Recently, the ACM Conference on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS’20) announced on its official website that two papers from Ant Financial were selected.

It is reported that this is the first time ant Financial attended the conference. The two selected papers revolve around confidential computing and Serverless cold start optimization, indicating that the research and practice in related fields are recognized by the academic community.

The ACM Conference on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS’20) is the premier academic conference in the field of programming languages and operating systems. This year’s conference will be held March 16-20, 2020.

One of the papers selected by Ant Financial was “Occlum: Secure and Efficient MultitaskingInside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX, in which Ant employee Tian Hongliang and research intern Shen Visitors are co-first authors of equal contribution. Occlum is a secret computing LibOS developed by ant Financial systems’ Security Computing team. In contrast to the operating system kernel, Occlum LibOS provides system services for trusted applications in the SGX (or other TEE) Enclave, allowing applications to run in the Enclave without fragmentation or modification. Occlum supports existing large applications, such as XGBoost, TensorFlow, OpenVINO and other ARTIFICIAL intelligence frameworks, as well as server applications, such as Shell, GCC, LLVM, and WebServer. Occlum is now in the implementation of several businesses in Ant and Ali economy.

See the Occlum open source project for details:

Github.com/occlum/occl…

Another selected paper was “Catalyzer: sub-millisecond Startup for Serverless Computing withInitialization-less Booting”, written by ant financial research intern tianyi yu and others. This paper introduces the ultimate optimization of service startup delay in Serverless scenarios. Cold start delay is the current technical difficulty of Serverless technology. Ant Financial, together with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has deeply reformed the operating system kernel based on the safe container. After repeated experiments, the cold start time of the application has been optimized to the millisecond level.

ASPLOS is the premier international conference on computer systems, focusing on the intersection of architecture, programming languages, and operating systems. Since its founding in 1982, ASPLOS has promoted the development of a number of computer system technologies, including but not limited to core innovations such as RISC, RAID, Cluster, network storage, large-scale multiprocessors, and deep learning processors. ASPLOS has great influence in both academic and industrial circles, and has always been A class A international conference recommended by China Computer Society (CCF). The selection of ASPLOS papers is very rigorous, and the acceptance rate remains below 20% for a long time. Out of 476 papers submitted this year, only 86 were accepted, a mere 18 percent acceptance rate.

Since its establishment, Ant Financial has actively carried out research cooperation with universities and academic organizations at home and abroad. Before that, Ant Financial has carried out cooperation with Tsinghua University, Tongji University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California Berkeley, and achieved scientific research achievements. Ant Financial will continue to strengthen academic research and cooperation with universities to promote the common development of fintech industries, universities and research institutes.