Distributed and Parallel Systems

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Reza Farahani gave a tutorial at the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)

Dr. Reza Farahani presented 3-hour tutorial titled “Serverless Orchestration on the Edge-Cloud Continuum: Challenges and Solutions” at the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) on May 5.

Abstract: Serverless computing simplifies application development by abstracting infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on building application functionality while infrastructure providers handle tasks, such as resource scaling and provisioning. Orchestrating serverless applications across the edge-cloud continuum, however, poses challenges such as managing heterogeneous resources with varying computational capacities and energy constraints, ensuring low-latency execution, dynamically allocating workloads based on real-time metrics, and maintaining fault tolerance and scalability across multiple edge and cloud instances. This tutorial first explores foundational serverless computing concepts, including Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), and their integration into distributed edge-cloud systems. It then introduces advancements in multi-cloud orchestration, edge-cloud integration strategies, and resource allocation techniques, focusing on their applicability in real-world scenarios. It addresses the challenges of orchestrating serverless applications across edge-cloud environments, mainly using dynamic workload distribution models, multi-objective scheduling algorithms, and energy-optimized orchestration. Practical demonstrations employ Kubernetes, serverless platforms such as GCP Functions, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, OpenFaaS, and OpenWhisk, along with monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana, to deploy and execute real-world application workflows, providing participants with hands-on experience and insights into evaluating and refining energy- and performance-aware serverless orchestration strategies.

Reza Farahani to give the initial talk of his habilitation at the University of Klagenfurt

Sustainable and Serverless Service Management

on the Edge-Cloud Continuum

Abstract: In recent years, the computing continuum has transformed distributed computing by integrating centralized cloud infrastructure with decentralized edge devices, enabling support for computationally intensive and data-driven applications. Serverless computing, with its event-driven resource management, dynamic scalability, and infrastructure abstraction, has emerged recently as a complementary paradigm for such an environment. However, integrating serverless computing into the computing continuum introduces additional challenges in service and system management, such as ensuring seamless service scalability across distributed resources, maintaining low-latency and energy-efficient task execution, and orchestrating dynamic resource provisioning across diverse and heterogeneous infrastructures. This talk first reviews the key challenges and emerging solutions for serverless service and application management on the edge-cloud continuum. It then explores the broader implications of these schemes, highlighting open questions for achieving high-performance and sustainable service orchestration. The talk further presents our serverless frameworks designed to address these challenges across serverless functions, application workflows, and workflow batches, which leveraged multi-objective scheduling algorithms, adaptive workload allocation strategies, and heuristic-based orchestration techniques to enable fine-grained resource optimization in the computing continuum, balancing energy efficiency, latency, economic cost, and service quality. Through real-world applications and experiments on our designed computing continuum, the talk demonstrates how these frameworks enable sustainable and scalable service management, paving the way for next-generation distributed computing systems.

 

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Papers accepted: Efficient Location-Based Service Discovery for IoT and Edge Computing in the 6G Era & Enhancing Traffic Safety with AI and 6G: Latency Requirements and Real-Time Threat Detection

Efficient Location-Based Service Discovery for IoT and Edge Computing in the 6G Era

Authors: Kurt Horvath, Dragi Kimovski

Conference: 2025 10th International Conference on Information and Network Technologies (ICINT 2025)

Abstract: Efficient service discovery is a cornerstone of the rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing ecosystems, where low latency and localized service provisioning are critical. This paper proposes a novel location-based DNS (Domain Name System) method that leverages Location Resource Records (LOC RRs) to enhance service discovery. By embedding geographic data in DNS responses, the system dynamically allocates services to edge nodes based on user proximity, ensuring reduced latency and improved Quality of Service (QoS). Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate minimal computational overhead, with processing times below 1 ms, making the approach highly suitable for latency-sensitive applications. Furthermore, the proposed methodology aligns with emerging 6G standards, which promise sub-millisecond latency and robust connectivity. Future research will focus on real-world deployment, validating the approach in dynamic IoT environments. This work establishes a scalable, efficient, and practical framework for location aware service discovery, providing a strong foundation for next generation IoT and edge-computing solutions.

