XaaS: Acceleration as a Service to Enable Productive High-Performance Cloud Computing

Torsten Hoefler, Marcin Copik, Pete Beckman, Andrew Jones, Ian T. Foster, Manish Parashar, Daniel A. Reed, Matthias Troyer, Thomas C. Schulthess, Dan Ernst, Jack J. Dongarra

Abstract: High-performance computing (HPC) and the cloud have evolved independently, specializing their innovations into performance or productivity. Acceleration as a Service (XaaS) is a recipe to empower both fields with a shared execution platform that provides transparent access to computing resources, regardless of the underlying cloud or HPC service provider. Bridging HPC and cloud advancements, XaaS presents a unified architecture built on performance-portable containers. Our converged model concentrates on low-overhead, high-performance communication and computing, targeting resource-intensive workloads from climate simulations to machine learning. XaaS lifts the restricted allocation model of Function as a Service (FaaS), allowing users to benefit from the flexibility and efficient resource utilization of serverless computing while supporting long-running and performance-sensitive workloads from HPC.