IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention

The paper titled "Lukewarm Serverless Functions: Characterization and Optimization" by NTU Assistant Professor Dmitrii Ustiugov and his collaborators, namely David Schall (University of Edinburgh), Artemiy Margaritov (Hisilicon), Andreas Sandberg (Arm Research), Boris Grot (University of Edinburgh) has received the IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention for enabling microarchitecture research in the serverless domain. The paper was presented at the 49th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2022), which was held in New York City, USA. This award is highly selective, given to the best 24 papers published in top computer architecture papers in 2022. 

Serverless is taking the cloud by storm. A recent study estimates that over half of organizations using one or more of the most-popular cloud providers have adopted serverless. However, the microarchitecture research community has largely missed the trend. There are two essential reasons for that. The first is the lack of a meaningful infrastructure and workloads appropriate for microarchitectural studies of serverless deployments. The second is the lack of understanding of challenges and opportunities in the serverless domain that microarchitecture researchers can target. The impact of this work is in addressing both of these impediments to research, hence empowering microarchitects to study and optimize processors for the demands of serverless workloads. 

The recognition of this work with the IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention is a testament to the importance of understanding and optimizing microarchitecture of serverless deployments in the cloud. The benchmarks and tools introduced by this work are freely available to researchers interested in exploring the performance and optimization of serverless computing at the microarchitectural level.

Congratulations to Prof Dmitrii Ustiugov!