High-Performance Serverless Computing: A Systematic Literature Review on Serverless for HPC, AI, and Big Data

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes how serverless computing is being adopted for high-performance, AI, and big data applications, highlighting trends, research directions, and use cases to guide future development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of research directions and use cases, along with analysis of publication trends and collaboration networks in serverless HPC, AI, and big data.

Findings

Growing research interest in serverless for HPC, AI, and big data

Identification of eight primary research directions

Analysis of collaboration networks among researchers

Abstract

The widespread deployment of large-scale, compute-intensive applications such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and big data is leading to convergence between cloud and high-performance computing infrastructures. Cloud providers are increasingly integrating high-performance computing capabilities in their infrastructures, such as hardware accelerators and high-speed interconnects, while researchers in the high-performance computing community are starting to explore cloud-native paradigms to improve scalability, elasticity, and resource utilization. In this context, serverless computing emerges as a promising execution model to efficiently handle highly dynamic, parallel, and distributed workloads. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic literature review of 122 research articles published between 2018 and early 2025, exploring the use of the serverless paradigm to develop, deploy, and orchestrate compute-intensive applications across cloud, high-performance computing, and hybrid environments. From these, a taxonomy comprising eight primary research directions and nine targeted use case domains is proposed, alongside an analysis of recent publication trends and collaboration networks among authors, highlighting the growing interest and interconnections within this emerging research field. Overall, this work aims to offer a valuable foundation for both new researchers and experienced practitioners, guiding the development of next-generation serverless solutions for parallel compute-intensive applications.