Serverless Skeletons for Elastic Parallel Processing

Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm with the goal of freeing developers from resource management issues. As of today, serverless computing platforms are mainly used to process computations triggered by events or user requests that can be executed independently of each other. These workloads benefit from on-demand and elastic compute resources as well as per-function billing. However, it is still an open research question to which extent parallel applications, which comprise most often complex coordination and communication patterns, can benefit from serverless computing.In this paper, we introduce serverless skeletons for parallel cloud programming to free developers from both parallelism and resource management issues. In particular, we investigate on the well-known and widely used farm skeleton, which supports the implementation of a wide range of applications. To evaluate our concepts, we present a prototypical development and runtime framework and implement two applications based on our frame-work: Numerical integration and hyperparameter optimization - a commonly applied technique in machine learning. We report on performance measurements for both applications and discuss the usefulness of our approach.