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Explore a groundbreaking serverless computing paradigm through this 16-minute conference presentation from USENIX ATC '25. Learn about burst computing, an innovative solution specifically designed for burst-parallel jobs that overcomes the limitations of traditional Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) architectures. Discover how researchers from Universitat Rovira i Virgili and Barcelona Supercomputing Center developed a novel group invocation primitive that enables job-level isolation and launches large groups of workers with guaranteed simultaneity. Understand the resource allocation optimizations that pack workers into fewer containers, accelerating initialization and enabling locality benefits. Examine how this locality significantly reduces remote communication compared to FaaS systems and enables synchronous worker communication through message passing and group collectives, making previously unfeasible applications possible in serverless environments. Gain insights into the implementation built atop OpenWhisk and the communication middleware that leverages locality with zero-copy messaging. Review comprehensive evaluation results demonstrating reduced job invocation and communication latency, including a 2× speed-up in TeraSort and an impressive 98.5% reduction in remote communication for PageRank with a 13× speed-up compared to standard FaaS implementations.
