Everywhere and Nowhere: Envisioning a Computing Continuum for Science

Emerging data-driven scientific workflows are seeking to leverage distributed data sources to understand end-to-end phenomena, drive experimentation, and facilitate important decision making. Despite the exponential growth of available digital data sources at the edge, and the ubiquity of nontrivial computational power for processing these data, realizing such science workflows remains challenging. This article explores a computing continuum that is everywhere and nowhere: One spanning resources at the edges, in the core and in between, and providing abstractions that can be harnessed to support science. It also introduces recent research in programming abstractions that can express what data should be processed and when and where it should be processed, and autonomic middleware services that automate the discovery of resources and the orchestration of computations across these resources.