Collaborative Research: PPoSS: LARGE: Scalable Specialization in Distributed Edge-Cloud Systems – The Extended Reality Case

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project will develop design methodologies for a scalable, domain-specific, heterogeneous, distributed edge/cloud system with stringent constraints on latency, energy, thermal power, computational requirements, and size. The work will use a distributed multiparty augmented / virtual / mixed reality (collectively, extended reality or XR) experience as a target parallel and distributed application with challenging quality-of-experience goals, scalability requirements, design constraints, and diverse and fast-evolving algorithmic components. There are orders-of-magnitude gaps between desirable design goals and today's state-of-the-art, making this a long-lived multidisciplinary research challenge. The project brings together work in Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Compilers, Systems, Security and Privacy, and Accuracy and Correctness. It will result in innovations that cut across the system stack to improve quality-of-experience scalability with the number of users and devices and device resources, XR device performance scalability with hardware parallelism, and design methodologies scalability with system complexity. The project will disseminate its research results through considerable open-source software artifacts, building on the team’s previously released ILLIXR system (the first open-source end-to-end single-device XR system), in addition to publications in top venues and talks in academic and industry venues. High-performance, energy-efficient distributed applications such as multiparty XR (and numerous others) have the potential for transformative impact on a vast number of societal activities such as medicine, education, entertainment, manufacturing, science, and more. The team will work in close collaboration with industry partners for direct technology-transfer avenues. The PIs will continue their past record of strong involvement of undergraduates, women, and minorities in research; leadership in establishing the CARES movement; and other efforts to broaden participation in computing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.