in realworld deployments. Driven by an object detection use case, this paper presents an architecture for time-critical Deep Learning workflows by providing a data-driven scheduling approach to distribute the pipeline across Edge to Cloud resources. Furthermore, it adopts a data management strategy that reduces the resolution of incoming data when potential trade-off optimizations are available. We illustrate the system's viability through a performance evaluation of the object detection use case on the Grid'5000 testbed. We demonstrate that in a multi-user scenario, with a standard frame rate of 25 frames per second, the system speed-up data analysis up to 54.4% compared to a Cloud-only-based scenario with an analysis accuracy higher than a fixed threshold.

Our research aims to improve the accuracy of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems by means of machine learning. EEW systems are designed to detect and characterize medium and large earthquakes before their damaging effects reach a certain location. Traditional EEW methods based on seismometers fail to accurately identify large earthquakes due to their sensitivity to the ground motion velocity. The recently introduced high-precision GPS stations, on the other hand, are ineffective to identify medium earthquakes due to its propensity to produce noisy data. In addition, GPS stations and seismometers may be deployed in large numbers across different locations and may produce a significant volume of data consequently, affecting the response time and the robustness of EEW systems.In practice, EEW can be seen as a typical classification problem in the machine learning field: multi-sensor data are given in input, and earthquake severity is the classification result. In this paper, we introduce the Distributed Multi-Sensor Earthquake Early Warning (DMSEEW) system, a novel machine learning-based approach that combines data from both types of sensors (GPS stations and seismometers) to detect medium and large earthquakes. DMSEEW is based on a new stacking ensemble method which has been evaluated on a real-world dataset validated with geoscientists. The system builds on a geographically distributed infrastructure, ensuring an efficient computation in terms of response time and robustness to partial infrastructure failures. Our experiments show that DMSEEW is more accurate than the traditional seismometer-only approach and the combined-sensors (GPS and seismometers) approach that adopts the rule of relative strength.

Microservices promise the benefits of services with an efficient granularity using dynamically allocated resources. In the current evolving architectures, data producers and consumers are created as decoupled components that support different data objects and quality of service. Actual implementations of service meshes lack support for data-driven paradigms, and focus on goal-based approaches designed to fulfill the general system goal. This diversity of available components demands the integration of users requirements and data products into the discovery mechanism. This paper proposes a data-driven service discovery framework based on profile matching using data-centric service descriptions. We have designed and evaluated a microservices architecture for providing service meshes with a standalone set of components that manages data profiles and resources allocations over multiple geographical zones. Moreover, we demonstrated an adaptation scheme to provide quality of service guarantees. Evaluation of the implementation on a real life testbed shows effectiveness of this approach with stable and fluctuating request incoming rates.

In a context of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), energy-efficiency is a critical factor to achieve long operational life-time. The constraint of using battery-powered devices adds degrees of complexity, especially in a hard to reach environment with scarce network and energy resources. The reporting of data consumes large amount of energy, reducing the life-time of both individual nodes and the CPS as a whole. One way to reduce the energy cost of communication is to reduce the number of Bits to transmit. However, this is a viable approach only if the transmitted data remain suitable for further analysis.In this paper, we report on the effect of reducing the image dimensions on the confidence score computed by a convolutional neural network (CNN) determining the species of animals present in images. We also report on the energy consumption of transmitting full vs. reduced dimensions of images. CPS devices and CNNs developed by the Distributed Arctic Observatory (DAO) project are used as experimental platforms.The results show that the energy needed to report the images can be reduced by up to 98% while only reducing the average confidence of determining the species correctly by 0.10%.

Summary Large scientific facilities provide researchers with instrumentation, data, and data products that can accelerate scientific discovery. However, increasing data volumes coupled with limited local computational power prevents researchers from taking full advantage of what these facilities can offer. Many researchers looked into using commercial and academic cyberinfrastructure (CI) to process these data. Nevertheless, there remains a disconnect between large facilities and CI that requires researchers to be actively part of the data processing cycle. The increasing complexity of CI and data scale necessitates new data delivery models, those that can autonomously integrate large‐scale scientific facilities and CI to deliver real‐time data and insights. In this paper, we present our initial efforts using the Ocean Observatories Initiative project as a use case. In particular, we present a subscription‐based data streaming service for data delivery that leverages the Apache Kafka data streaming platform. We also show how our solution can automatically integrate large‐scale facilities with CI services for automated data processing.

The number of Internet of Things applications is forecast to grow exponentially within the coming decade. Owners of such applications strive to make predictions from large streams of complex input in near real time. Cloud-based architectures often centralize storage and processing, generating high data movement overheads that penalize real-time applications. Edge and Cloud architecture pushes computation closer to where the data is generated, reducing the cost of data movements and improving the application response time. The heterogeneity among the edge devices and cloud servers introduces an important challenge for deciding how to split and orchestrate the IoT applications across the edge and the cloud. In this paper, we extend our IoT Edge Framework, called R-Pulsar, to propose a solution on how to split IoT applications dynamically across the edge and the cloud, allowing us to improve performance metrics such as end-to-end latency (response time), bandwidth consumption, and edge-to-cloud and cloud-to-edge messaging cost. Our approach consists of a programming model and real-world implementation of an IoT application. The results show that our approach can minimize the end-to-end latency by at least 38% by pushing part of the IoT application to the edge. Meanwhile, the edge-to-cloud data transfers are reduced by at least 38% and the messaging costs are reduced by at least 50% when using the existing commercial edge cloud cost models.

