$f$funcX: Federated Function as a Service for Science

Zhuozhao Li1; Ryan Chard2; Yadu Babuji3; Ben Galewsky4; Tyler J. Skluzacek3; Kirill Nagaitsev5; Anna Woodard3; Ben Blaiszik3; Josh Bryan3; Daniel S. Katz6; Ian Foster2; Kyle Chard3

2022-12-01

10.1109/TPDS.2022.3208767

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems   Impact Factor & Quartile

2161-9883

1558-2183

funcX is a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. Unlike centralized FaaS systems, funcX decouples the cloud-hosted management functionality from the edge-hosted execution functionality. funcX's endpoint software can be deployed, by users or administrators, on arbitrary laptops, clouds, clusters, and supercomputers, in effect turning them into function serving systems. funcX's cloud-hosted service provides a single location for registering, sharing, and managing both functions and endpoints. It allows for transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across the federated ecosystem of endpoints-enabling users to route functions to endpoints based on specific needs. funcX uses containers (e.g., Docker, Singularity, and Shifter) to provide common execution environments across endpoints. funcX implements various container management strategies to execute functions with high performance and efficiency on diverse funcX endpoints. funcX also integrates with an in-memory data store and Globus for managing data that may span endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX, present our prototype design and implementation, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than 130000 concurrent workers. We show that funcX's container warming-aware routing algorithm can reduce the completion time for 3,000 functions by up to 61% compared to a randomized algorithm and the in-memory data store can speed up data transfers by up to 3x compared to a shared file system.

Function-as-a-service cyberinfrastructure distributed computing

SCI

English

First

NSF["2004894","2004932"] ; Argonne National Laboratory through U.S. Department of Energy[DE-AC02-06CH11357]

Computer Science ; Engineering

Computer Science, Theory & Methods ; Engineering, Electrical & Electronic

WOS:000866501500002

IEEE COMPUTER SOC

Web of Science

1.Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
2.Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA
3.University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
4.NCSA, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
5.Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
6.NCSA, CS, ECE, and the iSchool, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

Zhuozhao Li,Ryan Chard,Yadu Babuji,et al. $f$funcX: Federated Function as a Service for Science[J]. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems,2022,33(12):4948-4963.

Zhuozhao Li.,Ryan Chard.,Yadu Babuji.,Ben Galewsky.,Tyler J. Skluzacek.,...&Kyle Chard.(2022).$f$funcX: Federated Function as a Service for Science.IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems,33(12),4948-4963.

Zhuozhao Li,et al."$f$funcX: Federated Function as a Service for Science".IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 33.12(2022):4948-4963.