Content area

Abstract

Edge systems – such as mobile devices, IoT nodes, and embedded sensors – increasingly operate in dynamic environments while facing severe resource constraints. Among these, compute is often the primary bottleneck, limited not only by hardware capacity but also by thermal and energy constraints inherent to untethered operation. A common strategy in systems design is to trade memory for compute, e.g., via caching or memoization. But on the edge, memory is also scarce, making indiscriminate reuse infeasible. This thesis is built on a central insight: despite the dynamic inputs and behaviors observed at runtime, most deployed applications – from system software to ML pipelines – rely on underlying structural stability. This stability arises from how these systems are developed: through modular frameworks, predictable control paths, and abstractions that preserve behavior across updates. In this dissertation, we show how to dissect and extract these stable computational elements and selectively reuse them to reduce compute overhead, even when memory is tightly limited. This allows us to affirmatively answer a fundamental question: can edge systems, without the luxury of abundant resources, still benefit from the kind of reuse strategies common in richer environments? First, we present Floo, a system that memoizes function-level computations in mobile applications by leveraging persistent interaction flows and function signatures, enabling effective reuse with minimal overheads. Then, we introduce Remembrall, which reuses parts of neural network pipelines in video analytics workloads by identifying redundant structure in learned embedding spaces - enabling lightweight adaptation and compute reduction under memory constraints. Together, these systems demonstrate that judicious use of limited memory, grounded in structural stability, can enable efficient compute reuse on the edge.

Details

1010268
Title
Leveraging Structural Stability for Efficient Compute-Memory Tradeoffs in Edge Systems
Number of pages
127
Publication year
2025
Degree date
2025
School code
0181
Source
DAI-B 87/3(E), Dissertation Abstracts International
ISBN
9798293893874
Committee member
Li, Kai; Apostolaki, Maria; Lloyd, Wyatt; Levy, Amit
University/institution
Princeton University
Department
Computer Science
University location
United States -- New Jersey
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
32042936
ProQuest document ID
3256596637
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/leveraging-structural-stability-efficient-compute/docview/3256596637/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Database
ProQuest One Academic