Gillis: Serving Large Neural Networks in Serverless Functions with Automatic Model Partitioning

The increased use of deep neural networks has stimulated the growing demand for cloud-based model serving platforms. Serverless computing offers a simplified solution: users deploy models as serverless functions and let the platform handle provisioning and scaling. However, serverless functions have constrained resources in CPU and memory, making them inefficient or infeasible to serve large neural networks-which have become increasingly popular. In this paper, we present Gillis, a serverless-based model serving system that automatically partitions a large model across multiple serverless functions for faster inference and reduced memory footprint per function. Gillis employs two novel model partitioning algorithms that respectively achieve latency-optimal serving and cost-optimal serving with SLO compliance. We have implemented Gillis on three serverless platforms-AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and KNIX-with MXNet as the serving backend. Experimental evaluations against popular models show that Gillis supports serving very large neural networks, reduces the inference latency substantially, and meets various SLOs with a low serving cost.