
Seamless offloading of web app computations from mobile device to edge clouds - godelmachine
https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/01/31/web-worker-migration/
======
dangerface
> you’ve got mobile devices without the computing power needed to deliver a
> great experience

I can play call of duty on my mobile with graphics better than xbox 360, what
are you on about?

> cloud computing that has all the needed power that’s too far away

The issue is mobile bandwidth not just latency.

> Edge servers are the middle ground

More expensive, less powerful and scales worse than the mobile, while also
increasing latency and bandwidth the mobile just doesn't have.

Wifi is a bigger drain on battery than cpu so it will drain phones batteries
faster not slower, this is truly a compromise thats the worst of both worlds.

~~~
dalore
Wifi is not a bigger drain than cpu when you're playing CoD on your mobile.
Your smart phone now has multiple cpu's and would have a GPU. When you're
doing something intensive like CoD it will fire up that GPU and suck up power.

Wifi power used will vary with a few factors, how far you away from the
station, how many other wifi signals, etc.

In addition a big bright screen uses a lot more power than wifi. But that
would be used either way so not part of the comparison.

~~~
folex
Agreed. Also, it looks to me that paper's idea intended to be used for batch
(or, at least, batchable) computations, where you submit data, and then
retrieve the result.

In that case, Wi-Fi isn't used intensively, only for data transmission,
meaning it could be idle during computation. So the power savings could be
relatively big.

------
janci
Interesting idea, but why they are offloading heavy computation to the less
powerful device? I don't see any device around me that is more powerful than
my smartphone. Except for the computer, for which it makes sense to run the
computation at the first place.

~~~
colordrops
It seems to me they are suggesting adding more powerful processors to edge
devices such as routers if this turns out to be a useful technique.

~~~
homero
With so many WiFi devices it would be very innovative to have my router expose
a computation API. Nothing real time but why not move Fitbit data processing
to the router and save my battery. Web workers are a great API. Upload the
script then get the results later or upload directly.

------
NohatCoder
Seems like a complicated process for maybe getting slightly more compute
power. Phones are plenty fast these days, processing power is rarely a major
limiting factor.

~~~
xf00
> processing power is rarely a major limiting factor.

Autonomy is. I could see compute clouds like this being offered at the OS
level rather than browser, along with a claim for multiple days charge cycles,
or slashed device weight/thickness. However, it would likely only work well
for common and predictable computing tasks. And it would further separate
users from hardware.

------
_davebennett
What exactly are we doing on IOT devices that we require so much computing
power for? Phones are already strong enough and everything else just captures
audio/video.

~~~
ovi256
Deep learning can be used for many interesting things, like computer vision
applications.

Even visual odometry and SLAM, necessary for AR, can be solved through DL.

I, for one, can't wait to have something in a raspberry Pi form _and power_
factor that can run a big deep CNN at 30fps.

That opens the way to a lot of neat gadgets that can be summarized as
"computers that can see":

[https://www.ben-
evans.com/benedictevans/2019/7/19/computers-...](https://www.ben-
evans.com/benedictevans/2019/7/19/computers-that-can-see)

------
jbverschoor
Ahhh the first step of the cycle. We're going back to on premise computing.

~~~
DSingularity
It really is a pendulum isn’t it? Is it driven by cost dynamics? Computers
become expensive and incentivize sharing (mainframes, cloud, sevens, ...).
Prices come down — either because workload become more complex or hardware
becomes cheaper — and the incentives for exclusive ownership come back.

------
folex
There's a similar paper from 2018
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325255736_Decentral...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325255736_Decentralized_Computation_Offloading_on_the_Edge_with_Liquid_WebWorkers)

