F3: An FPGA-accelerated FaaS Framework

FPGAs offer programmable, energy-efficient acceleration attractive for serverless workloads, but their low-level APIs, lack of virtualization/isolation, high reconfiguration and communication overheads, and absence of orchestration contradict the serverless model. F3 is the first system enabling efficient and secure use of FPGAs to accelerate serverless functions, letting functions offload tasks without low-level device management while providing isolation, high throughput, and low latency. It achieves this via a high-level hardware-agnostic API, unikernel-based FPGA virtualization for function isolation, a per-node FPGA resource manager to cut cold starts and communication overhead, and an FPGA-aware orchestrator; the open-source prototype builds on OpenFaaS, Kubernetes, and containerd (CRI/OCI), and shows significant latency and throughput improvements on real workloads, microbenchmarks, and Azure production traces.