Masterless Distributed Computing Over Mobile Devices
J. Dale Browne · Calhoun: The Naval Postgraduate School Institutional Archive (Naval Postgraduate School) · 2012
It is obvious that information is becoming increasingly important in todays society. This can be seen by the widespread availability of high-speed Internet in homes and the ubiquity of smart phones. This new information centric paradigm is possible because of a large supporting infrastructure without which the Internet, the volumes of information, and the speed we can access them would not exist. The military has recognized the potential value of this trend because the greatest hindrance that any commander has is the fog of warthe absence of the information necessary to make critical decisions. On a battlefield, a commander would like to know the status and location of all of his soldiers, the same for enemy troops, and optimal strategies to accomplish their mission. Unfortunately this needed information is currently impossible to obtain in a timely manner. This thesis addresses these problems by presenting an architecture for ad-hoc distributed computing among mobile devices. Our results show that our system does indeed, as devices are added, speed up a distributed calculation and does it in a way that does not rely on the presence of a routable network. We also show that the speedup obtained nears optimal as the size of the computation necessary to calculate an update increases. Additionally, we have shown that we can chain distributed computations together resulting in a decreased amount of time needed to perform an SVD, an important step in many data-mining algorithms.