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Aura: Harnessing the Power of IoT Devices For Distributed Computing
An anonymous reader points out that a computer science research team from the University of Alabama has put together a new architecture called "Aura," which lets people make use of excess computing power from various smart devices scattered throughout their homes. Ragib Hasan, the team's leader, says this scheme could be integrated with smartphones, letting you offload CPU-intensive tasks to your home devices. He also anticipates the ability to sell off excess capacity — like how people with solar panels can sometimes sell the excess energy they harvest. Alternately, they could be allocated to a distributed computing project of the homeowner's choice, like Seti@home. Of course, several obstacles need to be solved before a system like Aura can be used — smart devices run on a variety of operating systems and often communicate only through a narrow set of protocols. Any unifying effort would also need careful thought about security and privacy matters.
How are they going to pull it off with Arm and the comparatively locked down and diverse OS's of "smart devices" ?
this is stupid. no. just no. ok?
iot is all about low power, dedicated and it is NOT YOUR HOSTING PLATFORM for running your bullshit on.
iot has enough trouble with weak or non-existent security and the devices are just not meant to accept 'workloads' from you.
someone has been smoking from the beowulf bowl...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The "problem" is that even cheap phone processors have far more processing power than needed. Anything that requires real processing power already is offloaded to the net. There is no need to scavenge cycles from other processors.
I have a bunch of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi processors doing a bunch of stuff (mostly collecting data) and they all are overkill for the task at hand. They mostly send data to servers and/or retrieve massaged data for presentation. I can't imagine any of these processors ever becoming overloaded and needing assistance.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I can run a Chinese and Russian bitcoin job on my lightbulbs!
If the CPU in the IoT Device is powerful enough to make offloading actually worthwhile, isn't that CPU way overkill for the IoT Device's primary function?
I can't imagine a lot of companies putting more powerful (that is, more expensive) chips than is necessary to run the device itself.
I am not a sig.
Is this a mis-placed April Fools post?
CPUs don't 'have' power. They consume power. A powerful CPU is one that has the potential to consume a lot of power doing some form of calculation. The point in IoT embedded controllers is to consume as little power as possible. If they are loaded up with tasks that have nothing to do with their embedded purpose, they will consume more power (watt) and since they're not optimized for the task, they will do so inefficiently.
They said that they would build networks of cell processors in our homes that would cooperate on tasks. But the truth is that you need a really great network to make it worthwhile. IoT devices are likely to be on high-latency networks, and won't want to participate with one another. Most of them will have piddly little amounts of horsepower not really useful for anything compared even to a low-end cellphone of today. Someday this will make sense, but this is not that day.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What in the fuck is this
I myself don't subscribe to the IoT model, mainly because I don't trust the security. Doing something like this on my thermostat? I trust the security even less.
My god, we've come full circle.
So 20 years ago or so, the concept of ubiquitous computing was floating around. You know, where everything follows you, and CPU loads could pushed onto other idle machines because it all had excess capacity 90% of the time.
And then the network was the computer. And then the computer was the cloud.
And now we're back to offloading CPU into a bunch of ubiquitous devices.
What next, client server computing, mainframes, and dumb terminals?
It's like some strange time loop.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If the CPU in the IoT Device is powerful enough to make offloading actually worthwhile, isn't that CPU way overkill for the IoT Device's primary function?
Not at all. The CPU is fast to reduce latency. This not only meets response targets, but it also means the CPU can shut down after a very short time, saving power.
This is especially important on battery powered devices. If the CPU is off except for a couple of milliseconds every few seconds, a battery can last for years.
The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. Making it physically small means many chips per die, which means low cost per chip. If that makes it fast, so much the better .
As long as you're not using extra power to increase the speed further, there's no problem with a processor being "too fast". That just means it can go to sleep sooner. In fact, slowing it down can be expensive: Slower means not only that the power is on longer, but it also usually means bigger components which require more electrons to change their voltage. The more electrons delivered by the battery, the more if it is used up. Oops!
Granted that the processors are powerful and cheap, and have a lot of computation potential. But there are other downsides to trying to use IoT devices for a computing resource.
One is that the volatile memory, which uses scarce power just holding its state is very small, and the permanent memory, though it may be moderately large, is flash: VERY slow, VERY power consuming to do a write (and the processor stops while you're writing flash, screwing things up for its primary purpose).
Much of the current generation IoT devices run on either the Texas Instruments CC2541 (8051 processor, 8kB RAM, 256kB flash) and its relatives, or the Nordic nRF51822 (32-bit ARM® Cortexâ M0 CPU, 32kB/16kB RAM, 256kB/128kB flash) and its family, and the next generation is an incremental improvement rather than a breakthrough. You can do a lot in a quarter megabyte of code space (if you're willing to work at it a bit like we did in the early days of computing). But there's not a lot of elbow room there.
