XaaS: Acceleration as a Service to Enable Productive High-Performance Cloud Computing
Torsten Hoefler, Marcin Copik, Pete Beckman, Andrew Jones, Ian Foster, Manish Parashar, Daniel A. Reed, Matthias Troyer, T. C. Schulthess, Daniel Ernst, Jack Dongarra
Abstract
HPC and 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 while supporting long-running and performance-sensitive workloads from HPC.