ARA Distributed Inference Experiments: Flying HTCondor Over a Field of Wireless Dreams
Martin Kandes at HTC25
June 5, 2025
We present the initial design and proposed implementation for a series of long-baseline, distributed inference experiments leveraging ARA — a platform for advanced wireless research that spans approximately 500 square kilometers near Iowa State University, including campus, the City of Ames, local research and producer farms, and neighboring rural communities in central Iowa. These experiments aim to demonstrate, characterize, and evaluate the use of distributed inference for computer vision tasks in rural and remote regions where high-capacity, low-latency wireless broadband access and backhaul networks enable edge computing devices and sensors in the field to offload compute-intensive workloads to cloud and high-performance computing systems embedded throughout the edge-to-cloud continuum. We highlight the role of HTCondor as the common scheduler and workload manager used to distribute the inference workload across ARA and beyond. We also discuss some of the unique challenges in deploying HTCondor on ARA.