Skip to content

WORDS 2021: The Second Workshop On Resource Disaggregation and Serverless

April 15th, Cyberspace, Co-located with ASPLOS 2021



Welcome to the Second Workshop On Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS 2021)!

Program

Welcome Messages from Chairs (7:50 - 8:00 PDT)

Session 1 (8:00 - 9:30 PDT) (Session Chair: Sebastian Burckhardt)

INVITED Kappa: A Programming Framework for Serverless Computing (SoCC 2020)
Wen Zhang, Vivian Fang (UC Berkeley), Aurojit Panda (NYU), Scott Shenker (UC Berkeley/ICSI)

A Study of NPB and CANDLE on Commercial Off-the-Shelf Disaggregated Memory
Melanie Cornelius, Avery Peck, Zhiling Lan (Illinois Institute of Technology), Bill Allcock, Brian Toonen (Argonne National Laboratory)

INVITED Faasm: Lightweight Isolation for Efficient Stateful Serverless Computing (ATC 2020)
Simon Shillaker and Peter Pietzuch (Imperial College London)

Session 2 (9:30 - 11:00 PDT) (Session Chair: Irina Calciu)

INVITED AIFM: High-Performance, Application-Integrated Far Memory (OSDI 2020)
Zhenyuan Ruan (MIT CSAIL), Malte Schwarzkopf (Brown University), Marcos K. Aguilera (VMware Research), Adam Belay (MIT CSAIL)

MODC: Resilience for disaggregated memory architectures using task-based programming
Kimberly Keeton (Unaffliated), Sharad Singhal (Hewlett Packard Labs), Haris Volos (University of Cypress), Yupu Zhang (Google), Ramesh Chandra Chaurasiya, Clarete Riana Crasta, Sherin T George, Nagaraju K N, Mashood Abdulla K, Kavitha Natarajan, Porno Shome, Sanish Suresh (Hewlett Packard Labs)

Towards Offloadable and Migratable Microservices on Disaggregated Architectures: Vision, Challenges, and Research Roadmap
Xiaoyi Lu, Arjun Kashyap (University of California Merced)

Open Discussion (11:00 - 11:30 PDT)

Break and Networking (11:30 - 12:30 PDT)

Session 3 (12:30 - 1:30 PDT) (Session Chair: Kim Keeton)

INVITED Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider (ATC 2020)
Mohammad Shahrad, Rodrigo Fonseca, Íñigo Goiri, Gohar Chaudhry, Paul Batum, Jason Cooke, Eduardo Laureano, Colby Tresness, Mark Russinovich, and Ricardo Bianchin (Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Research)

In-network Contention Resolution for Disaggregated Memory
Stewart Grant, Alex C. Snoeren (University of California San Diego)

Session 4 (1:30 - 2:30 PDT) (Session Chair: Mohammad Shahrad)

INVITED Serverless Workflows with Durable Functions and Netherite
Sebastian Burckhardt (Microsoft Research), Chris Gillum, David Justo (Microsoft Azure), Konstantinos Kallas (University of Pennsylvania), Connor McMahon (Microsoft Azure), Christopher S. Meiklejohn (Carnegie Mellon University)

Disaggregated Applications Using Nanoservices
Xinwen Wang, Yu-Ju Huang, Tiancheng Yuan, Robbert van Renesse (Cornell University)

Closing Remarks


Call for Papers

Recent hardware developments and application trends are challenging the long-standing data-center architecture where a server is the unit of deployment, operation, and failure and the cloud infrastructure where VMs or containers are the unit of cloud services. In response, two ideas have gained huge traction recently: resource disaggregation and serverless computing. Resource disaggregation breaks a computer server (either physically or virtually) into fine-grained, network-accessed hardware resource units that can be shared by different applications. Serverless computing eschews "servers" by allowing users to directly deploy fine-grained programs (or "serverless functions") that are triggered by external events.

With the natural synergy and importance of these two topics, the 2nd Workshop on Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS'21) will build on the success of the 1st Workshop on Resource Disaggregation (WORD'19) by including the area of serverless computing. WORDS'21 will bring together researchers and practitioners in hardware, software, networking, programming language, and application domains to engage in a lively discussion on a wide range of topics in the broad definition of resource disaggregation and serverless computing.

We solicit both position papers that explore new challenges and design spaces and short papers that include completed or early-stage work.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Hardware design for resource disaggregation and serverless computing
  • Network design for resource disaggregation and serverless computing
  • Programming models for resource disaggregation and serverless computing
  • Serverless and disaggregation workloads and applications
  • Scheduling problems in resource disaggregation and serverless computing
  • Integration of resource disaggregation and serverless computing
  • Disaggregated and remote memory/storage
  • Resource management of disaggregated cluster
  • Execution environments for serverless computing
  • Novel application of the serverless computing model to other domains
  • Deployment of disaggregated cluster
  • Virtualization of disaggregated hardware
  • Billing models for serverless computing

Research and position paper submissions must be no longer than 5 pages including figures and tables, plus as many pages as needed for references. Text should be formatted in two columns on 8.5x11-inch paper using 10-point Times-Roman font on 12-point (single-spaced) leading, 1-inch margins, and a 0.25-inch gutter (separation between the columns). Submissions will be double blind, though authors are allowed to post their paper on arXiv or other public forums.

We encourage researchers from all institutions to submit their work for review. Preliminary results of interesting ideas and work-in-progress are welcome. A paper accepted to WORDS would not preclude its future publication in a major conference. Submissions that are likely to generate vigorous discussion will be favored!

SUBMIT YOUR WORK

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: Mar 8, 2021
  • Notification: Mar 31, 2021
  • Final version due: Apr 13, 2021
  • Workshop date: Apr 15, 2021

Program Chairs

  • Yiying Zhang - University of California, San Diego
  • Harry Xu - University of California, Los Angeles

Program Committee

  • Arvind Krishnamurthy - University of Washington
  • Boon Thau Loo - University of Pennsylvania
  • Íñigo Goiri - Microsoft Research
  • Irina Calciu - VMware Research
  • Kimberly Keeton
  • Mohammad Shahrad - Princeton University / University of British Columbia
  • Neeraja Yadwadkar - Stanford University
  • Sebastian Burckhardt - Microsoft Research
  • Shivaram Venkataraman - University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Stanko Novakovic - Microsoft Research