Computing in the Continuum: Combining Pervasive Devices and Services to Support Data-Driven Applications

The exponential growth of digital data sources has the potential to transform all aspects of society and our lives. However, to achieve this impact, the data has to be processed promptly to extract insights that can drive decision making. Further, traditional approaches that rely on moving data to remote data centers for processing are no longer feasible. Instead, new approaches that effectively leverage distributed computational infrastructure and services are necessary. Specifically, these approaches must seamlessly combine resources and services at the edge, in the core, and along the data path as needed. This paper presents our vision for enabling an approach for computing in the continuum, i.e., realizing a fluid ecosystem where distributed resources and services are programmatically aggregated on-demand to support emerging data-driven application workflows. This vision calls for novel solutions for federating infrastructure, programming applications and services, and composing dynamic workflows, which are capable of reacting in real-time to unpredictable data sizes, availabilities, locations, and rates.