WORDS 2021

The 2nd Workshop on Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS’21)
Virtual, Co-located with ASPLOS’21

Submissions Due: Feb 22, 2021

Welcome to the Second Workshop On Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS 2021)!

Recent hardware developments and application trends are challenging the long-standing data-center architecture where a server is the unit of deployment, operation, and failure and the cloud infrastructure where VMs or containers are the unit of cloud services. In response, two ideas have gained huge traction recently: resource disaggregation and serverless computing. Resource disaggregation breaks a computer server (either physically or virtually) into fine-grained, network-accessed hardware resource units that can be shared by different applications. Serverless computing eschews “servers” by allowing users to directly deploy fine-grained programs (or “serverless functions”) that are triggered by external events.

With the natural synergy and importance of these two topics, the 2nd Workshop on Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS’21) will build on the success of the 1st Workshop on Resource Disaggregation (WORD’19) by including the area of serverless computing. WORDS’21 will bring together researchers and practitioners in hardware, software, networking, programming language, and application domains to engage in a lively discussion on a wide range of topics in the broad definition of resource disaggregation and serverless computing.

Call for Papers

We solicit both position papers that explore new challenges and design spaces and short papers that include completed or early-stage work.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Hardware design for resource disaggregation and serverless computing
• Network design for resource disaggregation and serverless computing
• Programming models for resource disaggregation and serverless computing
• Serverless and disaggregation workloads and applications
• Scheduling problems in resource disaggregation and serverless computing
• Integration of resource disaggregation and serverless computing
• Disaggregated and remote memory/storage
• Resource management of disaggregated cluster
• Execution environments for serverless computing
• Novel application of the serverless computing model to other domains
• Deployment of disaggregated cluster
• Virtualization of disaggregated hardware
• Billing models for serverless computing

Research and position paper submissions must be no longer than 5 pages including figures and tables, plus as many pages as needed for references. Text should be formatted in two columns on 8.5×11-inch paper using 10-point Times-Roman font on 12-point (single-spaced) leading, 1-inch margins, and a 0.25-inch gutter (separation between the columns). Submissions will be double blind, though authors are allowed to post their paper on arXiv or other public forums.

We encourage researchers from all institutions to submit their work for review. Preliminary results of interesting ideas and work-in-progress are welcome. A paper accepted to WORDS would not preclude its future publication in a major conference. Submissions that are likely to generate vigorous discussion will be favored!

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: Feb 22, 2021
• Notification: March 24, 2021
• Final version due: April 13, 2021
• Workshop date: April 15, 2021

Program Chairs

• Yiying Zhang – University of California, San Diego
• Harry Xu – University of California, Los Angeles