ƒuncX is a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. Unlike centralized FaaS systems, ƒuncX decouples the cloud-hosted management functionality from the edge-hosted execution functionality. ƒuncX's endpoint software can be deployed, by users or administrators, on arbitrary laptops, clouds, clusters, and supercomputers, in effect turning them into function serving systems. ƒuncX's cloud-hosted service provides a single location for registering, sharing, and managing both functions and endpoints. It allows for transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across the federated ecosystem of endpoints—enabling users to route functions to endpoints based on specific needs. ƒuncX uses containers (e.g., Docker, Singularity, and Shifter) to provide common execution environments across endpoints. ƒuncX implements various container management strategies to execute functions with high performance and efficiency on diverse ƒuncX endpoints. ƒuncX also integrates with an in-memory data store and Globus for managing data that may span endpoints. We motivate the need for ƒuncX, present our prototype design and implementation, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that ƒuncX can scale to more than 130000 concurrent workers. We show that ƒuncX's container warming-aware routing algorithm can reduce the completion time for 3,000 functions by up to 61% compared to a randomized algorithm and the in-memory data store can speed up data transfers by up to 3x compared to a shared file system.

The function as a service paradigm aims to abstract the complexities of managing computing infrastructure for users. While adoption in industry has been swift, we have yet to see widespread adoption in academia. This is in part due to barriers such as the need to access large research data, diverse hardware requirements, monolithic code bases, and existing systems available to researchers. We describe funcX, a federated functionas-a-service platform that addresses important requirements for use of FaaS in research computing. We outline how funcX has been used in early science deployments.