P3-Mobile: Parallel Computing for Mobile Edge-Clouds

Abstract

We address the problem of whether networks of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets can be used to perform opportunistic, best-effort, parallel computations. We designed and implemented P3-Mobile, a parallel programming system for edge-clouds of Android devices to test the feasibility of this idea. P3-Mobile comes with a programming model that supports parallel computations over peer-to-peer overlays mapped onto mobile networks. The system performs automatic load-balancing by using the overlay to discover work. We present preliminary performance results for a parallel benchmark, using up to 16 devices, and discuss their implications towards future work.