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ISTC-CC NEWSLETTER
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Ling Liu's SC13 paper "Large Graph Processing Without the Overhead" featured by HPCwire.
ISTC-CC provides a listing of useful benchmarks for cloud computing.
Another list highlighting Open Source Software Releases.
Second GraphLab workshop should be even bigger than the first! GraphLab is a new programming framework for graph-style data analytics.
ISTC–CC December 2011 Status Report
Summary:
The ISTC-CC held its first annual retreat in Pittsburgh on December 8 & 9. The 116 attendees included faculty and students from Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Princeton University, and UC Berkeley, as well as 35 Intel employees (representing Intel Labs, DCG, SSG, FSG and IAG). The agenda featured keynotes by Jason Waxman and Rich Uhlig of Intel, 12 research talks by faculty and students from all four Universities, 12 breakout groups, and 57 posters. By all accounts, the retreat was a big success: great interactions, lots of connections made, new insights, idea inspiration, and generally superb energy! Further information and slides can be found at http://www.istc-cc.cmu.edu/events/retreat11.shtml (user=istc-cc, pw=altostratus). We had another great month for publications by ISTC-CC researchers. 10 papers were published, including 6 papers in Micro'11 and 1 paper each in SC'11, LISA'11, ASE'11, and ATS'11. Randy Katz (UC Berkeley)'s ASE'11 paper received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. Garth Gibson (CMU) secured $950K in amplifying funding. Guy Blelloch (CMU) was named an ACM Fellow.
ISTC-CC Retreat group photo
Details:
ISTC Mission: Four inter-related research pillars (themes) architected to create a strong foundation for cloud computing of the future
The research agenda of the ISTC-CC is composed of the following four themes
- Specialization: Explores specialization as a primary means for order of magnitude improvements in efficiency (e.g., energy), including use of emerging technologies like non-volatile memory and specialized cores.
- Automation: Addresses cloud’s particular automation challenges, focusing on order of magnitude efficiency gains from smart resource allocation/scheduling and greatly improved problem diagnosis capabilities.
- Big Data: Addresses the critical need for cloud computing to extend beyond traditional big data usage (primarily, search) to efficiently and effectively support Big Data analytics, including the continuous ingest, integration, and exploitation of live data feeds (e.g., video or twitter).
- To theEdge: Explores new frameworks for edge/cloud cooperation that can efficiently and effectively exploit billions of context-aware clients and enable cloud-assisted client applications whose execution spans client devices, edge-local cloud resources, and core cloud resources.
Participants
Academic PI: Greg Ganger (CMU)
Executive Sponsor: Wen-Hann Wang (CSR)
Managing Sponsor: Rich Uhlig (CSR-SAL)
Program Director: Jeff Parkhurst (APR)
Intel PI: Phil Gibbons
Intel Researchers: Michael Kaminsky, Mike Kozuch, Babu Pillai
Academic Partners: Dave Andersen, Guy Blelloch, Garth Gibson, Carlos Guestrin, Mor Harchol-Balter, Todd Mowry, Onur Mutlu, Priya Narasimhan, M. Satyanarayanan, and Dan Siewiorek (CMU); Mike Freedman, Kai Li, and Margaret Martonosi (Princeton); Anthony Joseph, Randy Katz, and Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley); Ada Gavrilovska, Ling Liu, Calton Pu, Karsten Schwan, and Sudha Yalamanchili (GA Tech).
ISTC Highlight Details:
The ISTC-CC First Annual Retreat included 35 attendees from Intel, 2 from MIT, 3 from Princeton (1 Faculty & 2 students), 4 from UC Berkeley (2 faculty & 2 students), 5 from Georgia Tech (3 faculty & 2 students), 1 from MIMOS, and 66 from CMU (21 faculty/staff & 45 students). The agenda featured keynotes by Jason Waxman and Rich Uhlig of Intel, 12 research talks by faculty and students from all four Universities, 12 breakout groups, and 57 posters. By all accounts, the retreat was a great success! The talks, poster sessions, and breakouts provided a tremendous opportunity for attendees to give feedback at the early stage of ISTC-CC research projects. Faculty and students made key connections across Universities and with Intel folks that should greatly benefit the projects going forward. There was even a “Madness Session” hosted by Mike Kaminsky where ideas of key research and application gaps were discussed along with opportunities to further collaborate and interact with cloud center research. Leaders from three other ISTCs (visual, secure, and embedded) also attended, leading to promising cross-center collaboration discussions. One interesting note was that the cloud center research community was larger than just Intel and the Hub and Spoke schools. In fact, posters and presentations noted other research sponsors of their work including Microsoft, AT&T Research, VMware, HP Labs and Google and that other schools were participating in this research including Lancaster University (UK), EPFL (Switzerland) and Rice University (Houston). This exemplifies the expanded reach and sponsorship of the center's research. Agenda, presentations and posters can be found at http://www.istc-cc.cmu.edu/events/retreat11.shtml.
