  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.
