Nicolaas Kaashoek will present his General Exam "RADICAL Serverless" on May 16, 2023 at 1pm in CS 301. The members of his committee are as follows: Wyatt Lloyd (adviser), Amit Levy, and Mike Freedman Links to Abstract and Reading list below: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1axoXIJtRm70Og4sHIWANJFKzqk1xOYsAkxW8X8Zi... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-xgMy9BvoJ8Rwb7tLwGH_92X_EfUk0vRZifPUlJo... Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Abstract: The serverless, or functions-as-a-service (FAAS), cloud computing execution model has proven a useful tool for running computations efficiently in the cloud. Serverless functions scale on demand, can be run either in a data center or at the edge, and use available resources more efficiently than a virtual machine. However, serverless cannot support many workloads that could take advantage of these properties because the functions are stateless. Simply adding storage to serverless to make it stateful is not sufficient either, as it can impose a heavy performance cost. In this talk, I will present my work towards building a more flexible, stateful serverless execution environment: RADICAL serverless. RADICAL serverless functions can run anywhere with durability, consistency, and low latency. RADICAL is able to deliver on its promise by simultaneously executing functions in both a local (closer to the user) context to provide low latency, and a remote context that has access to consistent, durable storage. This combination allows RADICAL to, through the use of read-set extraction and speculative execution, get the best of both worlds.