Coalescent Computing

TL;DR

The paper discusses the emerging paradigm of coalescent computing at the edge, where disaggregated, ephemeral resources are dynamically pooled to enhance user experience, posing new system challenges and research opportunities.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of coalescent computing at the edge, highlighting key challenges and proposing directions for future research in resource disaggregation and dynamic provisioning.

Findings

Edge infrastructure enables fine-grained resource sharing.

System software must adapt to ephemeral, disaggregated resources.

Research is needed to develop new provisioning mechanisms.

Abstract

As computational infrastructure extends to the edge, it will increasingly offer the same fine-grained resource provisioning mechanisms used in large-scale cloud datacenters, and advances in low-latency, wireless networking technology will allow service providers to blur the distinction between local and remote resources for commodity computing. From the users' perspectives, their devices will no longer have fixed computational power, but rather will appear to have flexible computational capabilities that vary subject to the shared, disaggregated edge resources available in their physical proximity. System software will transparently leverage these ephemeral resources to provide a better end-user experience. We discuss key systems challenges to enabling such tightly-coupled, disaggregated, and ephemeral infrastructure provisioning, advocate for more research in the area, and outline possible paths forward.