Mike and Rick talk at a poster session |
Balint speaks at a breakout group |
Satya addresses a packed room |
- Garth Gibson (CMU)'s proposal for LANL/CMU Scalable Storage and Retrieval Systems was awarded $800K over 3 years.
- Garth Gibson (CMU)'s proposal for ISR/NSA Science of Security: Systematic Testing of Distributed and Multi-threaded Systems at Scale was awarded $150K for 1 year.
- Ariel Rabkin and Randy Katz (UC Berkeley)'s paper "Precomputing Possible Configuration Error Diagnoses" was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), November 2011.
- Guy Blelloch (CMU) was named an ACM Fellow, for contributions to parallel computing. There are now 7 ISTC-CC faculty who are ACM Fellows: Dan Siewiorek (CMU, inducted 1994), Randy Katz (UC Berkeley, 1996), Kai Li (Princeton, 1998), M. Satyanaryanan (CMU, 2002), Phil Gibbons (Intel, 2006), Margaret Martonosi (Princeton, 2009), and Guy.
Schedule of upcoming events and milestones
The next Open Cirrus Summit will be held in Beijing in June 2012. The CFP is posted at http://labs.chinamobile.com/cloud/opencirrus/OCsummit12, and the submission date is March 2. All are invited to submit short papers. Michael Kozuch is co-PC chair.
Technical highlights
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Publications summary for the past month (partial list):
- 3 papers submitted: to Eurosys'12 (2 papers, in addition to the 2 reported last month) and to MobiSys'12
- 6 papers accepted: to NSDI'12 (3 papers), to PPOPP'12, to PerCom'12 and to DATE'12
- 10 papers published: to MICRO'11 (6 papers), to SC'11, to LISA'11, to ASE'11, and to ATS'11
- FAWN rack/cluster reached a new milestone with the addition of several new shelves. All of the new CPU-DIMM based nodes are now in the rack. The team is working to reduce the number of power bricks by running several nodes off of one supply.
Sponsor group interaction highlights
- Phil Gibbons and Michael Kozuch (Intel) participated in the Intel Cloud & Client Futurecasting Summit in Hillsboro, OR, December 2011, which was organized by Dan Dahle (Intel), and included several participants from SAL.
- Michael Kaminsky (Intel) and David Andersen (CMU) spoke to various members of SAL and Intel, in general, during the ISTC-CC retreat about various FAWN and NVM-related topics.
- Babu Pillai (Intel) has been participating in the Cloud Client Strategy Task Team, organized by Rick Olha (Intel). The goal is to identify use cases and technology directions that the Labs should be investigating in the cloud-client space. Babu has been pushing cloud-augmented interactive perception applications on mobile devices as a driving use case / application model.
- The following University and Intel folks attended the first annual ISTC-CC Retreat in Pittsburgh (attendance was by invitation only):
- GA Tech- Karsten Schwan, Calton Pu, and Ada Gavrilovska along with two PhD Students, Deepal Jayasinghe & Chengwei Wang
- UC Berkeley – Anthony Joseph & Ion Stoica along with two PhD Students, Matei Zaharia & Andy Konwinski
- Princeton – Margaret Martonosi along with two PhD Students, Wyatt Lloyd & Daniel Lustig
- Intel – Sameh Gobriel, Jeff Jackson, Tanay Karnik, Konrad Lai, John Manferdelli, Rajiv Mathur, John Miller, Charlie Tai, Jason Waxman, Ted Willke, Matthew Haycock, Mic Bowman, Christian Maciocco, Richard Olha, Gans Srinivasa, Scott Hahn, Maziar Manesh, Doug Carmean, Prashant Chandra, Limor Fix, Balint Fleischer, Paolo Narvaez, David Ott, Jeff Parkhurst, Rich Uhlig, Vyas Sekar, Kyungtae Han, Henry Gabb, Phil Gibbons, Babu Pillai, Mike Kozuch, Michael Kaminsky, Mei Chen, Jason Campbell & Denver Dash
- CMU – Randy Bryant (SCS Dean), James Hoe (ECE Dept Chair), Dave Andersen, Guy Blelloch, Chuck Cranor, Christos Faloutsos, Kayvon Fatahalian, Jennifer Gabig, Greg Ganger, Garth Gibson, Nitin Gupta, Mor Harchol-Balter, Todd Mowry, Priya Narasimhan, Anthony Rowe, Majd Sakr, M. Satyanarayanan, Yaser Sheikh, Dan Siewiorek & Michael Strouken, along with 46 post-docs & grad students
- Also in attendance were Michael Stonebraker & Frans Kaashoek (MIT)
- Jeff Parkhurst met with Rick Ohla and Dan Dahle of CSR tech management to discuss collaboration strategies and technology pipeline strengthening moving forward.
