Title: Knowledge Is Power: Sensing The Physical World Around Devices

Abstract

Function-as-a-Service "serverless" platforms like Amazon Lambda have quickly emerged as a popular environment for developers since their arrival in 2014. FaaS offers developers automatic scaling of their applications with user demand and the promise to only pay for the resources their application uses, down to the millisecond range. Despite its desirability and positive features, FaaS has its dirty secrets. In this talk, I will reveal how the paradigm disregards decades of architectural wisdom and rewards misbehaviour from the FaaS provider. These issues require a rethink of the hardware and software stack to make today's markets more efficient and to enable the applications of tomorrow that will make FaaS shine in the post-Moore era.

To prototype these changes, we need to build full-stack prototype systems ready to run complex virtualised or containerised applications like FaaS, as high-level simulation alone abstracts away the complex system interactions. I will introduce OpenPiton, our open-source manycore research platform used to evaluate architecture research ideas for the cloud and beyond. OpenPiton enables the exact kind of full-stack system-on-chip prototyping we need in a push-button way, making it ideal for evaluating serverless applications and future research ideas. By embracing open-source hardware, the platform reduces the barrier to entry for new users across Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and creates a nexus where research ideas can come together to build a single coherent system.

One example of such a system I will introduce is our "Bring Your Own Core" (BYOC) platform for enabling heterogeneous-ISA systems research. BYOC enabled the development of both the first open-source, general-purpose, heterogeneous-ISA processor and the first open-source, SMP Linux-booting RISC-V manycore. By providing our novel interface for the connection of processor cores, one can bring a core of their choice and turn it into a heterogeneous manycore system with minimal effort. With this we have built multiple heterogeneous-ISA prototypes and connected ten cores of ISAs including RISC-V, X86, and SPARC. BYOC brings the potential to break down the ISA barrier, treating it as "just another interface" in the broader system stack, and to enable a new class of application-optimised heterogeneous systems to live alongside emerging application-specific accelerators.

Biography

Jonathan Balkind is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, and Operating Systems. He is the Lead Architect of OpenPiton and its heterogeneous-ISA descendent, BYOC, which are productive research platforms with thousands of downloads from over 70 countries worldwide. In developing Piton (a 25-core OpenPiton ASIC), Jonathan's verification effort helped ensure a functional, Linux-booting chip, a notable accomplishment for a small academic team's first chip. Jonathan was also a developer of FaaSProfiler, a tool for profiling Function-as-a-Service "serverless" applications. His research on FaaS unveiled a series of architectural problems with today's FaaS workloads which will only be effectively addressed through hardware-software co-design. Jonathan was a Class of 2018 Siebel Scholar and recipient of the Gordon Y.S. Wu Fellowship in Engineering. He received his Master's in Science in Computing Science with Honours of the First Class from the University of Glasgow in June 2013. He has completed internships at Samsung Electronics (Suwon, South Korea), Arm Ltd (Cambridge, UK), and Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK).