SpecFaaS: Accelerating Serverless Applications with Speculative Function Execution

Jovan Stojkovic, Tianyin Xu, Hubertus Franke, Josep Torrellas

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Serverless computing has emerged as a popular cloud computing paradigm. Serverless environments are convenient to users and efficient for cloud providers. However, they can induce substantial application execution overheads, especially in applications with many functions.In this paper, we propose to accelerate serverless applications with a novel approach based on software-supported speculative execution of functions. Our proposal is termed Speculative Function-as-a-Service (SpecFaaS). It is inspired by out-of-order execution in modern processors, and is grounded in a characterization analysis of FaaS applications. In SpecFaaS, functions in an application are executed early, speculatively, before their control and data dependences are resolved. Control dependences are predicted like in pipeline branch prediction, and data dependences are speculatively satisfied with memoization. With this support, the execution of downstream functions is overlapped with that of upstream functions, substantially reducing the end-to-end execution time of applications. We prototype SpecFaaS on Apache OpenWhisk, an open-source serverless computing platform. For a set of applications in a warmed-up environment, SpecFaaS attains an average speedup of 4.6×. Further, on average, the application throughput increases by 3.9× and the tail latency decreases by 58.7%.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2023 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, HPCA 2023 - Proceedings
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages814-827
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781665476522
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event29th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, HPCA 2023 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Feb 25 2023Mar 1 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Volume2023-February
ISSN (Print)1530-0897

Conference

Conference29th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, HPCA 2023
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period2/25/233/1/23

Keywords

  • Cloud computing
  • Function-as-a-Service
  • Serverless computing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'SpecFaaS: Accelerating Serverless Applications with Speculative Function Execution'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this