CAREER: SHF: Enhancing Serverless Efficiency Through Microarchitectural Checkpointing

云数据中心是当今技术基础设施的重要组成部分。应用程序和网站在很大程度上依赖于它们的高效运营来服务于数百万至数十亿用户。为了提高云服务器的利用率并简化应用程序开发，云平台最近开发了一种名为无服务器计算的新设计范式。新的无服务器应用程序是由非常小的代码片段组成的，与传统应用程序相比，这些代码通常只运行几毫秒。这项研究项目调查了这一变化对微处理器的影响，这些微处理器历来是为长时间运行的应用程序而设计的。该项目探索了如何修改微处理器的核心，以提高它们在运行此类无服务器应用程序时的能效。提高云数据中心中无服务器计算的效率将节省成本，减少经济部门的环境足迹，同时降低具有新应用的新进入者的进入门槛。此外，该项目还整合了一项教育计划，主要内容是改变专业渠道，并参与公平和包容的教学实践研讨会，以广泛增强不断增长的云计算和计算机科学工作队伍的多样性。该项目调查了新兴的、短期的应用程序(如无服务器计算)对嵌入微处理器中的预测结构的影响，这些微处理器的设计考虑了长期应用程序。无服务器应用程序在当今的服务器处理器上运行会浪费大量的能量和时间，但它们已被采用来提高整体服务器利用率和开发人员生产力。因此，保存分支预测器和缓存等结构的内容或微体系结构检查点，有可能大幅提高无服务器的效率，并通过消除微体系结构培训时间来增加传统应用程序的性能。该项目调查了哪些结构最适合检查点，将检查点机制实施到商业采用的开源处理器中，设计了用户和操作系统软件与程序员的接口，并提出了使检查点可采用所需的新的安全保护措施。这种全栈原型过程，利用真实世界的开源软件和硬件，将展示通过微体系结构检查点实现的显著效率优势。这将为正在激增的无服务器边缘和云计算以及传统的、长期运行的应用程序提供更高效的数据中心，所有这些都是社会所依赖的云服务的基础。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。

Cloud data centers are a vital piece of technology infrastructure today. Applications and websites rely deeply on their efficient operation to serve millions to billions of users. To improve the useful utilization of cloud servers and ease application development, cloud platforms have recently developed a new design paradigm known as serverless computing. New serverless applications are made of very small pieces of code, which often run for just milliseconds, in contrast to traditional applications. This research project investigates the implications of this change on microprocessors which have been historically designed for long-running applications. The project explores how to modify the cores of the microprocessor to improve their energy efficiency when running such serverless applications. Improving the efficiency of serverless computing in cloud data centers will enable cost savings and a reduced environmental footprint across economic sectors while lowering the barrier to entry for new entrants with novel applications. In addition, this project integrates an education plan featuring a new change of major pipeline and participation in equitable and inclusive teaching practices workshops to broadly enhance the diversity of the growing cloud computing and computer science workforce.This project investigates the impacts of emerging, short-lived applications like serverless computing on the prediction structures embedded into microprocessors designed with long-lived applications in mind. Serverless applications waste significant energy and time running on today's server processors, but they have been adopted to improve overall server utilization and developer productivity. Saving the contents, or microarchitectural checkpointing, of structures like branch predictors and caches thus has the potential to drastically improve the efficiency of serverless and supercharge traditional applications by eliminating microarchitectural training time. This project investigates which structures are best to checkpoint, implements checkpointing mechanisms into commercially-adopted, open-source processors, designs the user and operating system software interfaces to the programmer, and proposes new security protections needed to make the checkpointing adoptable. This full-stack prototyping process, exploiting real-world, open-source software and hardware, will demonstrate the significant efficiency benefits realizable with microarchitectural checkpointing. This will enable more efficient data centers for serverless edge and cloud computing that are proliferating as well as traditional, long-running applications, all of which underpin the cloud services that society relies on.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.