[hpc-announce] Special Issue - Serverless Edge Computing - Future Generation Computer Systems

[Luiz F. Bittencourt]

Dear Colleagues,

we would like to invite you to contribute a paper to the Special Issue
on “Serverless Computing in the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum”, which is
hosted by Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS).


Motivation and Scope
Serverless computing is a novel paradigm for the operation of
next-generation cloud data centers. Serverless applications are
developed as an ecosystem of microservices – called functions – which
are loosely coupled and highly scalable. Each function is instantiated
in a set of stateless and equivalent containers. As a result,
consecutive invocations of a function from a user can reach different
containers, and a container can serve different users. Furthermore,
serverless enables a pure pay-per-use pricing model such that users
pay for the consumed resources rather than for the allocated ones.

At the same time, edge computing complements the cloud by pervasively
deploying compute nodes over a continuum from the cloud to the network
edge, where user devices are. This proximity to the final users paves
the way to a plethora of emerging applications (e.g., Internet of
Things, Augmented/Virtual Reality, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks) having
stringent requirements such as low latency, high throughput, and
context awareness.

An urgent question is how to extend serverless technologies from cloud
data centers to the Cloud-to-Edge continuum. On the one hand,
serverless opens plenty of opportunities at the edge. For example, it
saves energy and compute resources, which can be limited on edge
nodes, by letting users share containers and by automatically
deallocating containers after a period of idleness (i.e.,
scale-to-zero). On the other hand, however, adopting serverless at the
edge raises several challenges, which are due to the gap between the
cloud-oriented design of serverless and the peculiar characteristics
of edge systems. Some of the research questions in the field are: the
management of the state of functions; the mitigation of the cold-start
effect caused by scaling-to-zero; the execution of long-running
workloads such as federated learning; the adaptability of serverless
to the wide-area distribution of edge networks and to the
heterogeneity of edge nodes.

This special issue aims at bringing together new ideas, latest
findings, and novel results from researchers and practitioners working
on this research area. Topics of interest include, but are not limited
to, the following:
● Serverless computing in architectures spanning the Cloud-to-Edge continuum
● Protocols and algorithms for serverless computing in wide-area networks
● Integration of serverless computing with edge standards (e.g., ETSI
MEC, 5G/6G)
● Machine Learning in/for serverless-operated cloud-edge systems
● Energy efficiency of serverless in edge computing infrastructures
● Economical study on serverless in edge computing systems
● Development and testing of serverless-operated edge computing platforms
● Performance evaluation of serverless computing at the network edge,
by means of simulation or experiments on real testbeds


Guest Editors
● Carlo Puliafito, University of Pisa, Italy, carlo.puliafito at unipi.it
● Omer F. Rana, Cardiff University, UK, ranaof at cardiff.ac.uk
● Luiz F. Bittencourt, University of Campinas, Brazil, bit at ic.unicamp.br
● Hao Wu, Beijing Normal University, China, 11112018008 at bnu.edu.cn


Important Dates
● Submission portal opens: January 10, 2023
● Deadline for paper submission: July 15, 2023
● Latest acceptance deadline for all papers: November 15, 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 10, 2023. When
submitting your manuscript please select the article type VSI:
Serverless_edge.
All submissions deemed suitable by the editors to be sent for peer
review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Once
your manuscript is accepted, it will go into production to be
published in the special issue.


Best regards,
The Guest Editors