 

Enhancing Traffic Safety with AI and 6G: Latency Requirements and Real-Time Threat Detection

Authors: Kurt Horvath, Dragi Kimovski, Stojan Kitanov, Radu Prodan

Conference: 2025 10th International Conference on Information and Network Technologies (ICINT 2025)

Abstract: The rapid digitalization of urban infrastructure opens the path to smart cities, where IoT-enabled infrastructure enhances public safety and efficiency. This paper presents a 6G and AI-enabled framework for traffic safety enhancement, focusing on real-time detection and classification of emergency vehicles and leveraging 6G as the latest global communication standard. The system integrates sensor data acquisition, convolutional neural network-based threat detection, and user alert dissemination through various software modules of the use case. We define the latency requirements for such a system, segmenting the end-toend latency into computational and networking components. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the impact of vehicle speed and user trajectory on system reliability. The results provide insights for network operators and smart city service providers, emphasizing the critical role of low-latency communication and how networks can enable relevant services for traffic safety.

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HiPC Distinguished Paper Award goes to….

At the HiPC 2024 (31st IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analysis) held in Bengaluru, India from December 18-21, Haleh Dizaji received the HiPC Distinguished Paper Award for the paper “Graph Sampling Quality Prediction for Algorithm Recommendation” written together with Reza Farahani, Joze M. Rozanec, Ahmet Soylu, Dragi Kimovski and Radu Prodan. Radu Prodan who participated in the conference received the award. Congratulations!

 

 

 

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Paper accepted: PreMatch: A Prediction-based Scheduler for Dataflow Asynchronous Processing on the Computing Continuum

Authors: Narges Mehran, Zahra Najafabadi Samani, Samira Afzal, Radu Prodan, Frank Pallas and Peter Dorfinger

Event: The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing https://www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2025/

Abstract:

The popularity of asynchronous data exchange patterns has recently increased, as evidenced by an Alibaba trace analysis showing that 23% of the communication between microservices uses this method. Such workloads necessitate exploring a method for reducing their dataflow processing and completion time. Moreover, there is a need to exploit a prediction method to forecast the future requirements of such microservices and (re-)schedule them. Therefore, we investigate the prediction-based scheduling of asynchronous dataflow processing applications by considering the stochastic changes due to dynamic user requirements.

Moreover, we present a microservice scaling and scheduling method named PreMatch combining a machine learning prediction strategy based on gradient boosting with ranking and game theory matching scheduling principles. Firstly, PreMatch predicts the number of microservice replicas, and then, the ranking method orders the microservice replica and devices based on microservice and transmission times. Thereafter, the PreMatch schedules microservice replicas requiring dataflow processing on computing devices. Experimental analysis of the PreMatch method shows lower completion times on average 13% compared to a related prediction-based scheduling method.

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Keynote talk @ 21st EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (MobiQuitous 2024)

Radu Prodan is invited to give a keynote talk at the 21st EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (MobiQuitous 2024), which will be held from November 12-14,2024, in Oslo, Norway.

Abstract:

The presentation starts by reviewing the convergence of two historically disconnected AI branches: symbolic AI of explicit deductive reasoning owning mathematical rigor and interpretability, and connectionist AI of implicit inductive reasoning lacking readability and explainability.
Afterward, it makes a case of neuro-symbolic data processing in knowledge graph representation approached by the Graph-Massivizer Horizon Europe project and applied for anomaly prediction in data centers using graph neural networks. Machine learning-driven graph sampling algorithms support its training and inference on resource-constrained Edge devices. The presentation concludes with an outlook into future projects targeting Edge large language models fine-tuned and contextualized using symbolic knowledge representation for regulatory AI compliance, job market, and medicine.

