NOP: Safe and Efficient Intermittent Computing for a Batteryless IoT

Project overview

Intermittent computing is an emerging paradigm for batteryless IoT nodes powered by harvesting ambient energy. It intends to provide transparent support for power losses so that complex computations can be distributed over several power cycles. It aims at significantly increasing the complexity of software running on these nodes, and at reducing the volume of outgoing data. It improves the overall energy efficiency of the whole processing chain, reduces reaction latencies, and, by limiting data movements, preserves anonymity and privacy.

NOP aims at improving the efficiency and usability of intermittent computing, based on consolidated theoretical foundations and a detailed understanding of energy flows within systems. For this, it brings together specialists in system architecture, energy-harvesting IoT systems, compilation, and real-time computing, to address the following scientific challenges:

1. develop sound formal foundations for intermittent systems,
2. develop precise predictive energy models of a whole node (including both harvesting and consumption) usable for online decision making,
3. significantly improve the energy efficiency of run-time support for intermittency,
4. develop techniques to provide formal guarantee through static analysis of the systems behavior (forward progress),
5. develop a proof of concept: an intermittent system for song bird recognition, to assess
   the costs and benefits of the proposed solutions.

Funding and timeline

Project NOP has received a French government support granted to the Labex Cominlabs excellence laboratory and managed by the National Research Agency in the “Investing for Future” program under reference ANR-10-LABX-07-01.

The project started on October 1, 2021 and will end on December 31, 2024.

Future events

• 25-26 Sep 2023: CominLabs Days in Rennes (presentation of NOP in plenary and poster session, and evaluation after 18 months by the IaC.

Past news

• 20-21 Sep 2023: Plenary meeting in Nantes (Guest talk: Kevin Marquet, Univ. Grenoble Alpes)
• 4 Sep 2023: NOP paper describing SCHEMATIC, our work on co-optimization of checkpoint placement and memory mapping, is accepted at CGO 2024! Congrats to all authors.
• 5 Apr 2023: Working day in Rennes (Guest talk: Guillaume Pierre, Univ. Rennes).
• 1 june 2023: Aymeric Hernandez and Nadda Kouddane join NOP as interns for 3 months. Welcome Aymeric and Nadda!
• 1 Mar 2023: Sashank Srinath joins NOP as an intern for 6 months. Welcome Sashank!
• 13 Nov 2022 : NOP paper describing our work on formal modeling and static analysis of reactive intermittent systems is accepted for publication in Discrete Event Dynamic Systems. Congrats to all authors.
• 10-11 Oct 2022: CominLabs Days in Rennes (presentation of NOP during the poster session).
• 27-28 Sep 2022: Plenary meeting in Lannion (Guest talk: Romain Rouvoy, Univ. Lille).
• 16 May 2022: Hector Chabot joins NOP as an intern for three months. Welcome Hector!
• 12 May 2022: Working day in Rennes.
• 26-27 Apr 2022: Meeting of NOP PhD students in Nantes.
• 28-29 Mar 2022: CominLabs Days in Rennes (presentation of NOP during the poster session).
• 19-20 Oct 2021: Kick-off meeting in Nantes (Guest talks: Audrey Queudet, Univ. Nantes, Vincent Lostanlen, CNRS).