At the time of SBIR award from NSF, UpShift Labs, Inc. was described as an early-stage software start-up bringing cutting edge data compression technology out of Harvard University's research labs to make mobile devices faster, better connected, and more useful. Subsequent publication (2014) by the principals suggested progress. "Mobile device hardware can limit the sophistication of mobile applications. One strategy for side-stepping these constraints is to opportunistically offload computations to the cloud, where more capable hardware can do the heavy lifting. We propose a platform that accomplishes this via compressive offloading, a novel application of compressive sensing in a distributed shared memory setting. Our prototype gives up to an order-of-magnitude acceleration and 60% longer battery life to the end user of an example handwriting recognition app. We argue that offloading is beneficial to both end users and cloud providersâthe former experiences a performance boost and the latter receives a steady stream of small computations to fill periods of under-utilization. Such workloads, originating from ARM-based mobile devices, are especially well-suited for offloading to emerging ARM-based data centers.
