Accelerating Edge Metagenomic Analysis with Serverless-Based Cloud Offloading

Third-generation nanopore sequencing technologies, along with portable devices such as MinION Nanopore and Jetson Xavier NX, allow performing cost-effective metagenomic analysis in a portable manner. At the same time, we observe the growth of the serverless computing paradigm that offers high scalability with limited maintenance overhead for the underlying infrastructure. Recent advancements in serverless offerings make it a viable choice for performing operations such as basecalling. This paper aims to evaluate if a combination of edge and serverless computing paradigms can be successfully used to perform the basecalling process, with the focus on acceleration of offline edge-based processing with serverless-based infrastructure. For the purposes of the experiments, we proposed a workflow in which DNA sequence reads are processed simultaneously at the edge with Jetson Xavier NX and in the cloud with AWS Lambda in different network conditions. The results of our experiments show that with such a hybrid approach, we can reduce the processing time and energy consumption of the basecalling process compared to fully offline or fully online processing. We also believe that while so far, the adoption of serverless computing for bioinformatic applications is not high, the recent improvements to platforms such as AWS Lambda make it a compelling choice for an increasing number of bioinformatics workflows.