Dr. Reza Farahani | Department of Information Technology (ITEC)
Abstract: In recent years, the computing continuum has transformed distributed computing by integrating centralized cloud infrastructure with decentralized edge devices, enabling support for computationally intensive and data-driven applications. Serverless computing, with its event-driven resource management, dynamic scalability, and infrastructure abstraction, has emerged recently as a complementary paradigm for such an environment. However, integrating serverless computing into the computing continuum introduces additional challenges in service and system management, such as ensuring seamless service scalability across distributed resources, maintaining low-latency and energy-efficient task execution, and orchestrating dynamic resource provisioning across diverse and heterogeneous infrastructures.
This talk first reviews the key challenges and emerging solutions for serverless service and application management on the edge-cloud continuum. It then explores the broader implications of these schemes, highlighting open questions for achieving high-performance and sustainable service orchestration. The talk further presents our serverless frameworks designed to address these challenges across serverless functions, application workflows, and workflow batches, which leveraged multi-objective scheduling algorithms, adaptive workload allocation strategies, and heuristic-based orchestration techniques to enable fine-grained resource optimization in the computing continuum, balancing energy efficiency, latency, economic cost, and service quality. Through real-world applications and experiments on our designed computing continuum, the talk demonstrates how these frameworks enable sustainable and scalable service management, paving the way for next-generation distributed computing systems.
Bio: Reza Farahani is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Information Technology (ITEC), University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2023, following an M.Sc. in 2019 from the University of Tehran and a B.Sc. in 2014 from the University of Isfahan, both in Iran. From October 2019 to February 2023, Dr. Farahani contributed to the CDG ATHENA project at the University of Klagenfurt, funded by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft and industry partner Bitmovin GmbH, where he completed his Ph.D. During this time, he also served as a Visiting Scholar at the 5G & 6G Innovation Centre, Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey, U.K., from November 2022 to January 2023. Currently, Dr. Farahani serves as a tool leader and WP5 co-leader in the Horizon Europe Graph-Massivizer project (101140216) on the coordination side. He has authored over 35 scientific publications published in international journals and conferences and played key roles in two EU and three national FFG project proposals as a PI, Scientific Coordinator, and WP leader. Additionally, he has served as a TPC member for several international conferences in multimedia, computer networks, and distributed systems fields. Additionally, with over six years of experience in computer networks and cloud computing, Dr. Farahani has worked in diverse roles, including Network Engineer, Developer, Protocol Designer, and Instructor (R&S, SP). His research interests include distributed systems, network and service management, network softwarization and virtualization, the edge-cloud continuum, multimedia communication, edge AI, serverless computing, performance- and sustainability-aware service orchestration, and multi-objective optimization.
