kubernetes - Benefits for creating k8s deployment of Folding@Home for Raspberry Pi cluster?

Question

I have recently made a Folding@Home arm64 container image for Docker type deployment, and now I want to acheive the goal of deploying Folding@Home to a microk8s cluster on my Raspberry Pis.

However, I noticed the microk8s itself uses a lot of CPU proccessing power, and I am not sure if k8s Folding@HOME would give any benefits at all, after going through all that troubles.

FYI: On the other hand, I would like to deploy microk8s after all, for deploying other services perhaps.

For those who are interested, here's the link to my image: https://hub.docker.com/r/beastob/foldingathome-arm64

Answer 1

As you found out the orchestrator itself already utilizes a considerable amount of resources. Therefore I don't see a real benefit in a single-host scenario (apart from the Kubernetes' unified API to operate containers or for development).

Though, especially when you have additional/multiple hosts (multiple Raspberry Pis or e.g. include instances of a public cloud provider to your cluster) you can leverage Kubernetes' scheduling capability: using e.g. DaemonSet you can ensure that "every node of the cluster" runs an instance of your workload.

Additionally, you could even limit the resource consumption of those workloads to leave some space for other workloads (or define priorities).

IMO: if you want to run Folding@Home in a container I'd rather go for something like Podman. I assume there is no interoperability between the Folding@Home instances, so they can operate independently from each other. No real need for an orchestrator.