The tiny memories mean you don't have a lot of resource to throw at operating systems and extra work. In fact, though the communication stacks are pretty substantial (and use up a LOT of the flash!), the OSes are pretty rudimentary: Mostly custom event loop abstraction layers, talking to applications that are mostly event and callback handlers. Development environments encourage custom loads that don't have any pieces of libraries or system services that aren't actually used by the applications.
Another downside is the lack of bandwidth for communicating between them. (Bluetooth Low Energy, for example, runs at one megaBIT per second, has a lot of overhead and tiny packets, and divides three "advertising" (connection establishment) channels, in the cracks between 2.4GHz WiFI chnnels, among ALL the machines in radio "earshot".) Maybe they can do a lot of deep thought - but getting the work to, and the results from, all those little guys will be a bottleneck.
Maybe Moore's Law and the economic advantage of saving programmer time may make this change in the future. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for "smart" lightbulbs to have large, standardized, OSes making that "wasted" CPU power available to parasitic worms.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Just wait until people start pushing ads to these things. One day you open your refrigerator door it plays the Dr. Pepper jingle. Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. re-optimized for low leakage, of course.
When a substantial fraction of the target applications are intended to run for years on a fractional amp-hour lithium button or harvested ambient energy, power saving is critical.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
:%s/Internet Of Things/Hackable/gc
All your devices are belong to us! Opps, a small software bug flooded your house, not our responsibility due to the legal agreement, have a nice day!
Twang it
I don't want various and sundry crapware running on my refrigerator, TV set, phone, or anything else thankyouverymuch,
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Many, perhaps even most, of the IoT devices are battery powered. Mostly CR2032 coin cells. These have ~150mAH to 240mAH depending on how you use them. Your nodes will die off in about a day of running non-stop. This website mostly thinks in terms of embedded==(Arduino || Rasberry Pi) when in reality most of the IoT devices will be Arm Cortex M0+/M3/M4 devices that spend the vast majority of their lives in low power sleep modes drawing a microamp or two.
A person at a meeting with only a smartphone could offload to Aura the process of recalculating a spreadsheet for a presentation, eliminating the need for a laptop
This is what I love about all the buzzword enriched nonsense. Use cases presented are not only completely worthless but so half baked and nonsensical that they are actually funny.
Hasanâ(TM)s plan, of course, anticipates a world with a vast number of Internet of Things devices, where lightbulbs, refrigerators, thermostats and other products will come with small processors and network connectivity.
Oh the dreams of marketeers...
By 2020, the world will have 26 billion such devices in operation, according to technology analyst firm Gartner.
More likely they spend $26 billion in advertising to get people to care about their worthless and annoying gimmicks and still fail.
To be fair, low power embedded CPUs can be quite capable these days and are likely to only get more capable.
Is there a big advantage to going 8-bit 8051 over ultra-low-power 32-bit ARM these days?
Low power and low bandwidth. Very very low bandwidth in some cases.
Well bitcoin mining doesn't need much bandwidth. :-)
if you have spare cycles and are iot, you did it wrong
I'm not so sure. What if an ultra-low-power ARM's cost is in the ballpark of an 8051? One might save on the software development and maintenance side by using a more modern and familiar CPU.
Look at desktop/laptop CPUs. They are grossly overpowered for many users. Why would iot devices follow a similar pattern if the costs are right?
"Low powered" CPUs tend to burn more energy per cycle than high performance CPUs when forced to run at full load. Combined with the overhead of distributing tasks over the internet you'd be spending much more money on power compared to doing it in a datacenter.
I'm a little too young for that, so I can think of is hearing Johnny Fives voice
Everyday we could all send one dollar to one new person, until were all billionaires!
I think you all are missing the point. Of course this is encouraged by getting buzzwordy about the system using IoT. This is NOT about taking your precious raspberry pi, arduino or sensor for compute. It's about utilizing the iPad, iPhone, Android, etc laying around your house generally doing shit with a decent processor. Not sure if it is the designer or PC world getting on this IoT buzzwagon, but I expect it is the former.
Even if I thought my little ATMegas could "help out" the Haswell, I wouldn't want them draining their little 400 mAh LiPos. Part of making this stuff, is having it go to sleep properly!
If your IOT devices actually have spare processing power, and it will have no impact on their primary function or more importantly, their power usage, then they are poorly designed. You know what kinds of tasks IOT devices would be great for? DDOSing someone. That's about it.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Millions of computers that would have been considered a supercomputer a couple decades ago are connected by high speed connections, yet there is no real market for unused cpu cycles even though there has been several attempts. Most of these computers are probably under 5% utilization unless they have a virus.
I am beginning to thing IOT stands for 'idiot on tranquilizers'
love is just extroverted narcissism
Sorry, but no you cannot have my electricity for free. It costs money to run all of the IoT devices, so while I might have free cpu cycles, they're not for you.
If anything we want our handheld devices to become as dumb as possible so they will last weeks without having to be recharged and to be as light as possible.