FRμIT project meeting #4: Glasgow
24 May 2018
/ fruit
The fourth FRμIT project meeting was held on 23-24 May 2018 at the
University of Glasgow. We reviewed progress, and discussed next steps
for the PiStack board, peer-to-peer infrastructure, and federated
authentication for the FRμIT testbed.
The meeting started with progress updates from the FRμIT project
members. First was Dejice Jacob, who described the Glasgow Micro Stream
framework for lightweight distributed stream data processing for IoT
and sensor networks.
Herry then gave an update on the FRμIT OS. In version 0.3.2, this
now has A/B root partitions to allow recovery from failed updates, an
update system (currently centralised via fruit-update with
peer-to-peer updates in testing), remote and local system configuration
(fruit-config), and monitoring (fruit-monitor).
Herry also reviewed the current state of the FRμIT management server
that's used to control and manage the federated cluster. Finally, he
reviewed changes to the peer-to-peer update server, which is being
rewritten in Go to increase stability and robustness.
Posco Tso updated us on Loughborough's work on the
Xvisor hypervisor as a basis for
lightweight OS migration. They're implemented support for reading and
writing CPU states, copying memory, and integrating the network stack,
and are finalising migration support.
His group has also been working on optimising Kubernetes for operation
on Raspberry Pi systems, trying to reduce CPU and memory usage.
Their system is being benchmarked using web servers and caches, and
distributed machine learning via TensorFlow.
Steven Johnston and Phil Basford from Southampton gave an update on the
status of the PiStack boards. These are now ready, and were distributed
to the FRμIT project partners for large-scale testing at the meeting.
The project demonstrated the FRμIT OS and PiStack boards at the NOMS
DOMINOS workshop, and
presented a poster and paper.
Eiko Yoneki gave an update on the RaDICS distributed computing service
using Raspberry Pi nodes with unikernels (to be presented as a poster
at MobiSys later this year). She's also working on pest and disease
greenhouse monitoring in Kenya using Raspberry Pi nodes with cameras to
monitor plants with machine learning to detect diseases; they have
considerable ongoing work to port machine learning classifiers and
training onto Raspberry Pi clusters.
Following the progress updates, we discussed use cases and deployment
scenarios for FRμIT and the PiStack boards, to allow us to validate
that the system works and scales as expected. Southampton have some
air quality monitoring work ongoing using Raspberry Pi clusters that
should move to FRμIT OS and have been discussing with others working
in similar area. Glasgow have smart campus monitoring work that should
also move to FRμIT as the infrastructure matures, and have an
interest in using FRμIT for network monitoring.
As discussed
in the last meeting, we have ongoing discussions with JISC about
using their Project Moonshot federated authentication infrastructure
for FRμIT, for authentication users for job submission and remote
access to the FRμIT testbed. Job submission will require container
submission, and we discussed ways of building and submitting containers
to the testbed, and how this relates to other infrastructures such as
Kubernetes.
We also discussed next steps with the peer-to-peer update infrastructure,
recently discussed in
a blog post, considering how to make this more scalable and robust.
The next meeting will be held in July 2018, mostly likely once again in
Glasgow.