Design of Intelligent Controllers to Maximize Efficiency and Guarantee Security, Privacy, and Fairness in Heterogeneous Computing and Sensing Systems

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Today's technology users often own multiple computers and carry multiple mobile devices (e.g., laptops, smart watches, phones, and tablets), but many of these devices are idle most of the time. Despite advances in hardware technologies, the computing and sensing capacity that users own cannot meet the requirements of some of the applications they want to run (e.g., cognitive applications such as face detection, speech recognition, and virtual personal assessment). This discrepancy has pushed many users to either buy more devices or rent more capacity from infrastructure providers to cope with their peak demand. Although these approaches have worked in practice, they usually impose extra costs and major inefficiencies (e.g., energy and power). In this research program, we pursue a different approach. We propose to develop tools and methods that enable users to share their computing and sensing devices to form a more capable, shared system. Furthermore, we propose to develop methods to manage the shared system and improve its performance and efficiency.******This Discovery grant will fund a cutting-edge research program designed to push the limits of intelligent decision making in shared systems, while addressing major challenges in providing security, privacy, and fairness assurances. The program will train at least ten HQP, providing them with advanced theoretical aspects of engineering, and practical and hands-on experience on industry scale infrastructures and workloads. While the outlined research focuses on shared heterogeneous systems, many other applications could benefit from the proposed program, including multiprocessor technologies, wireless and sensor networks, ad-hoc emergency mobile systems, and high-performance data centres. According to a recent CBRE report, the data centre investment volume reached $20 billion in North America during 2017. Data centres consume a significant amount of energy and emit the same amount of CO2 as the airline industry. According to the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), 95% of data centre electricity is consumed inefficiently. This is mainly because of servers' low utilization. The methods and tools developed in this research program could be directly used to increase utilization of servers and improve data centres' energy efficiency. In doing so, the program not only saves potentially millions of dollars in energy costs, but also protects the environment from further CO2 pollution. Canadian innovation and HQP training in efficient large-scale computing will contribute to maintaining Canada's role as a world leader in information technologies.