Accelerating Function-Centric Applications by Discovering, Distributing, and Retaining Reusable Context in Workflow Systems

Workflow systems provide a convenient way for users to write large-scale applications by composing independent tasks into large graphs that can be executed concurrently on high-performance clusters. In many newer workflow systems, tasks are often expressed as a combination of function invocations in a high-level language. Because necessary code and data are not statically known prior to execution, they must be moved into the cluster at runtime. An obvious way of doing this is to translate function invocations into self-contained executable programs and run them as usual, but this brings a hefty performance penalty: a function invocation now needs to piggyback its context with extra code and data to a remote node, and the remote node needs to take extra time to reconstruct the invocation's context before executing it, both detrimental to lightweight short-running functions.

A better solution for workflow systems is to treat functions and invocations as first-class abstractions: subsequent invocations of the same function on a worker node should only pay for the cost of context setup once and reuse the context between different invocations. The remaining problems lie in discovering, distributing, and retaining the reusable context among workers. In this paper, we discuss the rationale and design requirement of these mechanisms to support context reuse, and implement them in TaskVine, a dataintensive distributed framework and execution engine. Our results from executing a large-scale neural network inference application and a molecular design application show that treating functions and invocations as first-class abstractions reduces the execution time of the applications by 94.5% and 26.9%, respectively.