Belfast researchers develop powerful new "Edge Computing" framework

  • Researchers at Queen's University Belfast have developed a software framework for Edge Computing, a geolocated alternative to Cloud computing designed to reduce processing delays.

    Many internet services and apps now perform their computation on elastic cloud instances rather than central servers, which has been great for scaling services dynamically meet consumer demand and has allowed computation-heavy tasks such as voice recognition to be integrated into small low-power devices like the Amazon Alexa range.

    As more services adopt cloud computing and cloud-based content delivery systems, noticeable delays have cropped up due to the time overhead that comes from sending data back and forth between servers physically located all over the world. That's where the emerging field of Edge Computing comes in, offering an alterative to cloud computing that uses servers physically located near the user or service to reduce delays.

    Researchers Dr Blesson Varghese and Nan Wang from the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) at Queen’s University Belfast have been working in the field of Edge Computing, and now report that they've developed an Edge Computing solution and a framework to allow users to compute on the system.

    Dr Varghese explained the practical impact the work will have, saying "With the Edge Computing system we have designed, multiple traditionally Cloud-hosted applications are able to service users from their adjacent places such as a home router. Consequently, delays experienced by application users are reduced."

    Source: Queen's University

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    Brendan is a Sync NI writer with a special interest in the gaming sector, programming, emerging technology, and physics. To connect with Brendan, feel free to send him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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