Cppless: Single-Source and High-Performance Serverless Programming in C++

TL;DR

Cppless is a C++ framework that simplifies deploying and executing serverless functions, enabling high-performance remote computation with minimal code changes and significant speedups.

Contribution

It introduces Cppless, a novel LLVM-based framework that automates deployment and invocation of serverless functions in C++, addressing deployment complexity and compatibility issues.

Findings

Up to 59x speedup in parallel computations

Minimal code modifications required

Low cost increase with serverless offloading

Abstract

The rise of serverless computing introduced a new class of scalable, elastic and widely available parallel workers in the cloud. Many systems and applications benefit from offloading computations and parallel tasks to dynamically allocated resources. However, the developers of C++ applications find it difficult to integrate functions due to complex deployment, lack of compatibility between client and cloud environments, and loosely typed input and output data. To enable single-source and efficient serverless acceleration in C++, we introduce Cppless, an end-to-end framework for implementing remote functions which handles the creation, deployment, and invocation of serverless functions. Cppless is built on top of LLVM and requires only two compiler extensions to automatically extract C++ function objects and deploy them to the cloud. We demonstrate that offloading parallel computations, such as from a C++ application to serverless workers, can provide up to 59x speedup with minimal cost increase while requiring only minor code modifications.