[hpc-announce] [CFP] [FGCS] Special Issue on Serverless Computing for Next-generation Application Development

[Adel N. Toosi]

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Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite researchers, practitioners, and experts in the
field of serverless computing to contribute to our special issue on
"Serverless Computing for Next-generation Application Development" featured
in the esteemed journal of Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS).

An online copy of this Call for Papers can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/monash.edu/fgcs-serverless-next-gen/home

Motivation and Scope
Serverless computing is a new paradigm for developing, deploying, and
operating cloud applications. It is a step towards greater abstraction of
virtualization technology, from bare metal to virtual machines, containers,
and now Functions as a Service (FaaS). Serverless computing reduces
complexity for the user by outsourcing infrastructure and operational
measures to the service provider, offering high agility and lower cost in
application development without the need for operational expertise.
Functions in Serverless computing are typically event-driven and can be
triggered by various types of events, such as a change in a data source, an
HTTP request, a message being added to a queue, or a record being inserted
in a database. With Serverless, users only pay for the resources they
consume, rather than having to provision and pay for resources in advance.

Despite its commercial success and benefits, there are many open research
challenges in serverless computing, such as handling state for ephemeral
functions, cold start, function composition, debugging and monitoring,
efficient auto-scaling and resource management, and security and
compliance. Other outstanding issues include utilizing serverless on
heterogeneous hardware/software and throughout the edge-to-cloud continuum
or over dynamic networks. While serverless has been successfully applied to
a wide range of application domains such as web and mobile backends, IoT,
and data processing, it is anticipated to help scale HPC and
High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), facilitate the adoption of AI/ML/DL
techniques and be used for Big Data processing, among others. The
development of these applications brings new challenges specific to these
domains that necessitate the advancement of serverless technology and
prompt attention. This special issue aims to promote high-quality research
on recent serverless computing advances to support existing and emerging
applications and to inspire related research efforts.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Serverless/FaaS computing patterns and composition languages
- Function-as-a-service (FaaS) chaining
- Serverless frameworks, platforms, and tools
- Serverless computing services and FaaS application development methods
- Methods for distributed serverless computing
- Serverless/FaaS computing in edge, fog, and cloud architectures
- Autoscaling techniques for serverless/FaaS computing platforms
- Resource scheduling and management for serverless computing platforms
- Networking Protocols and software-defined networking techniques for
serverless/FaaS
- Serverless computing in wireless domains such as Adhoc and Mobile
networks, 5G/6G/beyond, etc
- In-Network Serverless Computing
- Serverless and FaaS for Big data applications
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with/for serverless computing
- Benchmarking suite and tools for performance evaluation of serverless
applications
- Performance evaluation of serverless computing frameworks
- Performance models for serverless execution models
- Modeling, analysis, and simulation of serverless computing
- Prototypes and real-life experiments involving serverless computing
- Existing and emerging serverless applications with high societal impact
- Viewpoints, visions, survey papers and community views on serverless
computing

Guest Editors
Adel N. Toosi Monash University, Australia. adel.n.toosi at monash.edu
Alexandru Iosup, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. a.Iosup at vu.nl
Bahman Javadi, Western Sydney University, Australia.
b.javadi at westernsydney.edu.au
Evgenia Smirni, William and Mary, USA. esmirni at cs.wm.edu
Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria. dustdar at dsg.tuwien.ac.at

Important Dates
- Submission portal opens: January 30, 2023
- Deadline for paper submission: June 30, 2023
- Latest acceptance deadline for all papers: November 1, 2023

Manuscript Submission Instructions
The FGCS’s submission system (
https://www.editorialmanager.com/FGCS/default.aspx) will be open for
submissions to our Special Issue from January 30, 2023.

Kindly note that there is another ongoing special issue in FGCS that covers
the topic of "Serverless Computing in the Cloud-Edge Continuum". When
submitting your manuscript to our special issue, please ensure to select
the appropriate article type, "VSI: Serverless next-gen" to avoid any
confusion or delay.

By submitting your paper as early as possible, you will receive a faster
decision on your submission as we begin processing it immediately upon
receipt of your manuscript.

Best regards,
The Guest Editors
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