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funcX is a distributed Function as a Service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution., NSF 2004894/2004932

A poster about funcX presented at the 2022 ADSA Spring meeting.

A panel presentation in SIAM PP22, in the sessionPD3:Build, Integration and Testing for Sustainable Scientific Computing Software, 25 February 2022.

This deposit contains a preprint of a poster paper, and the poster itself, for "Federated Function as a Service for eScience" as submitted and peer-reviewed by the 17th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2021), presented virtually 22 September 2021. Abstract:The function as a service paradigm aims to abstract the complexities of managing computing infrastructure for users. While adoption in industry has been swift, we have yet to see widespread adoption in academia. This is in part due to barriers such as the need to access large research data, diverse hardware requirements, monolithic code bases, and existing systems available to researchers. We describe funcX, a federated function-as-a-service platform that addresses important requirements for use of FaaS in research computing. We outline how funcX has been used in early science deployments.

Researchers across the globe are seeking to rapidly repurpose existing drugs or discover new drugs to counter the the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). One promising approach is to train machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to screen large numbers of small molecules. As a contribution to that effort, we are aggregating numerous small molecules from a variety of sources, using high-performance computing (HPC) to computer diverse properties of those molecules, using the computed properties to train ML/AI models, and then using the resulting models for screening. In this first data release, we make available 23 datasets collected from community sources representing over 4.2 B molecules enriched with pre-computed: 1) molecular fingerprints to aid similarity searches, 2) 2D images of molecules to enable exploration and application of image-based deep learning methods, and 3) 2D and 3D molecular descriptors to speed development of machine learning models. This data release encompasses structural information on the 4.2 B molecules and 60 TB of pre-computed data. Future releases will expand the data to include more detailed molecular simulations, computed models, and other products., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

Growing data volumes and velocities are driving exciting new methods across the sciences in which data analytics and machine learning are increasingly intertwined with research. These new methods require new approaches for scientific computing in which computation is mobile, so that, for example, it can occur near data, be triggered by events (e.g., arrival of new data), or be offloaded to specialized accelerators. They also require new design approaches in which monolithic applications can be decomposed into smaller components, that may in turn be executed separately and on the most efficient resources. To address these needs we propose funcX---a high-performance function-as-a-service (FaaS) platform that enables intuitive, flexible, efficient, scalable, and performant remote function execution on existing infrastructure including clouds, clusters, and supercomputers. It allows users to register and then execute Python functions without regard for the physical resource location, scheduler architecture, or virtualization technology on which the function is executed---an approach we refer to as "serverless supercomputing." We motivate the need for funcX in science, describe our prototype implementation, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can process millions of functions across more than 65000 concurrent workers. We also outline five scientific scenarios in which funcX has been deployed and highlight the benefits of funcX in these scenarios.