Cppless: Single-Source and High-Performance Serverless Programming in C++

The rise of serverless computing introduced a new class of scalable, elastic and widely available parallel workers in the cloud. Many systems and applications benefit from offloading computations and parallel tasks to dynamically allocated resources. However, the developers of C++ applications find it difficult to integrate functions due to complex deployment, lack of compatibility between client and cloud environments, and loosely typed input and output data. To enable single-source and efficient serverless acceleration in C++, we introduce Cppless, an end-to-end framework for implementing remote functions which handles the creation, deployment, and invocation of serverless functions. Cppless is built on top of LLVM and requires only two compiler extensions to automatically extract C++ function objects and deploy them to the cloud. We demonstrate that offloading parallel computations, such as from a C++ application to serverless workers, can provide up to 59x speedup with minimal cost increase while requiring only minor code modifications.