ABSTRACT
Serverless functions provide elastic scaling and a fine-grained billing
model, making Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) an attractive programming model. However, for distributed jobs that benefit from largescale and dynamic parallelism, the lack of fast and cheap communication is a major limitation. Individual functions cannot communicate directly, group operations do not exist, and users resort to
manual implementations of storage-based communication. This results in communication times multiple orders of magnitude slower
than those found in HPC systems. We overcome this limitation and
present the FaaS Message Interface (FMI). FMI is an easy-to-use,
high-performance framework for general-purpose point-to-point
and collective communication in FaaS applications. We support different communication channels and offer a model-driven channel
selection according to performance and cost expectations. We model
the interface after MPI and show that message passing can be integrated into serverless applications with minor changes, providing
portable communication closer to that offered by high-performance
systems. In our experiments, FMI can speed up communication
for a distributed machine learning FaaS application by up to 162x,
while simultaneously reducing cost by up to 397 times.
1 Like