Benjamin Carver

Benjamin Carver

PhD student in computer science. Cloud & serverless computing.

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Pages

Posts

Blog Post number 1

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

portfolio

publications

In Search of a Fast and Efficient Serverless DAG Engine

Published in PDSW 2019, 2019

We identify and evaluate a set of techniques to make DAG schedulers serverless-aware. These techniques have been implemented in Wukong, a serverless, DAG scheduler attuned to AWS Lambda. Wukong provides decentralized scheduling through a combination of static and dynamic scheduling. We present the results of an empirical study in which Wukong is applied to a range of microbenchmark and real-world DAG applications. Results demonstrate the efficacy of Wukong in minimizing the performance overhead introduced by AWS Lambda — Wukong achieves competitive performance compared to a serverful DAG scheduler, while improving the performance of real-world DAG jobs by as much as 3.1X at larger scale.

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Wukong: A Scalable and Locality-Enhanced Framework for Serverless Parallel Computing

Published in SOCC 2020, 2020

In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the problem space of DAG scheduling in serverless computing. We identify and evaluate a set of techniques to make DAG schedulers serverless-aware. These techniques have been implemented in Wukong, a serverless, DAG scheduler attuned to AWS Lambda. Wukong provides decentralized scheduling through a combination of static and dynamic scheduling. We present the results of an empirical study in which Wukong is applied to a range of microbenchmark and real-world DAG applications. Results demonstrate the efficacy of Wukong in minimizing the performance overhead introduced by AWS Lambda — Wukong achieves competitive performance compared to a serverful DAG scheduler, while improving the performance of real-world DAG jobs by as much as 3.1X at larger scale.

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InfiniStore: Elastic Serverless Cloud Storage

Published in VLDB 2023, 2023

We design and implement InfiniStore (Serverless I/O Nirvana), a persistent and elastic cloud storage system, which seamlessly couples the function-based ServerlessMemory layer with a persistent, inexpensive cloud object store layer. InfiniStore enables durability despite function failures using a fast parallel recovery scheme built on the auto-scaling functionality of a FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) platform. We evaluate InfiniStore extensively using three real-world applications and results show that InfiniStore achieves 27.77% and 97.30% tenant-side cost reduction compared to InfiniCache (a serverless-function-based object cache) and AWS ElastiCache respectively, while offering pay-per-access with competitive performance.

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λFS: Elastically Scaling Distributed File System Metadata Service using Serverless Functions

Published in ASPLOS 2023, 2024

The metadata service (MDS) sits on the critical path for file system operations, and as such it is key to the overall performance of a large-scale distributed file system (DFS). Common “serverful” MDS architectures, such as a single server or cluster of servers, have a significant shortcoming: either they are not scalable, or they make it difficult to achieve an optimal balance of performance, resource utilization, and cost. A modern MDS requires a novel architecture that addresses this shortcoming. To this end, we design and implement λFS, an elastic, high-performance metadata service for large-scale distributed file systems. λFS scales a DFS metadata cache on a FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) platform and synthesizes a series of techniques to overcome the obstacles that are encountered when building large stateful applications on FaaS platforms. λFS takes full advantage of the unique benefits offered by FaaS–elastic scaling and massive parallelism–to realize a highly-optimized metadata service capable of sustaining up to 4.13× higher throughput, 90.40% lower latency, 85.99% lower cost, and better resource utilization and efficiency than a state-of-the-art DFS for an industrial workload.

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talks

Wukong SoCC 2020 - Presentation

Published:

Presentation of Wukong: A Scalable and Locality-Enhanced Framework for Serverless Parallel Computing. You can view the talk here.

teaching