Serverless computing on heterogeneous computers

Existing serverless computing platforms are built upon homogeneous computers, limiting the function density and restricting serverless computing to limited scenarios. We introduce Molecule, the first serverless computing system utilizing heterogeneous computers. Molecule enables both general-purpose devices (e.g., Nvidia DPU) and domain-specific accelerators (e.g., FPGA and GPU) for serverless applications that significantly improve function density (50% higher) and application performance (up to 34.6x). To achieve these results, we first propose XPU-Shim, a distributed shim to bridge the gap between underlying multi-OS systems (when using general-purpose devices) and our serverless runtime (i.e., Molecule). We further introduce vectorized sandbox, a sandbox abstraction to abstract hardware heterogeneity (when using domain-specific accelerators). Moreover, we also review state-of-the-art serverless optimizations on startup and communication latency and overcome the challenges to implement them on heterogeneous computers. We have implemented Molecule on real platforms with Nvidia DPUs and Xilinx FPGAs and evaluate it using benchmarks and real-world applications.