Litener: An Accelerator-Enabled Lightweight Container for Edge Computing

Abstract

Containers supporting accelerators, such as Docker, include management tasks that require a significant amount of computing resources. While these resources are available in the Cloud, in other scenarios such as the Edge resources are more limited. An accelerator-enabled lightweight container would be desirable in such scenarios. In this paper, we analyse platforms to containerise applications using accelerators, including but not limited to Docker. After this analysis, we present a lightweight container, referred to as Litener, focused on using accelerators in scenarios with limited resources. Although the focus is on accelerators, many of the optimisations described can also be applied to scenarios that do not use accelerators. Experiments show a speedup of up to 7.78X when compared to other platforms.