Combining Serverless and High-Performance Computing Paradigms to support ML Data-Intensive Applications

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Main Authors: Staylor, Mills, Sarker, Arup Kumar, von Laszewski, Gregor, Fox, Geoffrey, Cheng, Yue, Fox, Judy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Staylor, Mills
Sarker, Arup Kumar
von Laszewski, Gregor
Fox, Geoffrey
Cheng, Yue
Fox, Judy
author_facet Staylor, Mills
Sarker, Arup Kumar
von Laszewski, Gregor
Fox, Geoffrey
Cheng, Yue
Fox, Judy
contents Data is found everywhere, from health and human infrastructure to the surge of sensors and the proliferation of internet-connected devices. To meet this challenge, the data engineering field has expanded significantly in recent years in both research and industry. Traditionally, data engineering, Machine Learning, and AI workloads have been run on large clusters within data center environments, requiring substantial investment in hardware and maintenance. With the rise of the public cloud, it is now possible to run large applications across nodes without owning or maintaining hardware. Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda provide horizontal scaling and precise billing without the hassle of managing traditional cloud infrastructure. However, when processing large datasets, users often rely on external storage options that are significantly slower than direct communication typical of HPC clusters. We introduce Cylon, a high-performance distributed data frame solution that has shown promising results for data processing using Python. We describe how we took inspiration from the FMI library and designed a serverless communicator to tackle communication and performance issues associated with serverless functions. With our design, we demonstrate that the scaling efficiency of AWS Lambda achieves within 6.5% of serverful AWS (EC2) at 64 nodes, based on implementing direct communication via NAT Traversal TCP Hole Punching.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12185
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Combining Serverless and High-Performance Computing Paradigms to support ML Data-Intensive Applications
Staylor, Mills
Sarker, Arup Kumar
von Laszewski, Gregor
Fox, Geoffrey
Cheng, Yue
Fox, Judy
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
H.2.4, D.2.7, D.2.2
Data is found everywhere, from health and human infrastructure to the surge of sensors and the proliferation of internet-connected devices. To meet this challenge, the data engineering field has expanded significantly in recent years in both research and industry. Traditionally, data engineering, Machine Learning, and AI workloads have been run on large clusters within data center environments, requiring substantial investment in hardware and maintenance. With the rise of the public cloud, it is now possible to run large applications across nodes without owning or maintaining hardware. Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda provide horizontal scaling and precise billing without the hassle of managing traditional cloud infrastructure. However, when processing large datasets, users often rely on external storage options that are significantly slower than direct communication typical of HPC clusters. We introduce Cylon, a high-performance distributed data frame solution that has shown promising results for data processing using Python. We describe how we took inspiration from the FMI library and designed a serverless communicator to tackle communication and performance issues associated with serverless functions. With our design, we demonstrate that the scaling efficiency of AWS Lambda achieves within 6.5% of serverful AWS (EC2) at 64 nodes, based on implementing direct communication via NAT Traversal TCP Hole Punching.
title Combining Serverless and High-Performance Computing Paradigms to support ML Data-Intensive Applications
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
H.2.4, D.2.7, D.2.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12185