# Straggler Resilient Serverless Computing Based on Polar Codes

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a polar code-based mechanism for enhancing the reliability of serverless computing by mitigating stragglers, demonstrating superior performance over existing coding methods through extensive experiments on AWS Lambda.

## Contribution

It presents a novel polar code-based framework for straggler-resilient serverless computation, including a specialized sequential decoder and extensions to matrix multiplication.

## Key findings

- Polar codes outperform other coding methods in straggler mitigation.
- The proposed scheme is effectively implemented on AWS Lambda.
- Partial polarization reduces encoding/decoding complexity with some resilience trade-offs.

## Abstract

We propose a serverless computing mechanism for distributed computation based on polar codes. Serverless computing is an emerging cloud based computation model that lets users run their functions on the cloud without provisioning or managing servers. Our proposed approach is a hybrid computing framework that carries out computationally expensive tasks such as linear algebraic operations involving large-scale data using serverless computing and does the rest of the processing locally. We address the limitations and reliability issues of serverless platforms such as straggling workers using coding theory, drawing ideas from recent literature on coded computation. The proposed mechanism uses polar codes to ensure straggler-resilience in a computationally effective manner. We provide extensive evidence showing polar codes outperform other coding methods. We have designed a sequential decoder specifically for polar codes in erasure channels with full-precision input and outputs. In addition, we have extended the proposed method to the matrix multiplication case where both matrices being multiplied are coded. The proposed coded computation scheme is implemented for AWS Lambda. Experiment results are presented where the performance of the proposed coded computation technique is tested in optimization via gradient descent. Finally, we introduce the idea of partial polarization which reduces the computational burden of encoding and decoding at the expense of straggler-resilience.