{rfName}
Ou

Indexed in

License and use

Altmetrics

Analysis of institutional authors

Sampé JAuthorSánchez-Artigas MCorresponding AuthorGarcía-López PCorresponding Author

Share

January 3, 2022
Publications
>
Article
No

Outsourcing Data Processing Jobs with Lithops

Publicated to:Ieee Transactions On Cloud Computing. 11 (1): 1026-1037 - 2023-01-01 11(1), DOI: 10.1109/TCC.2021.3129000

Authors: Sampe, Josep; Sanchez-Artigas, Marc; Vernik, Gil; Yehekzel, Ido; Garcia-Lopez, Pedro

Affiliations

Computer Engineering and Mathematics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili - Campus Sescelades, 204165 Tarragona, Tarragona, Spain, (e-mail: marc.sanchez@urv.cat) - Author
Computer Engineering and Mathematics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 16777 Tarragona, Tarragona, Spain, 43007 (e-mail: josep.sampe@urv.cat) - Author
Computer Science, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, 26747 Haifa, Haifa, Israel, (e-mail: idoyehe@gmail.com) - Author
DEIM, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Tarragona, Spain, (e-mail: pedro.garcia@urv.cat) - Author
IBM Res, Haifa 3498825, Israel - Author
IBM TJ Watson Res Ctr, Ossining, NY 10598 USA - Author
Storage Clouds and Analytics Group, IBM Haifa Research Labs, 74290 Haifa, Haifa, Israel, (e-mail: GILV@il.ibm.com) - Author
Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel - Author
Univ Rovira & Virgili, Tarragona 43007, Spain - Author
See more

Abstract

Unexpectedly, the rise of serverless computing has also collaterally started the ‘`democratization’' of massive-scale data parallelism. This new trend heralded by PyWren pursues to enable untrained users to execute single-machine code in the cloud at massive scale through platforms like AWS Lambda. Driven by this vision, this article presents Lithops, which carries forward the pioneering work of PyWren to better exploit the innate parallelism of la MapReduce tasks atop several Functions-as-a-Service platforms. Instead of waiting for a cluster to be up and running in the cloud, makes easy the task of spawning hundreds and thousands of cloud functions to execute a large job in a few seconds from start. With Lithops, for instance, users can painlessly perform exploratory data analysis from within a Jupyter notebook, while it is the Lithops's engine which takes care of launching the parallel cloud functions, loading dependencies, automatically partitioning the data, etc. In this article, we describe the design and innovative features of Lithops and evaluate it using several representative applications, including sentiment analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, and hyperparameter tuning. These applications manifest the Lithops ability to scale single-machine code computations to thousands of cores. And very importantly, without the need of booting a cold cluster or keeping a warm cluster for occasional tasks. IEEE

Keywords

cloud computingcodesdistributed systemsfaaibm cloudlithopsmulti-cloudparallel processingpythonpywrenruntimeserverless computingtask analysisCloud computingCloud-computingCodeCodesCodes (symbols)Data handlingDistributed systemsFaaIbm cloudIntelligent systemsJob analysisLithopLithopsMonte carlo methodsMulti-cloudMulti-cloudsParallel processingParallel processing systemsPythonPywrenRuntimeRuntimesScheduling algorithmsSentiment analysisServerless computingTask analysis

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Ieee Transactions On Cloud Computing due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2023, it was in position 17/144, thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Computer Science, Theory & Methods.

From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations provided by WoS (ESI, Clarivate), it yields a value for the citation normalization relative to the expected citation rate of: 4.19. This indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 14, 2024)

This information is reinforced by other indicators of the same type, which, although dynamic over time and dependent on the set of average global citations at the time of their calculation, consistently position the work at some point among the top 50% most cited in its field:

  • Weighted Average of Normalized Impact by the Scopus agency: 3.24 (source consulted: FECYT Feb 2024)
  • Field Citation Ratio (FCR) from Dimensions: 8.35 (source consulted: Dimensions Aug 2025)

Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-08-06, the following number of citations:

  • WoS: 21
  • Scopus: 24

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-08-06:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 16.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 16 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 3.8.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 5 (Altmetric).

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Israel; United States of America.

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (Sampe Domenech, Josep) and Last Author (García López, Pedro Antonio).

the authors responsible for correspondence tasks have been Sanchez Artigas, Marc and García López, Pedro Antonio.