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

该项目将通过同时借用数千台计算机，为计算机程序设计在几秒钟内完成通常需要几个小时的事情的方法。直到最近，这是不可能的或经济的：租用计算机的公司需要提前通知分钟，最低账单至少为10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提前通知的情况下同时租用数千台不可靠的计算机。该项目将设计软件、存储系统和编程语言，以便在大型计算中稳健地使用该技术。该研究旨在提供一种新的“突发并行”应用程序和系统模型。这种模式利用了亚马逊、微软和谷歌等云计算提供商提供的新功能即服务。在这个模型中，细粒度的“短暂的并行计算”，使大规模的并行计算在低成本。 通过对算法并行化的仔细关注，我们认为，许多新旧数据处理任务都可以适应于一个功能模型，该模型对小块数据进行操作，以突发并行方式执行，以实现交互式性能需求，以一种可以调试，跟踪，本项目旨在提供应用蓝图和系统基础，以实现最终目标，用户和开发人员可以按需访问大量并行性，而只需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合作，以确保其他人能够使用和构建这项工作。除了将这项研究纳入课程之外，研究人员还有一个正式的计划，将代表性不足的少数民族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（例如，GNU/Linux发行版、端口集合、应用程序商店等）。数据、代码和评估结果将在项目完成后继续在www.example.com上托管至少三年https://gplambda.github.io.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.