Applying deep learning models to large-scale IoT data is a compute-intensive task and needs significant computational resources. Existing approaches transfer this big data from IoT devices to a central cloud where inference is performed using a machine learning model. However, the network connecting the data capture source and the cloud platform can become a bottleneck. We address this problem by distributing the deep learning pipeline across edge and cloudlet/fog resources. The basic processing stages and trained models are distributed towards the edge of the network and on in-transit and cloud resources. The proposed approach performs initial processing of the data close to the data source at edge and fog nodes, resulting in significant reduction in the data that is transferred and stored in the cloud. Results on an object recognition scenario show 71\% efficiency gain in the throughput of the system by employing a combination of edge, in-transit and cloud resources when compared to a cloud-only approach.

Modern Cyberinfrastructures (CIs) operate to bring content produced from remote data sources such as sensors and scientific instruments and deliver it to end users and workflow applications. Maintaining data quality/resolution and on-time data delivery while considering an increasing number of computing, storage and network resources requires a reactive system, able to adapt to changing demands. In this paper, we propose a modelization of such system by expressing the dynamic stage of resources in the context of edge and in-transit computing. By considering resource utilization, approximation techniques and users' constraints, our proposed engine is generating mappings of workflow stages on heterogeneous geo-distributed resources. We specifically propose a runtime management layer that adapts the data resolution being delivered to the users by implementing feedback loops over the resources involved in the delivery and processing of the data streams. We implement our model into a subscription-based data streaming framework which enables integration of large facilities and advanced CIs. Experimental results show that dynamically adapting data resolution can overcome bandwidth limitation in wide area streaming analytics.

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the emerging paradigm that connects sensors, often located at the edge of the network, to stream processing engines located at the core of the network to enable online data-driven monitoring, management, and control. As IoT applications require increasing volumes of streaming data to be processed by complex workflows in a timely manner, it is becoming important to also leverage resources closer to the edge. Furthermore, the topology of these workflows and where theyare executed is determined not only by application objectives and available resources, but also by the content of the data streams, however, current stream processing engines do not provide this flexibility. In this paper, we present a programming framework that enables applications to specify data-driven, location- and resource-aware processing of data streams. Specifically, it provides abstractions for specifying where and how a data stream is processed based on its content, spatial and temporal characteristics. We also present an implementation of the framework using an event-driven runtime, where events are associatively described. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution by an evaluation of scalability and performance using a disaster response application usecase.

Large scale observatories are shared-use resources that provide open access to data from geographically distributed sensors and instruments. This data has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery. However, seamlessly integrating the data into scientific workflows remains a challenge. In this paper, we summarize our ongoing work in supporting data-driven and data-intensive workflows and outline our vision for how these observatories can improve large-scale science. Specifically, we present programming abstractions and runtime management services to enable the automatic integration of data in scientific workflows. Further, we show how approximation techniques can be used to address network and processing variations by studying constraint limitations and their associated latencies. We use the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) as a driving use case for this work.

Summary The adoption of cloud computing is still limited by several legal concerns that customers may have, such as data sovereignty. In cloud computing, data can be physically hosted in sensible locations, resulting in a lack of control for companies. In this context, we present the Nu@ge project, which aims at building a federation of container‐sized datacenters in the French territory. Nu@ge provides a software stack that enables companies to interconnect independent datacenters in a national mesh. A software architecture is presented and implemented as a federation of small datacenters deployed in France. The proposed architecture enables cooperation between local customized‐cloud managers and a federation‐wide middleware. It uses monitoring information from facilities and performance indicators from physical servers for managing the system, preventing incidents and considering energy efficiency. Additionally, a prototype of a container‐sized datacenter has been validated and patented.

The recent rapid expansion of Cloud computing facilities triggers an attendant challenge to facility providers and users for methods for optimal placement of workflows on distributed resources, under the often-contradictory impulses of minimizing makespan, energy consumption, and other metrics. Evolutionary Optimization techniques that from theoretical principles are guaranteed to provide globally optimum solutions, are among the most powerful tools to achieve such optimal placements. Multi-Objective Evolutionary algorithms by design work upon contradictory objectives, gradually evolving across generations towards a converged Pareto front representing optimal decision variables — in this case the mapping of tasks to resources on clusters. However the computation time taken by such algorithms for convergence makes them prohibitive for real time placements because of the adverse impact on makespan. This work describes parallelization, on the same cluster, of a Multi-Objective Differential Evolution method (NSDE-II) for optimization of workflow placement, and the attendant speedups that bring the implicit accuracy of the method into the realm of practical utility. Experimental validation is performed on a reallife testbed using diverse Cloud traces. The solutions under different scheduling policies demonstrate significant reduction in energy consumption with some improvement in makespan.