Other ISTC highlights
- Balint Fleischer (Intel) asked for follow-up material on several FAWN projects including the SILT and the NVM work. Balint also requested a meeting with Dave Andersen (CMU), Vijay Vasudevan (former CMU grad student), Garth Gibson (CMU) and Michael Kaminsky to share some of the work his group is doing.
- Randy Katz (UC Berkeley) received a Public Service Medal (Pingat Bakti Masyarakat) from the President of Singapore, 2011.
- The COPS work on scalable causal consistency for geo-replicated services, by Wyatt Lloyd (Princeton grad student), Michael Freedman (Princeton), Michael Kaminsky (Intel) and Dave Andersen (CMU), received positive publicity on the blog highscalability.com.
- Luke Jing Yuan (from MIMOS) completed his 2-month visiting researcher period with ISTC-CC. He worked with Mike Kozuch and Greg Ganger on extensions to Zoni (the open source system for partitioning physical resources in a cluster, used in Intel's OpenCirrus cloud) and on tools for migrating suspended OS+apps from a virtual machine deployment to a physical deployment (e.g., so as to run performance experiments on bare-bones hardware).
- Kiryong Ha (CMU grad student), M. Satyanarayanan (CMU), and Babu Pillai (Intel) have continued discussions on fast synthesis and launch of VM images on cloudlet infrastructure. Kiryong has created an initial prototype system that allows a user to carry a VM image on an Android phone, and then launch it on a local server. Data from early experiments on this system were highlighted in Satya's presentation at the Cloud Computing ISTC retreat.
- A cross-university team including folks from Carnegie Mellon (Alexey Tumonov, Elie Krevat, Jim Cipar, and Greg Ganger), Berkeley (Matei Zaharia, Andy Konwinski, Charles Reiss, Anthony Joseph, Ion Stoica, and Randy Katz), and Intel (Michael Kozuch) has formed to investigate issues around scheduling in the data center. The team met for several hours at the retreat. An initial technical report, which analyzes a workload trace from an 11000-node cluster, is under development.
- Michael Kaminsky (Intel) visited Princeton in November and met with Professors Michael Freedman and Margaret Martonosi (and their students).
List of publications
- [SC'11] "On the Duality of Data-intensive File System Design: Reconciling HDFS and PVFS," Wittawat Tantisiriroj, Swapnil Patil, Garth Gibson, Seung Son, Samuel Lang, and Robert Ross. 2011 Int'l Conf. for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, Seattle, WA, November 2011.
- [ASE'11] "Precomputing Possible Configuration Error Diagnoses," A. Rabkin and R. H. Katz. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Lawrence, KS, November 2011.
- [MICRO'11] "Reducing Memory Interference in Multicore Systems via Application-Aware Memory Channel Partitioning," Sai Prashanth Muralidhara, Lavanya Subramanian, Onur Mutlu, Mahmut Kandemir, and Thomas Moscibroda. The 44th International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Porto Alegre, Brazil, December 2011.
- [MICRO'11] "Parallel Application Memory Scheduling," Eiman Ebrahimi, Rustam Miftakhutdinov, Chris Fallin, Chang Joo Lee, Onur Mutlu, and Yale N. Patt. The 44th International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Porto Alegre, Brazil, December 2011.
- [MICRO'11] "Improving GPU Performance via Large Warps and Two-Level Warp Scheduling," Veynu Narasiman, Chang Joo Lee, Michael Shebanow, Rustam Miftakhutdinov, Onur Mutlu, and Yale N. Patt. The 44th International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Porto Alegre, Brazil, December 2011.
- [MICRO'11] "SHiP: Signature-Based Hit Predictor for High Performance Caching," Carole-Jean Wu, Aamer Jaleel, William Hasenplaugh, Margaret Martonosi, Simon Steely Jr., and Joel Emer. The 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, December 2011.
