2nd *LESS workshop @ PerCom 2023

March 13th, 2023. Student center of Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The 2nd workshop on Serverless computing for pervasive cloud-edge-device systems and services, a.k.a. *LESS, was held, co-located with the 2023 edition of the top-rated IEEE conference on pervasive computing and communications (PerCom).

The room was full of attendees and the interaction between the speakers and the audience was excellent throughout the event.

The workshop started with the keynote speech by Gregor Schiele (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany) on The Elastic AI Ecosystem – Towards A Holistic Pervasive System for Adaptive Artificial Intelligence. In his speech, Gregor offered the audience a unique perspective from the point of view of designers of hardware platforms for embedded AI. He also brought along samples of the integrated board they manufacture, with microcontroller (for management, communications, and simple computations) + FPGA (for heavy-weight AI inference tasks). Additionally, he illustrated the innovative software layer developed, which allows a dynamic time sharing of the FPGA for use with multiple applications and intelligent system-wide orchestration.

After the keynote, Gabriele Russo Russo (Università Roma Tre, Italy) gave the audience a spoiler of his work Serverledge: Decentralized Function-as-a-Service for the Edge-Cloud Continuum, which he would present in the main conference program. We called this a meet-the-author session, which has been greatly appreciated by the audience, who made several insightful questions on Gabriele's research activity and perspectives in this area, which is maximally relevant to the workshop topics.

After a coffee break, during which we entertained many animated discussions, the second session began, with three technical presentations of papers accepted from the workshop open call for contributions.

The first one was Measuring the Edge: A Performance Evaluation of Edge Offloading, authored by Heiko Bornholdt and Kevin R?bert (Universit?t Hamburg, Germany), Martin Breitbach (University of Mannheim, Germany), and Mathias Fischer and Janick Edinger (Universit?t Hamburg, Germany). The paper was presented by Heiko, who illustrated the research activities carried out to measure the cost of the network in computation offloading, in terms of performance, for different types of access networks and configurations.

The second paper was OS3: The Art and the Practice of Searching for Open-Source Serverless Functions, co-authored by Sarvesh Bhatnagar and Zhengquan Li (University of Michigan- Dearborn, USA), Zheng Song (University of Michigan at Dearborn, USA), and Eli Tilevich (Virginia Tech, USA), presented by the latter. Eli informed the audience of the too-often-neglected issue of open source software licensing and code search, within the context of serverless and edge computing.

Last but not least, the paper Reducing the Cost of GPU Cold Starts in Serverless Deep Learning Inference Serving, co-authored by Justin San Juan and Bernard Wong (University of Waterloo, Canada), was presented by Justin. He explained the problem of cold-start, which affects severely FaaS platforms, and possible solutions to overcome the problem in the case of AI inference done with GPUs.

Before concluding the workshop, a mini town hall meeting was held. The audience was encouraged to express their feeling and opinions on the event. Generally, it was agreed that the topic of serverless computing at the edge is hot and timely within the PerCom community, as well as more broadly in the research community. The high level of interaction was praised by many, and in fact, it was suggested that in the next edition, this should be pursued even more by creating dedicated interactive sessions such as open round tables (where all the attendees are the panelists!).

The organizers of *LESS 2023 thank all the authors, speakers, and attendees and they are looking forward to meeting them again, with new friends, at the 3rd edition of the workshop next year!

Claudio Cicconetti (IIT-CNR, Italy)

Pablo Serrano (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)

Adel N Toosi (Monash University, Australia)

Stay tuned and follow us on the *LESS website!