[hpc-announce] First workshop on "Serverless computing for pervasive cloud-edge-device systems and services" (*LESS)

[Adel N. Toosi]

We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this email
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The first workshop on "Serverless computing for pervasive cloud-edge-device
systems and services" (*LESS) to be hosted together with the next
PerCom (March 21-25, 2022 - Pisa, Italy).

*LESS is a unique opportunity to challenge the current serverless
design and platforms with issues specific to decentralized and
pervasive systems, applications, and services.

The workshop will help to raise awareness on serverless and
FaaS in the PerCom community and attract serverless experts from
the networking, virtualization, and cloud computing scientific
areas.

--> Please SUBMIT your max 6-page paper by November 14, 2021.

The full call for papers below.

Stay tuned at: https://starless.iit.cnr.it/

Best regards,
Claudio Cicconetti, Pablo Serrano, & Adel N. Toosi
*LESS'22 organizers

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Complete call-for-papers
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Despite the commercial success, there are several open research
challenges in the area of serverless/FaaS such as, the handling of
stateful functions, support for function composition patterns beyond
simple chaining, how to exploit data locality, or the mitigation
of cold-start effects.

Furthermore, the rise in popularity of serverless/FaaS has led many
researchers in the community to wonder whether this concept can be
applied also outside of cloud computing. Internet of Things (IoT)
applications could benefit from the FaaS programming model, but
they are usually deployed on edge systems, which adds several
challenges: there is no single entry point for all function
invocations, hardware-software configurations are heterogeneous,
or the mapping of advanced AI patterns (e.g. federated learning)
is unclear.

*LESS ‘22 solicits research contributions in the following areas:

+ Pervasive applications and services. Serverless is becoming the
de facto standard for deploying new mobile applications, but the
opportunities that can be unlocked by this paradigm in relation to
pervasive applications and services have not yet been fully explored.

+ Pervasive deployments. The application of serverless to edge
systems and opportunistic computing on user devices is a thriving
research area, which may enable new applications that today cannot
be realized or boost the adoption of applications that today have
scalability issues with traditional tools.

+ Distributed computing. The FaaS programming model is a powerful
abstraction, which already today fits many applications of business
interest. It is, however, unclear whether the abstraction is
sufficient for most or all pervasive applications relying on some
form of distributed computing (e.g., management of the state of
functions).

+ Pervasive networking. Serverless platforms rely on an underlying
abstraction of the network, which is designed and optimised for
relatively small data transfers, but pervasive applications and
systems may be more data-intensive.

+ Pervasive analytics. Many pervasive applications rely on AI/ML
for automated detection and decision-making. The role of serverless
and FaaS in this domain has not been defined yet, even though they
can promise significant benefits in terms of simpler management and
automatic scaling.

+ Energy Efficiency. The stateless, event-driven, and distributed
mindset triggered by serverless could make it suitable for the
adoption in edge computing, where low-power hardware and energy
harvesting technologies are key enablers for scenarios such as
remote areas.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Specific topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- Serverless comp. in edge, fog, and cloud architectures
- Serverless comp. for pervasive systems, apps, and services
- Protocols for distributed serverless comp.
- Serverless comp. in emerging communication patterns (6G)
- Function-as-a-service (FaaS) for pervasive applications
- AI and ML with/for serverless comp.
- Perf. eval. of serverless comp. in pervasive scenarios
- Modelling, analysis, and simulation of pervasive systems using serverless
comp.
- Prototypes and real-life experiments involving serverless comp.
  for pervasive systems
- Technical-economic analysis of serverless/FaaS for pervasive comp.
business cases

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission due:             November 14, 2021
Notification of acceptance: January   5, 2022
Camera-ready due:           February  5, 2022
Workshop date:              March 21 or March 25, 2022 [TBD]

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Papers must be in PDF format and contain 6 pages maximum (including
references), but also shorter submissions are welcome. Papers should
contain names and affiliations of the authors (not blinded). All
papers must be typeset in double-column IEEE format using 10pt fonts
on US letter paper, with all fonts embedded. Submissions must be
made via EDAS (link to be announced). The IEEE LaTeX and Microsoft
Word templates, as well as related information, can be found at the
IEEE Computer Society website.

*LESS will be held in conjunction with IEEE Percom 2022. All accepted
papers will be included in the Percom workshops proceedings and
included and indexed in the IEEE digital library Xplore. At least
one author will be required to have a full registration in the
Percom 2022 conference and present the paper during the workshop
(either remotely or in location).
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