Workshopping, across the universe

One of the pleasures of being an academic is to travel to nice places to meet interesting people, and interesting places to meet nice people. In one of my first such trips for a few years I recently went to Sweden to participate in the 17th Cloud Control Workshop.

I’d previously attended the 15th Cloud Control Workshop shortly before the pandemic happened, causing the series to pause briefly. This was the reboot, and as before, it was a great deal of fun: good company, good food, beautiful location. If you get the chance to go, take it if you can!

The workshop is a really nice mix of keynote presentations – not too many and not too long at 20 minutes (mostly) – and discussion sessions proposed beforehand or on site by participants. I gave one of the keynotes, talking about the challenges posed and opportunities offered by edge computing. Can share slides on request, or when I decide on a good way to publish them!

I also enjoyed many good discussions and conversations, topped off with a great BBQ, but two topics stand out. First, a great discussion session organised by Prof. Ana Klimović about serverless computing which immediately triggered some thoughts about possible followup publications from EDGELESS, and collaboration possibilities.

Second, several conversations on a topic I know little about, low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite networking, and what could be done with it.

For what it’s worth, my thought was whether a LEO constellation plus a little edge compute could provide a difficult-to-disrupt out-of-band monitoring network for critical infrastructure like datacenters and power grids: although data bandwidth is limited and a bit complicated due to the constraints on ground stations, they have pretty decent cameras, so why not use those to capture and locally process images of the roofs of large rectangular buildings like datacenters and the like which could continually display various status data.

Such status information would only need to be locally generated, so it would take fairly substantial physical disruption of the facility (also presumably noticeable by camera) to prevent that working. Alternatively, the constellation (perhaps shared across multiple facilities in different jurisdictions) would need to be substantially disrupted to prevent it being able to monitor targets.

It was a fun discussion anyway, combining a network technology I knew little about with possibly interesting applications of edge computing to resiliency.

Postcript: in case you’re curious, the title is a passing reference to Star Trekkin’, a fine popular music single from my youth. Which has a much longer back-story on Wikipedia than I had anticipated.