Continuation-Centric Computing with Arca | USENIX

Continuation-Centric Computing with Arca

Akshay Srivatsan, Yuhan Deng, Katherine Mohr, Emma Sudo, Sebastian Ingino, Francis Chua, and Keith Winstein, Stanford University

This paper presents continuation-centric computing, an operating system design paradigm for “serverless”-style workloads: short-lived tasks that spend a substantial fraction of time waiting on dependencies and other services. Under this paradigm, a running function can capture its current continuation—a lightweight snapshot of its state—as a distinct function that can be paused, migrated, or copied as needed.

This paper evaluates the continuation-centric computing model using Arca, an operating system providing continuation capture as a core service. Arca supports a process abstraction that is broadly similar to Unix processes in guarantees and isolation, but additionally provides efficient capture and resumption of serializable, portable continuations.

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BibTeX<br>@inproceedings {318593,

author = {Akshay Srivatsan and Yuhan Deng and Katherine Mohr and Emma Sudo and Sebastian Ingino and Francis Chua and Keith Winstein},

title = {{Continuation-Centric} Computing with Arca},

booktitle = {20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 26)},

year = {2026},

isbn = {978-1-939133-55-7},

address = {Seattle, WA},

pages = {1989--2005},

url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi26/presentation/srivatsan},

publisher = {USENIX Association},

month = jul

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