CAREER: Hardware/Software Co-design for Serverless Computing

该奖项的部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(Public Law 117-2)。云计算已成为不同领域的主导计算模式。在这一巨大成功的背后，几十年的研究努力已经演变成云环境，以便为用户提供更好的服务。为了跟上这一趋势，当前的云计算社区正在采用一种新的云计算范式--无服务器计算，它允许云用户在概念上与底层硬件资源保持距离，而不是专注于开发他们的应用程序。尽管有好处，但无服务器平台带来了新的挑战。其中一个明显的问题是服务时间缓慢。无服务器平台需要像其他云应用程序一样及时响应用户的请求。然而，它对网络的高度依赖导致了长时间的服务延迟，严重影响了用户体验。该项目通过使用新兴设备(即智能网络接口卡(SmartNIC)和非易失性存储器(NVM))减少对网络内存资源的依赖来解决服务时间缓慢的问题。这些成功的结果直接使云计算技术受益，云计算技术是现代计算机技术的关键领域之一。这一改进带来了更好的云计算环境，帮助云计算用户通过无服务器计算提高工作效率，但不必担心其服务时间较慢。该项目还侧重于对计算机科学专业的学生进行硬件教育，并将他们培养成能够设计硬件/软件共同设计系统的高级工程师。教育计划包括针对女性和少数族裔学生的多样化活动，为她们提供计算机体系结构方面的背景知识。该项目计划重新设计软件和硬件平台，以解决无服务器平台服务延迟缓慢的问题，而不是只调查软件优化，这通常会带来昂贵的权衡。实现这一目标的具体研究目标包括：(1)将整个存储协议从主机内核移植到SmartNIC上；(2)实现非易失性缓存控制器，在主存储器和网络存储之间插入非易失性缓存层；(3)使用非易失性存储器来增强非易失性缓存。本项目将网络存储延迟分解为网络延迟和存储访问延迟两个子问题。第一个研究目标是通过减轻主机CPU的协议处理负担来解决网络延迟问题。另外两个目标是通过采用SmartNIC控制的非易失性缓存以及本地磁盘和NVMM中的缓存空间来解决存储延迟缓慢的问题。建议的设计将是下一代云服务器的参考之一，展示了如何共同设计硬件和软件，以满足高软件需求。该奖项反映了NSF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。

This award is funded in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Cloud computing has become a dominant computing paradigm in diverse sectors. Behind this considerable success, decades of research efforts have evolved cloud environments to offer better services to their users. Keeping up with this trend, the current cloud community is adopting a new cloud-computing paradigm, serverless computing, which allows cloud users to have conceptual distance from the underlying hardware resources and focus instead on developing their applications. Despite its benefits, the serverless platform raises new challenges. One of the apparent problems is slow service time. The serverless platform needs to provide as timely responses to users' requests as other cloud applications. However, its high dependency on the network causes long service latency, significantly hurting users' experiences. This project addresses this slow service time by reducing dependence on network memory resources using emerging devices, namely, smart network interface cards (SmartNIC) and non-volatile memories (NVM). The successful outcomes directly benefit cloud-computing technology, one of the crucial areas in modern computer technology. This improvement leads to a better cloud-computing environment, helping cloud users be more productive with serverless computing but without concerns about its slow service time. This project also focuses on educating computer science students on hardware and nurturing them to be advanced engineers capable of designing hardware/software co-designed systems. The education plans include diverse activities for female and under-represented-minority students, providing them with backgrounds in computer architecture.Rather than investigating only software optimizations, which often offer expensive trade-offs, this project plans to redesign both the software and hardware platform to address serverless platforms' slow service latency. Specific research objectives to achieve this goal include: (1) migrate the entire storage protocols from the host kernel to the SmartNIC; (2) implement a non-volatile cache controller, which inserts a non-volatile cache layer between the main memory and the network storage; (3) employ non-volatile memory to enhance the non-volatile cache. This project dissects the network storage latency into two sub-problems, network latency and storage access latency. The first research objective addresses network latency by offloading protocol processing burdens from the host CPU. The other two objectives address slow storage latencies by adopting the SmartNIC-controlled non-volatile cache with the caching space in the local disks and the NVMM. The proposed design will be one of the references for the next-generation cloud server, showing how the hardware and the software can be co-designed to satisfy the high software demands.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.