Daffodil International University
Science & Information Technology => Science Discussion Forum => Latest Technology => Topic started by: fahad.faisal on May 25, 2018, 01:22:56 AM
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can sound complicated at first, but edge computing is actually rather straightforward.
In a nutshell, it involves the processing of data as near to the source of that data as possible, hence the name ‘the edge’. Rather than utilizing one centralized server or pinging information to and from the cloud, edge computing takes place right at the device, whether that be a mobile tower or the phone in your pocket.
That’s right. You’re likely utilizing edge computing even if you’ve never heard the term before. Which you probably haven’t.
“Most people don’t know what the edge is,” Mattias Fridström concedes.
As the ‘Chief Evangelist’ for Swedish telecom firm Telia Carrier, Fridström is at the cutting edge (excuse the pun) of computing. Telia is number one in the global internet backbone rankings, a position it has consistently held since 2017. In layman’s terms, that means it is currently the most important company for the internet and functions as a crucial backbone tying the world wide web together.
For a guy with such lofty tech credentials, Fridström chooses a surprisingly low-tech example to explain the edge: cows.
“Let’s say you’re a Swedish farmer who tends a large herd of cows. Each individual cow is outfitted with a transmitter that sends signals to your personal computer or mobile phone that calculates those signals for fairly simple computations. That’s the edge. The farmer’s computer or phone is making calculations that don’t need to be sent off to the cloud or a centralized server,” he says.
Fridström stresses that edge computing is less a replacement for the cloud than it is a complementary system.
“Some of the easier things can be done a lot closer to the end user. The simplest calculations can be done at the very edge of the network, while really complicated data will still need to go into the core where you have a lot more computation power,” he says. “There are certain functions that farmer will want to do with just a mobile phone there on the farm and those are the kinds of things that can be done at the edge.”
Of course, edge computing wasn’t developed solely with cows in mind.
It is already being utilized by a number of popular applications like Facebook and Pokemon Go. When it comes to the social media giant, Fridström says that Facebook stores all user photos in massive data centres but utilizes edge computing to store recent photos closer to the user while the user is most likely to share them. Smart, huh?
But the real potential of the edge lies within the internet of things (IoT). As more and more of our everyday objects become capable of sending and receiving data, that data needs to be processed closer to the objects themselves. In many cases, your phone will serve as an edge device as it processes information from your internet-connected refrigerator, home thermostat or what have you.
“With IoT, a lot of things that can be done on the mobile phone actually use edge computing so that the brain of the network is brought closer to where the users are,” Fridström explains. “With basic computing that is fairly easy to do, you move things closer to the edge so that things can happen very fast.”