TY - GEN
T1 - SpecFaaS
T2 - 29th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, HPCA 2023
AU - Stojkovic, Jovan
AU - Xu, Tianyin
AU - Franke, Hubertus
AU - Torrellas, Josep
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - 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%.
AB - 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%.
KW - Cloud computing
KW - Function-as-a-Service
KW - Serverless computing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85151642695&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85151642695&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10071120
DO - 10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10071120
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85151642695
T3 - Proceedings - International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
SP - 814
EP - 827
BT - 2023 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, HPCA 2023 - Proceedings
PB - IEEE Computer Society
Y2 - 25 February 2023 through 1 March 2023
ER -