FRμIT project meeting #2: Loughborough
6 September 2017
/ fruit
The second
FRμIT project meeting was held on 9 September 2017
at Loughborough University. We discussed the infrastructure
and management of the FRμIT testbed, including peer-to-peer
software updates, sensor boards, and high-density Raspberry Pi
cluster hardware.
The meeting began with a progress review. Cambridge have been experimenting
with running unikernels on their Raspberry Pi systems, running on RumpRun
and QEMU above Raspbian, to get a cut-down virtualisation instance — as an
alternative to Linux containers, and a possible prelude to running a native
unikernel on their Raspberry Pis. In Glasgow, we've been working on a node
management service and on peer-to-peer software updates
(Emily Band's internship
project). Loughborough have been working on bare metal migration,
extending work initially done at Tokyo University. Finally, Southampton
have been working on cluster hardware — the PiSEB sensor expansion board,
and the PiStack cluster power supply board, developed with the help of
their summer interns — and experimenting with LoRaWAN.
The afternoon focussed on infrastructure choices. We reviewed what Linux
distribution should we run on the FRμIT testbed, considering whether
Alpine Linux was appropriate or if we needed a custom distribution built
using the Yocto project for embedded Linux — our belief is that
Alpine is sufficient, since it runs nicely from RAM disk to save SD
card wear, and has ports of Docker, Singularity, and QEMU, so we'll
work towards a common Alpine-based distribution for the FRμIT testbed
machines.
Finally, we worked on the initial FRμIT paper: a survey of single board
compute clusters and the difficulties inherent in building a distributed
compute infrastructure that runs in challenged network environments —
and outside the data centre.