On 13 December 2023, BSC partner Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) presented its paper, “Glider: Serverless Ephemeral Stateful Near-Data Computation” at the 25th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (11-15 December 2023).
This conference is a major forum for the discussion of innovations and recent scientific advances of middleware systems with a focus on the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of distributed systems, platforms and architectures for computing, storage, and communication.
URV researcher Daniel Pons presented EXTRACT-related work on incorporating near-data computation into an ephemeral storage system to reduce the volume of transferred data in serverless analytics. “Glider” was presented as a means of enhancing communication between serverless compute stages to allow data to smoothely “glide” through the processing pipeline instead of bouncing between different services.
Pons compared traditional data processing and active storage to that of serverless data processing and computing and asked the question “Can we improve the serverless data-shipping problem?”. He then introduced Glider as a solution with corresponding examples how it works. He showed how Glider can eliminate 1/3 of data transfers and connections to storage, enable stream processing-pipling and overall faster computation.
More information on the presentation, publication and code can be found below.