Ant Group Papers Accepted at ASPLOS'20: Occlum Secure Enclave LibOS and Catalyzer Serverless Cold‑Start Optimization

ASPLOS'20, the top ACM conference on programming languages and operating systems, recently announced that two papers from Ant Group have been accepted, marking the company's first participation in the event.

The conference will be held from March 16 to 20, 2020.

The first accepted paper, Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX , is co‑first‑authored by Ant Group employee Tian Hongliang and research intern Shen Youren. Occlum is a confidential‑computing LibOS that provides system services inside an SGX (or other TEE) enclave, allowing unmodified applications to run securely. It supports large AI frameworks such as XGBoost, TensorFlow, and OpenVINO, as well as server applications like shells, GCC, LLVM, and web servers, and is being deployed across multiple Ant Group and Alibaba businesses.

Details of the Occlum open‑source project can be found at https://github.com/occlum/occlum .

The second paper, Catalyzer: Sub‑millisecond Startup for Serverless Computing with Initialization‑less Booting , authored by research intern Yu Tianyi and others, addresses the critical cold‑start latency problem in serverless computing. By deeply modifying the operating‑system kernel and leveraging secure containers, the team reduced cold‑start times to the millisecond level.

ASPLOS is a premier international conference that bridges architecture, programming languages, and operating systems, with a historically low acceptance rate (about 18% this year, 86 out of 476 submissions). It has driven many core innovations such as RISC, RAID, clusters, network storage, large‑scale multiprocessing, and deep‑learning processors.

Since its inception, Ant Group has actively collaborated with leading universities and research institutions worldwide, including Tsinghua University, Tongji University, MIT, and UC Berkeley, and will continue to strengthen academic‑industry partnerships to advance fintech research.