Abstract

Serverless has emerged as the next dominant cloud architecture. In serverless, developers structure their cloud application as a collection of stateless functions that execute on-demand. Despite accepted benefits to both developers and cloud providers, the serverless model brings new challenges calling for cross-layer characterization and optimization. Alas, today's state-of-the-art serverless stacks are propriety to each individual cloud provider, which impedes research in this space. In this talk, I will overview the serverless model and introduce the vHive open-source ecosystem. vHive includes a complete serverless stack, a suite of serverless workloads and robust tools for performance analysis and debug, which together enable meaningful serverless research at any scale. I will describe our usage of vHive to identify the unique pain points for today’s server CPUs posed by the serverless execution model and to propose pragmatic mechanisms that can alleviate the principal bottlenecks.

Boris Grot is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads the EASE Lab. His research focuses on understanding and alleviating efficiency bottlenecks and capability shortcomings of processing platforms for data-intensive applications. Boris is a member of the MICRO Hall of Fame and a recipient of multiple awards for his research. He was the Program Co-Chair for MICRO 2022 and is the General Chair for HPCA 2024.