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Application Management - Edge Orchestration

Edge Orchestration

Edge Orchestration provides a set of extensions for popular orchestration software (Kubernetes, Kubespray, Tanzu, Rancher, Helm, and so on), which enable clusters to take advantage of Intel® features such as Intel® Resource Director Technology (Intel® RDT) and Intel® Time Coordinated Computing Tools (Intel® TCC Tools).

Exclusive Cache Allocation Technology (ExCAT)

The Exclusive Cache Allocation Technology (ExCAT) service is part of Edge Orchestration and enables the usage of Intel’s Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) for workloads that are orchestrated within a Kubernetes cluster. You can request a cache buffer to be available exclusively for a workload. For that, an annotation is added to the Pod Spec with a key that determines the cache level and the value specifying the size. The workload is then scheduled on a worker node that provides a matching cache buffer. The buffers have to be configured on the worker nodes before they can be used by the service. The following sections provide more details about CAT in general and how to use it in the context of the ExCAT service.

Time Coordinated Computing (TCC)

Intel® Time Coordinated Computing Tools (Intel® TCC Tools) is a new set of features that augments the compute performance of Intel processors to address the stringent temporal requirements of real-time applications. Intel TCC reduces jitter and improves performance for latency sensitive applications. It helps to maximize efficiency by allowing for aggregation of time-critical and non-time-constrained applications onto a single board.

Refer to the following links for more information:

Note: Currently, only versions 2022.1 and 2021.3 of TCC Tools are supported.

Deploy Edge Orchestration

For more information on installing, configuring, and deploying Edge Orchestration, refer to the Edge Orchestration documentation available in the Edge Orchestration release archives located at Support/Edge-Orchestration within the ECI release archive (release-eci_#.#.zip).

Do the following to prepare the Edge Orchestration release package:

  1. Use the Intel edgesoftware utility to download the ECI release archive, if not done already.

  2. Copy the Edge Orchestration release archives csl-excat-v#.#.#.tar.gz and csl-tcc-v#.#.#.tar.gz from the ECI release archive (release-eci_#.#.zip) to the orchestration system. The Edge Orchestration release content is in the ECI release archive within the Support/Edge-Orchestration directory as follows:

    └── Support
        └── Edge-Orchestration
            ├── csl-excat-v#.#.#.tar.gz
            └── csl-tcc-v#.#.#.tar.gz
    
  3. Open a terminal on the orchestration system and navigate to the directory containing the Edge Orchestration release archives.

  4. From the terminal, extract the Edge Orchestration release archives:

    $ tar -xzvf ./csl-excat-v#.#.#.tar.gz
    $ tar -xzvf ./csl-tcc-v#.#.#.tar.gz
    

    In the extracted archive, you will find the directories csl-excat-v#.#.# and csl-tcc-v#.#.#.

Each Edge Orchestration extension provides its own documentation. For information on installing and using each Edge Orchestration extension, refer to the Edge Orchestration documentation.