fmi, serverless collectives

high-performance message passing and collective communication

While serverless functions provide high scalability and elastic resource management, the lack of fast and cheap communication is a major limitation of applying serverless computing to distributed applications. Without direct communication and group operations, functions must use cloud storage, resulting in cost and performance overheads.

Function Message Interface: an MPI-like interface for many channels of inter-function communication.

FaaS Message Interface (FMI) overcomes these limitations by offering and high-performance framework for general-purpose peer-to-peer and collective communication in FaaS applications. FMI provides portable communication with performance closer to that offered by high-performance systems.

The system implementation is available on an open-source license - try it today! It supports AWS Lambda, and support for other cloud platforms is coming in the future.