RHINO: An Efficient Serverless Container System for Small-Scale HPC Applications

Serverless computing, characterized by its pay-as-you-go and auto-scaling features, offers a promising alternative for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, as traditional HPC clusters often face long waiting times and resources over/under-provisioning. However, current serverless platforms struggle to support HPC applications due to restricted inter-function communication and high coupling runtime. To address these issues, we introduce RHINO, which offers end-to-end support for the development and deployment of serverless HPC. Using the Two-Step Adaptive Build strategy, the HPC code is packaged into lightweight, scalable functions. The Rhino Function Execution Model decouples HPC applications from the underlying infrastructures. The Auto-scaling Engine dynamically scales cloud resources and schedules tasks based on performance and cost requirements. We deploy RHINO on AWS Fargate and evaluate it on both benchmarks and real-world workloads. Experimental results show that, when compared to the traditional VM clusters, RHINO can achieve a performance improvement of 10% –30% for small-scale applications and more than 40% cost reduction.