FaaS Is Not Enough: Serverless Handling of Burst-Parallel Jobs
Daniel Barcelona-Pons, Aitor Arjona, Pedro Garc\'ia-L\'opez, Enrique, Molina-Gim\'enez, Stepan Klymonchuk

TL;DR
This paper presents a new serverless approach for burst-parallel jobs that overcomes FaaS limitations by enabling group invocation, improving locality, reducing latency, and significantly accelerating applications like TeraSort and PageRank.
Contribution
We introduce a group invocation primitive for serverless computing, enabling efficient burst-parallel job handling with improved locality and communication.
Findings
Reduces job invocation latency by 2×
Achieves 13× speed-up for TeraSort
Cuts remote communication by 98.5% for PageRank
Abstract
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) struggles with burst-parallel jobs due to needing multiple independent invocations to start a job. The lack of a group invocation primitive complicates application development and overlooks crucial aspects like locality and worker communication. We introduce a new serverless solution designed specifically for burst-parallel jobs. Unlike FaaS, our solution ensures job-level isolation using a group invocation primitive, allowing large groups of workers to be launched simultaneously. This method optimizes resource allocation by consolidating workers into fewer containers, speeding up their initialization and enhancing locality. Enhanced locality drastically reduces remote communication compared to FaaS, and combined with simultaneity, it enables workers to communicate synchronously via message passing and group collectives. This makes applications that are…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsOptimization and Search Problems · Scheduling and Optimization Algorithms · Digital Platforms and Economics
