Course Schedule
Being less concrete further out, the course scheduling is tentative and subject to changes.
Introduction
Week 1
- 08/27
Fill out background survey
Week 2
- 09/01
- 09/03
Reading: A Berkeley View on Cloud Computing; Cloudscape [FAST’25]
Team signup due (09/05)
Function-as-a-Service platforms & workloads
Week 3
- 09/08
- 09/10
Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications
On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda
Survey questions: Link
Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms (optional)
Week 4
Cold starts
- 09/17
Concurrency-Informed Orchestration for Serverless Functions
Catalyzer: Sub-millisecond Startup for Serverless Computing with Initialization-less Booting (optional)
Survey questions: Link
Week 5
- 09/22
Serverless Cold Starts and Where to Find Them
SEUSS: skip redundant paths to make serverless fast (optional)
Survey questions: Link
Project Proposal due
- 09/24
SAND: Towards High-Performance Serverless Computing
SOCK: Rapid Task Provisioning with Serverless-Optimized Containers
Survey questions: Link
Stateful serverless computing
Week 6
- 09/29
Faasm: Lightweight Isolation for Efficient Stateful Serverless Computing
NotebookOS: A Replicated Notebook Platform for Interactive Training with On-Demand GPUs
Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service (optional)
Survey questions: Link
- 10/01
Fault-tolerant and transactional stateful serverless workflows
Following the Data, Not the Function: Rethinking Function Orchestration in Serverless Computing
Survey questions: Link
Serverless applications (parallel computing & programming)
Week 7
- 10/06
Occupy the Cloud: Distributed Computing for the 99%
From Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Functional Containers
Survey questions: Link
- 10/08
Shuffling, Fast and Slow: Scalable Analytics on Serverless Infrastructure
Wukong: a scalable and locality-enhanced framework for serverless parallel computing
Survey questions: Link
Week 8
- 10/13
Reading day (no class)
- 10/15
Midterm Project Checkpoint Vibe Coding Day and Project Reflection
Week 9
- 10/20
Encoding, Fast and Slow: Low-Latency Video Processing Using Thousands of Tiny Threads
Towards Demystifying Serverless Machine Learning Training
Survey questions: Link
Sprocket: A Serverless Video Processing Framework (optional)
Lambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data using Serverless Cloud Infrastructure (optional)
Serverless storage
- 10/22
Pocket: Elastic Ephemeral Storage for Serverless Analytics
InfiniCache: Exploiting Ephemeral Serverless Functions to Build a Cost-Effective Memory Cache
Survey questions: Link
Boki: Stateful Serverless Computing with Shared Logs (optional)
Splinter: Bare-Metal Extensions for Multi-Tenant Low-Latency Storage (optional)
Project Checkpoint due
LLM serving
Week 10
- 10/27
Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention
InfiniGen: Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models with Dynamic KV Cache Management
The Ultra-Scale Playbook: Training LLMs on GPU Clusters (optional but highly recommended)
- 10/29
Orca: A Distributed Serving System for Transformer-Based Generative Models
DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving
Week 11
- 11/03
Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve
AlpaServe: Statistical Multiplexing with Model Parallelism for Deep Learning Serving
- 11/05
SpotServe: Serving Generative Large Language Models on Preemptible Instances
Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Up (optional)
Serverless AI
Week 12
- 11/10
ServerlessLLM: Low-Latency Serverless Inference for Large Language Models
- 11/12
Towards Swift Serverless LLM Cold Starts with ParaServe
Week 13
- 11/17
Parrot: Efficient Serving of LLM-based Applications with Semantic Variable
SLoRA: Scalable Serving of Thousands of LoRA Adapters
Punica: Multi-Tenant LoRA Serving (optional)
- 11/19
BlitzScale: Fast and Live Large Model Autoscaling with O(1) Host Caching
PhoenixOS: Concurrent OS-level GPU Checkpoint and Restore with Validated Speculation
Week 14
- 11/24
Hack day (no class)
- 11/26
Thanksgiving recess (no class)
Wrapping up
Week 15
- 12/01
Project presentation I
- 12/03
Project presentation II
Week 16
- 12/08
Project presentation III
- 12/10
Project everything due