WORDS 2023

The Fourth Workshop On Resource Disaggregation and Serverless Computing

October 23, 2023

Koblenz, Germany (held with SOSP 2023)

Recent hardware developments and application trends are challenging the long-standing server-centric data-center architecture. Two ideas have gained huge traction recently: resource disaggregation and serverless computing. Resource disaggregation breaks a computer server (either physically or virtually) into fine-grained, network-attached hardware resource units that can be shared by different applications. Serverless computing eschews "servers" by allowing users to directly deploy fine-grained programs ("serverless functions") that are triggered by external events. 

With the natural synergy and importance of these two topics, the 4th Workshop on Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS 2023), to be held in conjunction with the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2023), will bring together researchers and practitioners in operating systems, distributed systems, data-center networking, computer architecture, programming language, and domain-specific applications to engage in a lively discussion on a wide range of topics in the broad topicsv of resource disaggregation and serverless computing.

Accepted Papers

Enabling In-Vitro Serverless Systems Research, Dmitrii Ustiugov (Nanyang Technological University); Dohyun Park (Korea University); Lazar Cvetković (ETH Zürich); Mihajlo Djokic, Hongyu Hè (ETH Zurich); Boris Grot (University of Edinburgh); Ana Klimovic (ETH Zurich)

𝜇: A bolt-on approach for faster and cheaper serverless computing, Diogo Pacheco, João Pedro Barreto, Rodrigo Rodrigues (Instituto Superior Técnico (ULisboa) / INESC-ID)

Towards Efficient Hugepage-aware Memory Deduplication, Ruizhe Huang, Ding Li, Yao Guo, Xiangqun Chen (Peking University); Yuntao Liu (Huawei); Yuxin Ren (Huawei Technologies); Ning Jia (Huawei Group); Xinwei Hu (Huawei)

The Neglected Cost of Serverless Cluster Management, Lazar Cvetković (ETH Zurich); Rodrigo Fonseca (Microsoft); Ana Klimovic (ETH Zurich)

Aurelia: CXL Fabric with Tentacle, Kevin Wang (UC San Diego); Weitao Wang (Rice University)

Limited Access: The Truth Behind Far Memory, Anil Yelam, Stewart Grant (UC San Diego); Enze Liu (University of California, San Diego); Radhika Niranjan Mysore (VMWare Research); Marcos K. Aguilera (VMware Research); Amy Ousterhout (UC San Diego); Alex C. Snoeren (UC San Diego / Google)

Evicting for the greater good: The case for Reactive Checkpointing in serverless computing, Rafael Alexandre, Rodrigo Bruno, Rodrigo Rodrigues, João Pedro Barreto (IST (ULisboa) / INESC-ID)

Rendezvous: Where Serverless Functions Find Consistency, Mafalda Sofia Ferreira, João Loff, João Garcia (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa)

Call For Papers

We solicit three types of papers: position papers that explore new challenges and design spaces, short papers that describe completed or early-stage work, and abstracts that summarize works published in the past two years.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

Position and short paper submissions must be no longer than 5 pages including figures and tables, plus as many pages as needed for references. Abstracts of published works must be no longer than 2 pages, excluding references. Text should be formatted in two columns on 8.5x11-inch paper using 10-point Times-Roman font on 12-point (single-spaced) leading, 1-inch margins, and a 0.25-inch gutter (separation between the columns). New submissions must be double-blind. Abstracts of published works must be single-blind. Authors are allowed to post their papers on arXiv or other public forums.


We encourage researchers from all institutions to submit their work for review. Preliminary results of interesting ideas and work-in-progress are welcome. A paper accepted to WORDS would not preclude its future publication at a major conference. Accepted papers will have the option to be included in ACM proceedings. Submissions that are likely to generate vigorous discussion will be favored!

Important Dates

Organization Committee

Program Chairs

Program Committee