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Data-driven applications are essential to handle the ever-increasing volume, velocity, and veracity of data generated by sources such as the Web and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Simultaneously, an event-driven computational paradigm is emerging as the core of modern systems designed for database queries, data analytics, and on-demand applications. Modern big data processing runtimes and asynchronous many task (AMT) systems from high performance computing (HPC) community have adopted dataflow event-driven model. The services are increasingly moving to an event-driven model in the form of Function as a Service (FaaS) to compose services. An event-driven runtime designed for data processing consists of well-understood components such as communication, scheduling, and fault tolerance. Different design choices adopted by these components determine the type of applications a system can support efficiently. We find that modern systems are limited to specific sets of applications because they have been designed with fixed choices that cannot be changed easily. In this paper, we present a loosely coupled component-based design of a big data toolkit where each component can have different implementations to support various applications. Such a polymorphic design would allow services and data analytics to be integrated seamlessly and expand from edge to cloud to HPC environments.

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The use of deep learning models within scientific experimental facilities frequently requires low-latency inference, so that, for example, quality control operations can be performed while data are being collected. Edge computing devices can be useful in this context, as their low cost and compact form factor permit them to be co-located with the experimental apparatus. Can such devices, with their limited resources, can perform neural network feed-forward computations efficiently and effectively? We explore this question by evaluating the performance and accuracy of a scientific image restoration model, for which both model input and output are images, on edge computing devices. Specifically, we evaluate deployments of TomoGAN, an image-denoising model based on generative adversarial networks developed for low-dose x-ray imaging, on the Google Edge TPU and NVIDIA Jetson. We adapt TomoGAN for edge execution, evaluate model inference performance, and propose methods to address the accuracy drop caused by model quantization. We show that these edge computing devices can deliver accuracy comparable to that of a full-fledged CPU or GPU model, at speeds that are more than adequate for use in the intended deployments, denoising a 1024×1024 image in less than a second. Our experiments also show that the Edge TPU models can provide 3× faster inference response than a CPUbased model and 1.5× faster than an edge GPU-based model. This combination of high speed and low cost permits image restoration anywhere.