Virtual Cloud Core: OpenCL Workload Sharing Framework for Connected Devices

Many of earlier attempts on mobile cloud integrations aim on increasing storage capacity of mobile devices, rather than its computation capacity. Traditional distributed computing model relies on static and reliable network connections to share workload among collaborative devices. The researches on pervasive and ubiquitous computing community enable collaborative computation to be conducted on connected computers. Similarly, it is limited to predefined computation services including predefined services and computation platforms. The computation resources in modern computation environment are heterogeneous and evolve over time. The aforementioned computation models do not make good use of such resources. We design and implement an extended OpenCL framework to federate the computation resources of mobile devices with cloud service so as to share its workload and shorten application response times. A virtual cloud core is attached to OpenCL context and can unify the computation between mobile devices and cloud services. The framework does not blindly off-load computation but take into account network capacity and load on connected servers so as to effectively share the load. It also allows a computation request to be conducted either on CPU on mobile device or GPU on connected servers. Our experiments show that the response time can be improved for up to 25 times with modern wireless network connection.