Title: The Mobility Penalty: 30 Years and Counting

Speaker: Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Abstract: In a short September 1993 thought piece, I wrote “Regardless of future technological advances, a mobile unit’s weight, power, size and ergonomics will always render it less computationally capable than its static counterpart. While mobile elements will undoubtedly improve in absolute ability, they will always be at a relative disadvantage.” Looking back 30 years later, it is astonishing how consistently true this statement has remained. We refer to this irreducible gap as the “Mobility Penalty.” It is the price one pays simply for being a mobile computing device. In this brief talk, I will sketch a spectrum of approaches to overcoming the Mobility Penalty. At one extreme is offloading of compute-intensive operations to a cloudlet nearby. At the other extreme is the use of fixed-function hardware accelerators on mobile devices. Between these endpoints lie various configurations of programmable hardware accelerators. I will describe a path forward that combines the unique strengths of these design alternatives.

Short Bio: Satya’s multi-decade research career has focused on the challenges of performance, scalability, availability and trust in information systems that reach from the cloud to the mobile edge of the Internet. In the course of this work, he has pioneered many advances in distributed systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Most recently, he has been viewed as “The Father of Edge Computing” for his seminal 2009 paper, and his pioneering contributions to the foundations of edge computing. Satya is the Jaime Carbonell University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.