OCI enables Australia’s leading edge computing researchers to speed up development time, increase performance of applications by up to 20 percent and improve developer productivity by 20 percent.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne, rely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to tackle one of the biggest challenges of the next decade of computing: managing the tsunami of data generated by industrial Internet of Things. OCI Ampere A1 Compute, Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Machine Learning provide the research team with fast, scalable and secure cloud services.
Improving Speed and Productivity
The volume of data captured from connected devices threatens to overwhelm networks and computing resources, making it impossible to extract useful insights. The University prides itself in bringing together some of the best and brightest students and researchers from around the world to tackle society’s complex problems in innovative ways.
It is addressing this challenge with a project FogBus2, an open source, container-based, distributed framework that integrates edge/fog and cloud infrastructures so that data from cameras, ECG devices, laptops, smartphones, can be collected and processed in real-time to drive insight and intelligent action in IoT applications.
“With all these billions and billions of IoT devices pushing data to the cloud, the latency would be very high,” says Rajkumar Buyya, distinguished professor and director, Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Lab, University of Melbourne. “That is where we start moving toward this model of fog computing, where we can harness the resources at the edge of the network and the cloud.
As a research laboratory, it is exciting to show that our effort is not just functional in our own controlled lab infrastructure, but that it works in the real world. Working with Oracle helps us demonstrate that capability.”
Through the use of OCI, the research team sped up the development time, which was reduced by 3-4 weeks, a 15-20 per cent performance increase, and a far better response time in applications, such as video recognition and other latency sensitive applications, helping increase developer productivity by 20 percent.
Using a multicloud approach, which enables researchers to run tests across multiple cloud environments, the team decided to incorporate OCI Ampere compute instances for its IoT data processing capabilities. While FogBus2 is designed to run on any database, the university chose to standardise on Oracle Autonomous Database, which is deployed both in the core, as well as at the edge, to profile network information, including latency, availability of hardware resources, and required response times. The Autonomous Data Warehouse also provided the team with the ability to scale in order to cope with sudden bursts of traffic and easily integrate data of all types.
FogBus2 also uses Oracle AutoML to prioritise resources, determining whether processing should take place at the edge or core of the network. This ability to self-select the best algorithm to deliver results from a library and then self-iterate has freed up the researchers building their own machine learning algorithms enabling them to spend more time analysing and visualising data.
Additional security is provided by Oracle Identity and Access Management and Oracle Bastion.
Chris Chelliah, senior vice-president for customer strategy, insight and business development at Oracle Asia-Pacific said, “Edge computing provides tremendous opportunities for innovation in every industry. This research is really exciting as the effort is not just about creating a controlled lab test environment, but one that can be used by all industries from manufacturing to mining and even retail.
It also underscores the significance of using the right cloud for the job. For enterprises seeking to optimise their cloud infrastructure capabilities and spending, a multicloud configuration brings the flexibility, service or function that your organisation needs and can’t fulfill elsewhere and can be deployed in a way that works with your existing environment.”
Oracle’s Arm Accelerator Program helped the university rapidly get set up and started with OCI. Additionally, Oracle Cloud Free Tier provided the team’s developers with free services allowing them to experiment and determine the best architecture to support applications, before deploying them in the field.
