An approach to provide serverless scientific pipelines within the context of SKA
share
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a type of serverless computing that allows developers to write and deploy code as individual functions, which can be triggered by specific events or requests. FaaS platforms automatically manage the underlying infrastructure, scaling it up or down as needed, being highly scalable, cost-effective and offering a high level of abstraction. Prototypes being developed within the SKA Regional Center Network (SRCNet) are exploring models for data distribution, software delivery and distributed computing with the goal of moving and executing computation to where the data is. Since SKA will be the largest data producer on the planet, it will be necessary to distribute this massive volume of data to the SRCNet nodes that will serve as a hub for computing and analysis operations on the closest data. Within this context, in this work we want to validate the feasibility of designing and deploying functions and applications commonly used in radio interferometry workflows within a FaaS platform to demonstrate the value of this computing model as an alternative to explore for data processing in the distributed nodes of the SRCNet. We have analyzed several FaaS platforms and successfully deployed one of them, where we have imported several functions using two different methods: microfunctions from the CASA framework, which are written in Python code, and highly specific native applications like wsclean. Therefore, we have designed a simple catalogue that can be easily scaled to provide all the key features of FaaS in highly distributed environments using orchestrators, as well as having the ability to integrate them with workflows or APIs. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the potential of FaaS models for scientific data processing, particularly in the context of large-scale, distributed projects such as SKA.
READ FULL TEXT