Towards Adaptive Computation Offloading for 
Wireless Handheld Devices

Abstract

We describe our current work on designing and implementing a programming environment and middleware to support adaptive computation offloading for wireless handheld devices. This work is a part of our adaptive remote access (ARA) system to enable secure, convenient and cost-effective server support for handheld devices. We investigate techniques to automatically convert ordinary application programs into client-server distributed programs and to adaptively schedule the tasks according to the changing wireless network environment and to different types of workload. The objective is to minimize the cost of running applications on handheld devices. The idea of computation offloading is complicated by several issues. We discuss these issues and our current approaches. We first present a hybrid scheme for the maintenance of data consistency in the automatically generated distributed programs. This approach combines static program analysis with efficient run-time bookkeeping. We then present a network-flow model for the problem of optimal program partitioning and discuss how to use value-range partitioning, program profiling and minimal queries to deal with varying execution context. This is joint work with a number of graduate students, main contributors being Cheng Wang, Yonghua Ding and Rong Xu. Work is sponsored by National Science Foundation and the State of Indiana.

 

Bio of the Speaker

Zhiyuan Li is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science in Purdue University. He received an M.S. and a Ph.D., both in Computer Science, from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1985 and 1989 respectively.  Before he joined Purdue University in 1997, he worked as a senior software engineer at Center for Supercomputing Research and Development in University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and as Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul.  Li received a Research Initiation Award and an Early-Faculty Career Award from National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1992 and 1995 respectively. He has served on program committees of several computer conferences,  including IEEE/ACM International Parallel and Distributed Processing symposium (IPDPS), ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) and SIGPLAN Symposium on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES). He has also co-edited special issues for journals such as IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and International Journal on Parallel Programming.

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