Serverless? RISC more!

The growth of serverless computing has led to a widespread reexamination of the cloud software upon which it is based. In parallel, the flattening of single core performance has led to a resurgence of interest in manycore systems, trading absolute performance for system throughput, an appropriate match for the serverless paradigm. However, the combination of deep cloud system software stacks and slow hardware simulation techniques has limited the exploration of serverless-native CPUs. We argue that the RISC-V ecosystem offers an opportunity to tackle the intersection of these topics. We present an exploratory comparison of several RISC-V SoC configurations and commercial products running serverless workloads. We find that the RISC-V cores offer reasonable performance, but more importantly provide researchers the ability to run more realistic software workloads. This allows for meaningful exploration of the interactions between system software, serverless workloads, and specialized hardware.