Reinforcement Learning for Security-Aware Workflow Application Scheduling in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing as a novel computing paradigm brings remote cloud resource to the edge servers nearby mobile users. Within one-hop communication range of mobile users, a number of edge servers equipped with enormous computation and storage resources are deployed. Mobile users can offload their partial or all computation tasks of a workflow application to the edge servers, thereby significantly reducing the completion time of the workflow application. However, due to the open nature of mobile edge computing environment, these tasks, offloaded to the edge servers, are susceptible to be intentionally overheard or tampered by malicious attackers. In addition, the edge computing environment is dynamical and time-variant, which results in the fact that the existing quasistatic workflow application scheduling scheme cannot be applied to the workflow scheduling problem in dynamical mobile edge computing with malicious attacks. To address these two problems, this paper formulates the workflow scheduling problem with risk probability constraint in the dynamic edge computing environment with malicious attacks to be a Markov Decision Process (MDP). To solve this problem, this paper designs a reinforcement learning-based security-aware workflow scheduling (SAWS) scheme. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SAWS scheme, this paper compares SAWS with MSAWS, AWM, Greedy, and HEFT baseline algorithms in terms of different performance parameters including risk probability, security service, and risk coefficient. The extensive experiments results show that, compared with the four baseline algorithms in workflows of different scales, the SAWS strategy can achieve better execution efficiency while satisfying the risk probability constraints.

Abstracting container technologies and transfer mechanisms in the Scalable CyberInfrastructure for Artificial Intelligence and Likelihood Free Inference (SCAILFIN) project

High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities provide vast computational power and storage, but generally work on fixed environments designed to address the most common software needs locally, making it challenging for users to bring their own software. To overcome this issue, most HPC facilities have added support for HPC friendly container technologies such as Shifter, Singularity, or Charliecloud. These different container technologies are all compatible with the more popular Docker containers, however the implementation and use of said containers is different for each HPC friendly container technology. These usage differences can make it difficult for an end user to easily submit and utilize different HPC sites without making adjustments to their workflows and software. This issue is exacerbated when attempting to utilize workflow management software between different sites with differing container technologies. The SCAILFIN project aims to develop and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and likelihood-free inference (LFI) techniques and software using scalable cyberinfrastructure (CI) that span multiple sites. The project has extended the CERN-based REANA framework, a platform designed to enable analysis reusability, and reproducibility while supporting different workflow engine languages, in order to support submission to different HPC facilities. The work presented here focuses on the development of an abstraction layer that allows the support of different container technologies and different transfer protocols for files and directories between the HPC facility and the REANA cluster edge service from the user’s workflow application.