On the Containerization and Orchestration of RISC-V architectures for Edge-Cloud computing

Containerization technologies, orchestration systems and open hardware architectures, such as RISC-V, are crucial as the foundation of open digital infrastructures for the computing continuum - the seamless distribution of data and computation across platforms with heterogeneous capabilities. However, it is unknown how containerization technologies and orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes, would impact performance in new architectures based on RISC-V. This work aims to address this question and introduces KubeEdge-V, an orchestration platform for RISC-V systems. We define the minimum components required to support the basic features of the containerization and orchestration platforms: network plug-ins, container runtimes and computational/networking requirements, and we evaluated KubeEdge-V performance on a prototype of a distributed computing system based on SiFive processors called Monte Cimone. Finally, the paper compares the performance of KubeEdge-V on SiFive processors with an equivalent system based on ARM architecture featuring the same power envelope.