Cosmic: Cost-Effective Support for Cloud-Assisted 3D Printing

In this paper, we consider a new workload for which serverless platforms are well-suited: the execution of a 3D printer controller in the cloud. This workload is qualitatively different from those considered in prior work due to the stringent timing requirements. Our measurements on popular serverless platforms reveal millisecond-level overheads that impair the timely execution of the example control algorithm we consider. To mitigate the impact of these overheads, we judiciously partition the execution of the algorithm across a set of serverless functions and exploit timely speculation. Our evaluations on AWS Lambda show that, for 30 diverse print jobs, Cosmic is able to ensure the timely execution of the controller while reducing cost by 2.8×-3.5× compared to other approaches.