Operating Systems for Resource-adaptive Intelligent Software: Challenges and Opportunities

The past decades witnessed the fast and wide deployment of Internet. The Internet has bred the ubiquitous computing environment that is spanning the cloud, edge, mobile devices, and IoT. Software running over such a ubiquitous computing environment environment is eating the world. A recently emerging trend of Internet-based software systems is “ resource adaptive ,” i.e., software systems should be robust and intelligent enough to the changes of heterogeneous resources, both physical and logical, provided by their running environment. To keep pace of such a trend, we argue that some considerations should be taken into account for the future operating system design and implementation. From the structural perspective, rather than the “monolithic OS” that manages the aggregated resources on the single machine, the OS should be dynamically composed over the distributed resources and flexibly adapt to the resource and environment changes. Meanwhile, the OS should leverage advanced machine/deep learning techniques to derive configurations and policies and automatically learn to tune itself and schedule resources. This article envisions our recent thinking of the new OS abstraction, namely, ServiceOS , for future resource-adaptive intelligent software systems. The idea of ServiceOS is inspired by the delivery model of “ Software-as-a-Service ” that is supported by the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The key principle of ServiceOS is based on resource disaggregation, resource provisioning as a service, and learning-based resource scheduling and allocation. The major goal of this article is not providing an immediately deployable OS. Instead, we aim to summarize the challenges and potentially promising opportunities and try to provide some practical implications for researchers and practitioners.

Home UbiHealth

At the third computing era, users interact with many computing devices surrounding or implanted in them, in a natural way, anytime and anywhere, implementing the concept of ubiquitous computing. Moreover, the ubiquitous computing implementations provide the advantageous characteristics of awareness and personalization, which are precious in healthcare applications (i.e., the operating computing devices in the patient's environment can be aware about the evolving situations and actively participate in the provision of the medical treatment). In addition, the ubiquitously supported healthcare services can be provided anywhere and at any time allowing specific cases of the hospitalization model to be transferred to the home healthcare model. The adoption of the home healthcare model in a ubiquitous computing environment provides the prerequisites for the development of the home UbiHealth model. Extending the formal provision of medical services at home provides the capability to cover the medical needs of all the population categories.