- [MICRO'11] "PACMan: Prefetch-Aware Cache Management for High Performance Caching," Carole-Jean Wu, Aamer Jaleel, Margaret Martonosi, Simon Steely Jr., and Joel Emer. The 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, December 2011.
- [MICRO'11] "SIMD Re-convergence at Thread Frontiers," Gregory Diamos, Andrew Kerr, Haicheng Wu, and Sudhakar Yalamanchili, Benjamin Ashbaugh, and Subramaniam Maiyuran. The 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, December 2011.
- [LISA'11] "Why Do Migrations Fail and What Can We Do about It?" Gong Zhang and Ling Liu. Usenix 25th Large Installation System Administration Conference, Boston, MA, December 2011.
- [ATS'11] "Integrated Design & Test: Conquering the Conflicting Requirements of Low-Power, Variation-Tolerance, and Test Cost" Ashish Goel, Swaroop Ghosh, Mesut Meterelliyoz, Jeff Parkhurst and Kaushik Roy. The 20th Asian Test Symposium, Nov 2011.
List of presentations
- Satya (CMU) gave a keynote talk at the Corning Workshop on Cloud Computing, November 2011. He was the only academic speaker--the others were from Microsoft, IBM, Arista Networks and Myoonet.
- Wittawat Tantisiriroj (CMU grad student) presented "On the Duality of Data-intensive File System Design: Reconciling HDFS and PVFS," at SC'11, Seattle, WA, November 2011.
- Garth Gibson (CMU) presented "Future Needs, Obstacles and Technologies for Storage," 7th Kavli Futures Symposium, Scalable Energy-Efficient Data Centers and Clouds, Santa Barbara, CA.
- Randy Katz (UC Berkeley) presented "Mesos: An Operating System for the Datacenter," at Huawei Corporate Headquarters in Shenzhen, China, November 2011.
- Gong Zhang (GA Tech grad student) presented "Why Do Migrations Fail and What Can We Do about It?", at LISA '11, Boston, MA, December 2011.
- Hrishikesh Amur (GA Tech grad student) presented his research, "Low Memory MapReduce" at the IBM Student Workshop for Frontiers of Cloud Computing, December 2011.
- Gregory Diamos (GA Tech grad student) presented "SIMD Re-convergence at Thread Frontiers" at MICRO'11, Brazil, December 2011.
- Michael Kozuch (Intel) presented key observations from Intel's Open Cirrus effort at the "Support for Experimental Computer Science Workshop" at SC'11 in Seattle, WA, November 2011.
- Michael Kaminsky (Intel) presented a FAWN summary at Princeton, November 2011.
- Presentations from the first annual ISTC-CC Retreat in Pittsburgh: [slides at http://www.istc-cc.cmu.edu/events/retreat11.shtml (user=istc-cc, pw=altostratus)]
- Jason Waxman (Intel) gave a keynote on "Opportunities in Cloud Computing: Discussion at ISTC Summit"
- Rich Uhlig (Intel) gave a keynote on "Optimizing for the Cloud: Tech Trends, Testbeds and Working Together"
- Hyeontaek Lim (CMU grad student) presented "SILT: A Memory-Efficient, High-Performance Key-Value Store"
- Matei Zaharia (UC Berkeley grad student) presented "Spark: An Efficient and Fault-Tolerant System for In-Memory Cluster Computing"
- M. Satyanarayanan (CMU) presented "Cloudlets: Enabling the Post-PC World"
- Karsten Schwan (GA Tech) presented "GT Cloud ISTC Research Overview"
- Mor Harchol-Balter (CMU) presented "Some Lessons on Dynamic Power Management of Data Centers"
- Wyatt Lloyd (Princeton grad student) presented "Why Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS"
- Andy Konwinski (UC Berkeley grad student) presented "Mesos: Sharing the Cluster"
- Swapnil Patil (CMU grad student) presented "Performance Debugging Scalable Table Stores using YCSB++"
- Margaret Martonosi (Princeton) presented "Software Abstractions to Improve the Scheduling of Data Center Workloads"
- Justin Meza (CMU grad student) presented "Locality-Aware Data Placement in DRAM-PCM Hybrid Memories"
- Chengwei Wang (GA Tech grad student) presented "A Flexible System Integrating Monitoring and Analytics for Managing Large-Scale Data Centers"
- Raja Sambasivan (CMU grad student) presented "Diagnosing Performance Changes by Comparing Request Flows"