Waggle: A platform for distributed smart wireless sensors and in-situ parallel computation

Waggle: A platform for distributed smart wireless sensors and in-situ parallel computation

Speaker: Dr Peter Beckman
Locations:

University of Queensland: Time: 9.00 - 10.00am Seminar Room 505A/B, Axon Building (#47), St Lucia Campus. Enquiries: Fran Moore rcc-admin@uq.edu.au (Research Computing Centre)

Monash University: Time: 9.00 - 10.00am Seminar Room G12A, Building 26, Clayton Campus. Enquiries: Caitlin Slattery (Faculty of IT)

Abstract:
The Internet of Things is at the peak of its hype curve, taking over the #1 spot from Big Data, which has moved forward to the "trough of disillusionment”. And while much of the IoT work seems interested in reinventing internet-connected coffee pots or giving your fridge an email address, good computer science research and development questions in this space do exist. The Waggle (www.wa8.gl) open source research project at Argonne National Laboratory is working to design, develop, and deploy a novel wireless sensor system to enable a new breed of smart city research and sensor-driven environmental science. Our new IoT sensor platform is focused on sensing and actuation that requires in-situ computation, such as is needed for image recognition via packages such as OpenCV, audio classifiers, and autonomous control — essentially a parallel, distributed computing environment in a small box. Waggle is the core technology for the Chicago ArrayOfThings project (https://arrayofthings.github.io ). Prototype versions are already deployed on a couple campuses. Sensor boards are being tested for deployment in solar-powered trash cans (http://bigbelly.com ), and we are currently exploring a test deployment in street kiosks in NYC (http://www.link.nyc ). We have also tested the platform on a quadcopter. The presentation will outline the current progress of designing and deploying the current platform, and our progress on research topics in computer science.

Biography:
Pete Beckman is the founder and director of the Exascale Technology and Computing Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and the co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering. From 2008-2010 he was the director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, where he led the Argonne team working with IBM on the design of Mira, a 10 petaflop Blue Gene/Q. Pete joined Argonne in 2002, serving first as director of engineering and later as chief architect for the TeraGrid, where he led the design and deployment team that created the world's most powerful Grid computing system for linking production HPC computing centers for the National Science Foundation. After the TeraGrid became fully operational, Pete started a research team focusing on petascale high-performance system software, wireless sensors, and operating systems. Pete also coordinates the collaborative research activities in extreme-scale computing between the U.S. Department of Energy and Japan’s ministry of education, science, and technology. He is the lead architect for the Array of Things sensor network that will be deployed in Chicago and leads the Waggle wireless sensor project. Pete also has experience in industry. After working at Los Alamos National Laboratory on extreme-scale software for several years, he founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in 2000 that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, Pete became vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the U.S., Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Dr. Beckman has a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University (1993) and a B.A. in Computer Science, Physics, and Math from Anderson University (1985).

Slides: Waggle: A platform for distributed smart wireless sensors and in-situ parallel computation (13.4 MB, PDF)