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Paper accepted: PagerBombs and Intelligent Vehicles: Stop Weaponing Supply Chains with Blockchain Intelligence

Authors: Jing Yang, Qinghua Ni, Song Zhang, Nan Zheng, Juanjuan Li, Lili Fan, Lili Fan, Radu Prodan, Levente Kovacs, Fei-Yue Wang

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10734076/

Abstract: The Lebanese wireless device explosion incident has drawn widespread attention, involving devices such as pagers, walkie-talkies, and other common devices. This event has revealed and highlighted the security vulnerabilities in global supply chains from raw material manufacturing and distribution to the usage of devices and equipment, signaling the onset of a new wave of “supply chain warfare”. Even worse, with the rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and smart hardware, the fragility of global supply chains would become increasingly fatal and significant, since almost all devices of daily usage could be maliciously programmed and triggered as weapons of massive destruction. Given this, we need new thinking and new approaches to improve supply chain security [3]. With its decentralized, tamper-proof, and highly traceable characteristics, blockchain technology is considered an effective solution to address these security threats [4], [5]. How to secure the entire lifecycle of smart devices, from production and transportation to usage, through blockchain-enabled safety management and protection, has become a pressing issue that requires immediate attention.

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Paper accepted – StoreLess: Serverless workflow scheduling with federated storage in sky computing

Authors: Sashko Ristov, Mika Hautz, Philipp Gritsch, Stefan Nastic, Radu Prodan, Michael Felderer

ICSOC 2024: 22nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing https://icsoc2024.redcad.tn/

Abstract:

We observe irregular data transfer performance across federated serverless infrastructures (sometimes faster across providers than colocated), making the entire workflow scheduling even more challenging in federated FaaS and sky computing. This paper introduces STORELESS – a novel workflow scheduler and heuristic algorithm for serverless storage attachments that dynamically selects, provisions, and configures suitable function deployments and storage backends from the federated serverless infrastructure. STORELESS improves workflow execution time by up to 30% by running cross-regional setup compared to the state-of-the-art.

 

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Haleh @ First International Workshop on Scaling Knowledge Graphs for Industry” in Conference “Semantics 24: 20th International Conference on Semantic Systems”

Haleh gave a presentation at the first International Workshop on Scaling Knowledge Graphs for Industry (co-located with the 20th International Conference on Semantic Systems – SEMANTICS 2024)  – in Amsterdam, Sept. 17-19, 2024.

Title: “Modeling and Generating Extreme Volumes of Financial Synthetic Time-Series Data with Knowledge Graphs”

Authors: Laurentiu Vasiliu, S. Haleh S. Dizaji , Aaron Eberhart, Dumitru Roman and Radu Prodan

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Journal article accepted: Cost modelling and Optimisation for Cloud: A Graph-based Approach

Authors: Akif Quddus Khan, Mihhail Matskin, Radu Prodan, Christoph Bussler, Dumitru Roman, Ahmet Soylu

Journal of Cloud Computing: https://journalofcloudcomputing.springeropen.com/

Abstract: Cloud computing has become popular among individuals and enterprises due to its convenience, scalability, and flexibility. However, a major concern for many cloud service users is the rising cost of cloud resources. Since cloud computing uses a pay-per-use model, costs can add up quickly, and unexpected expenses can arise from a lack of visibility and control. The cost structure gets even more complicated when working with multi-cloud or hybrid environments. Businesses may spend much of their IT budget on cloud computing, and any savings can improve their competitiveness and financial stability. Hence, an efficient cloud cost management is crucial. To overcome this difficulty, new approaches and tools are being developed to provide greater oversight and command over cloud computing expenses. In this respect, this article, presents a graph-based approach for modelling cost elements and cloud resources and a potential way to solve the resulting constraint problem of cost optimisation. In this context, we primarily consider utilisation, cost, performance, and availability. The proposed approach is evaluated on three different user scenarios, and results indicate that it could be effective in cost modelling, cost optimisation, and scalability. This approach will eventually help organisations make informed decisions about cloud resource placement and manage the costs of software applications and data workflows deployed in single, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments.