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 ca- pabilities. 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 intro- duces KubeEdge-V, an orchestration platform for RISC-V systems. We define the minimum components required to support the basic features of the containerization and orches- tration 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.