BarMan: A run-time management framework in the resource continuum

Abstract

Over the last years, the number of IoT devices has grown exponentially, highlighting the current Cloud infrastructure limitations. In this regard, Fog and Edge computing began to move part of the computation closer to data sources by exploiting interconnected devices as part of a single heterogeneous and distributed system in a computing continuum viewpoint. Since these devices are typically heterogeneous in terms of performance, features, and capabilities, this perspective should encompass programming models and run-time management layers. This work presents and evaluates the BarMan open-source framework by implementing a Fog video surveillance use-case. BarMan leverages a task-based programming model combined with a run-time resource manager and the novel BeeR framework to deploy the application’s tasks transparently. This enables the possibility of considering aspects related to the energy and power dissipated by the devices and the single application. Moreover, we developed a task allocation policy to maximize application performance, considering run-time aspects, such as load and connectivity, of the time-varying available devices. Through an experimental evaluation performed on a real cluster equipped with heterogeneous embedded boards, we evaluated different execution scenarios to show the framework’s functionality and the benefit of a distributed approach, leading up to an improvement of 66% on the frame processing latency w.r.t. a monolithic solution.