The cloud evolved into an attractive execution environment for parallel applications, which make use of compute resources to speed up the computation of large problems in science and industry. Whereas Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings have been commonly employed, more recently, serverless computing emerged as a novel cloud computing paradigm with the goal of freeing developers from resource management issues. However, as of today, serverless computing platforms are mainly used to process computations triggered by events or user requests that can be executed independently of each other and benefit from on-demand and elastic compute resources as well as per-function billing. In this work, we discuss how to employ serverless computing platforms to operate parallel applications. We specifically focus on the class of parallel task farming applications and introduce a novel approach to free developers from both parallelism and resource management issues. Our approach includes a proactive elasticity controller that adapts the physical parallelism per application run according to user-defined goals. Specifically, we show how to consider a user-defined execution time limit after which the result of the computation needs to be present while minimizing the associated monetary costs. To evaluate our concepts, we present a prototypical elastic parallel system architecture for self-tuning serverless task farming and implement two applications based on our framework. Moreover, we report on performance measurements for both applications as well as the prediction accuracy of the proposed proactive elasticity control mechanism and discuss our key findings.

云已经发展成为一个吸引人的并行应用执行环境，该环境利用计算资源来加快科学和工业中重大问题的计算速度。尽管普遍采用了基础架构即服务（IaaS）产品，但是最近，无服务器计算已成为一种新颖的云计算范例，其目标是使开发人员摆脱资源管理问题。但是，到目前为止，无服务器计算平台主要用于处理由事件或用户请求触发的计算，这些事件或用户请求可以彼此独立执行，并受益于按需和弹性计算资源以及按功能计费。在这项工作中，我们讨论如何使用无服务器计算平台来操作并行应用程序。我们特别关注并行任务耕作应用程序的类别，并介绍一种新颖的方法来使开发人员摆脱并行性和资源管理问题。我们的方法包括一个主动弹性控制器，该控制器根据用户定义的目标调整每个应用程序运行的物理并行度。具体来说，我们展示了如何考虑用户定义的执行时间限制，在此之后需要显示计算结果，同时最大程度地降低相关的货币成本。为了评估我们的概念，我们提出了一种用于自动调整无服务器任务耕作的原型弹性并行系统架构，并基于我们的框架实现了两个应用程序。此外，