funcX: Federated Function as a Service for Science

TL;DR

funcX is a federated FaaS platform enabling scalable, high-performance remote function execution across diverse endpoints, with efficient container management and data handling, demonstrated on supercomputers with significant performance improvements.

Contribution

This paper introduces funcX, a novel federated FaaS system that decouples management from execution, supporting diverse endpoints and optimizing performance through container strategies and data integration.

Findings

Scales to over 130,000 concurrent workers.

Container warming-aware routing reduces function completion time by up to 61%.

In-memory data store speeds data transfers by up to 3x.

Abstract

funcX is a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. Unlike centralized FaaS systems, funcX decouples the cloud-hosted management functionality from the edge-hosted execution functionality. funcX's endpoint software can be deployed, by users or administrators, on arbitrary laptops, clouds, clusters, and supercomputers, in effect turning them into function serving systems. funcX's cloud-hosted service provides a single location for registering, sharing, and managing both functions and endpoints. It allows for transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across the federated ecosystem of endpoints--enabling users to route functions to endpoints based on specific needs. funcX uses containers (e.g., Docker, Singularity, and Shifter) to provide common execution environments across endpoints. funcX implements various container management strategies to execute functions with high performance and efficiency on diverse funcX endpoints. funcX also integrates with an in-memory data store and Globus for managing data that may span endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX, present our prototype design and implementation, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than 130 000 concurrent workers. We show that funcX's container warming-aware routing algorithm can reduce the completion time for 3000 functions by up to 61% compared to a randomized algorithm and the in-memory data store can speed up data transfers by up to 3x compared to a shared file system.