CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: GPL: General-Purpose Lambda Computing

该项目将设计一种方法，让计算机程序一次借用数千台计算机，在几秒钟内完成通常需要几个小时的事情。直到最近，这是不可能的，也不划算：租赁电脑的公司要求提前几分钟通知，最低账单至少为十分钟。最近，一项名为“功能即服务计算”的新技术允许人们在没有事先通知的情况下，以几分之一秒的时间同时租用数千台不可靠的计算机。这个项目将设计软件、存储系统和编程语言，以稳健地使用这项技术进行大规模计算。这项研究旨在提供一种新的“突发并行”应用程序和系统模型。该模式利用了亚马逊、微软和谷歌等云计算提供商提供的新功能即服务。在该模型中，细粒度的“临时Lambdas”能够以低成本进行大规模的并行计算。通过对算法并行化的仔细研究，我们认为许多新旧数据处理任务都可以被改造成一个函数模型，这些函数对小块数据进行操作，以突发并行的方式执行，以一种可调试、可跟踪和可理解的方式实现交互性能要求。该项目旨在提供应用程序蓝图和系统基础，使最终用户和开发人员能够按需访问海量并行，同时只为应用程序实际消耗的资源付费。研究人员将与开发人员社区接触，以确保其他人能够使用并在此基础上进行工作。除了将这项研究整合到课程课程中，研究人员还制定了一个正式的计划，将未被充分代表的少数族裔本科生纳入他们的研究小组。软件将根据加州大学和斯坦福大学的政策在开源软件许可证下发布，并通过项目网站和传统的开源软件分发方式(如GNU/Linux分发、端口集合、应用程序商店等)进行分发。数据、代码和评估结果将在项目完成后至少三年内继续托管，https://gplambda.github.io.This奖反映了国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The project will design ways for computer programs to do things in a few seconds that would ordinarily take hours, by borrowing thousands of computers at once. Until recently, this was not possible or economical: the companies that rent computers required minutes of advance notice, with a minimum bill of at least ten minutes. Recently, new technology called "function-as-a-service computing" allows people to rent thousands of unreliable computers at the same time with no advance notice, for fractions of a second. This project will design software, storage systems, and programming languages to use this technology robustly for large calculations.This research aims to deliver a new model of "burst parallel" applications and systems. This model takes advantage of new function-as-a-service offerings by cloud-computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In this model, fine-grained "ephemeral lambdas" enable large-scale parallel computations at low cost. With careful attention to algorithm parallelization, we argue that many both old and new data processing tasks can be adapted into a model of functions that operate on small pieces of data, executed in a burst-parallel manner to achieve interactive performance demands, in a way that can be debugged, traced, and understood.This project intends to provide the application blueprint and systems foundation to enable end-users and developers to access massive amounts of parallelism on demand, while only paying for those resources actually consumed by an application. The researchers will engage with the developer community to ensure that others are able to use and build upon the work. In addition to integrating this research into course curricula, the researchers have a formalized program for embedding under-represented minority undergraduate students into their research groups.Software will be released under open-source software licenses pursuant to the policies of the University of California and Stanford University, and distributed through the project website and through traditional means of distribution of open-source software (e.g., GNU/Linux distributions, ports collections, app stores, etc.). Data, code, and evaluation results will continue to be hosted for at least three years after project completion at https://gplambda.github.io.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.