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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 Q2 2012 Status Report
Summary:
The ISTC-CC held its second annual retreat in Pittsburgh on November 29 & 30. The 105 attendees included faculty and students from Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Princeton University & UC Berkeley, as well as 28 Intel employees. The agenda featured keynotes by Balint Fleischer and Das Kamhout of Intel, 12 research talks by faculty and students from all four Universities, 1 research talk from Intel Labs, 5 breakout groups, and 53 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/retreat12.shtml (user=istc-cc, pw=altostratus).
A great quarter for publications with 35 papers published, including 6 papers in SOCC’12, 3 in OSDI '12, 3 in ICAC’12, 3 in PACT’12, 2 in ICCD’12, and 4 in Middleware’12. A great quarter, too, for awards and honors, including:
- Garth Gibson (CMU) elected as ACM Fellow for contributions to the performance and reliability of storage systems.
- Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley) elected as ACM Fellow for contributions to networking, distributed systems and cloud computing.
- Kai Li (Princeton) received ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame award for his paper "Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems" in ACM TOCS.
- Phil Gibbons (Intel Labs) was named founding Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC), a newly established ACM journal. http://topc.acm.org
- Onur Mutlu (CMU) and co-authors won the Best Paper Award at ICCD’12 for their work on “Row Buffer Locality Aware Caching Policies for Hybrid Memories.”
- Elmer Garduno, Soila Kavulya, Jiaqi Tan, Rajeev Gandhi, and Priya Narasimhan (CMU) won the Best Student Paper Award at USENIX LISA’12 for their work on failure-diagnosis and visualization for Hadoop.
- Priya Narasimhan (CMU) served as program co-chair of Middleware’12. Onur Mutlu (CMU) served as program co-chair for Micro’12. Margaret Martonosi (Princeton) is serving as program chair for ISCA’13. Karsten Schwan agreed to be program co-chair for Middleware’13. Jeff Parkhurst agreed to be conference co-chair for the Intel Big Data/Hadoop summit at Jones Farm in February 2013.
- Garth Gibson was awarded a Los Alamos National Laboratory Outstanding Innovation, 2011 Technology Transfer, Distinguished Copyright for the Parallel Log-structured File System (PLFS).
- Wyatt Lloyd won the Princeton Wu Prize for Excellence.
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 the Edge: 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 Kiminsky, Mike Kozuch, Babu Pillai
AcademicPartners: 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).
Technical highlights
- [Data placement in NVM] Onur Mutlu and his students developed novel locality-aware data placement mechanisms that make the best of both DRAM and NVM technologies. The result is a significant improvement in both performance and energy efficiency in data-intensive and cloud workloads. This work received the Best Paper Award at ICCD 2012.
- [Parallel Log-structured File System] Garth Gibson was awarded a Los Alamos National Laboratory Outstanding Innovation, 2011 Technology Transfer, Distinguished Copyright Award (honoring extraordinary creations, demonstrating a breadth of commercial application, potential to create economical value and the highest level of technical excellence), for the Parallel Log-structured File System (PLFS). PLFS transparently delivers one to two orders of magnitude improvement in the write bandwidth in petascale computing when O(1000s-100,000s) threads are concurrently writing into the same file. It has been released as open source on sourceforge, deployed in production at Los Alamos National Lab and adopted for the emerging Exascale Software Stack.
- Publications summary for the past quarter:
- 12 papers accepted: to HPCA'13 (4 papers), NSDI'13 (2), DATE'13, HotMobile'13, IC2E'13, ALENEX'13, ACM TACO and ACM OSR.
- 35 papers published: in SOCC'12 (6 papers), OSDI'12 (3), ICAC'12 (3), PACT'12 (3), ICCD'12 (2), Middleware'12 (2), among others (see List of Publications below).
Schedule of upcoming events and milestones
- December 17: Sponsor Lab Strategy Review
- February 4: Intel Big Data/Hadoop summit at Jones Farm
Sponsor group interaction highlights
- [GraphBuilder] Ted Willke (Intel SAL) and his team, working closely with Carlos Guestrin (CMU/Washington) provided the first Open Source release of their GraphBuilder tool on 01.org, on December 3
- [PDL Retreat] Michael Kaminsky, Mike Kozuch, Sanjay Kumar, Babu Pillai, and Dulloor Subramanya Rao (Intel) attended the PDL Retreat at Bedford Springs, PA in November. They joined 45 technical leaders in hearing about CMU systems research including a lot of ISTC-CC activities. In addition to many posters about ISTC-CC research, 19 talks were given by ISTC-CC students at the PDL Retreat.
- Onur Mutlu (CMU) co-authored an ISCA submission with Chris Wilkerson (Intel Labs).
- Ada Gavrilovska (GA Tech), Karsten Schwan (GA Tech), Greg Ganger (CMU), Mike Kozuch (Intel Labs), Dejan Milojicic (HP), and Orran Krieger (Boston U) submitted a joint NSF proposal.
- [Cloudlet Consortium] Babu Pillai and Mahadev Satyanarayanan (CMU) had an extended discussion with Rich Uhlig (SAL) and Dan Dahle (CSR) on potential for building an industry-academia collaboration toward a pilot, public deployment of cloudlets. This is intended to demonstrate the concept, encourage further development of the software stacks, and study the potential gains the technology can bring. The group intends to discuss this further at a future meeting at Intel.
- [ISTC – Social Computing Center Cross Collaboration] Jeff Parkhurst will meet with Paul Dourish and Scott Mainwaring of the ISTC Social Computing center on June 15 to discuss potential cross center collaboration with ISTC BD and ISTC CC. While in Southern California, Jeff will also meet with James Frew (UCSB) who is part of our ISTC BD center and Li Wang and his Machine Learning group to discuss data mining and machine learning research vectors.
- [Graduating PhD Students for hire] The Cloud Computing ISTC is fortunate to be collaborating with (and supporting) some of the top graduate students in computer systems, distributed systems, and computer architecture. We’ve compiled a list of the students that expect to graduate in 2013 along with their home pages and CVs at http://www.istc-cc.cmu.edu/resources/graduates/index.shtml (username= istc-cc and password= altostratus). The embedded researchers (Gibbons, Kaminsky, Kozuch, and Pillai) know most of the students quite well, and if you have questions about them, please do not hesitate to ask. Please forward this pointer to any potential Intel hiring managers who may be interested. Also, the embedded researchers would appreciate being apprised as candidates progress through the hiring process. In particular, they would very much like to know if students are invited for on-site interviews, as these events may represent additional opportunities to disseminate the research results within Intel.
Other ISTC highlights
- [2 New ACM Fellows] Congrats to Garth Gibson (CMU) and Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley), who were elected as ACM Fellows in December 2012. This brings to 9 (!) the number of 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), Guy Blelloch (CMU, 2011), Garth and Ion.
- [Amplifying Funding] Satya (CMU) was awarded two new grants: from IMSL (Institute for Museum & Library Sciences), Gloriana St. Clair and Mahadev Satyanarayanan (PIs), for "Olive: A Digital Archive for Executable Content", $497,755, and from the Sloan Foundation, Mahadev Satyanarayanan and Gloriana St. Clair (PIs), for "Storing and Archiving Executable Content: the Olive Project", $400,000.
- [ISTC-CC Retreat] The ISTC-CC Second Annual Retreat included 62 from CMU (18 faculty/staff & 44 students), 28 attendees from Intel, 5 from Georgia Tech (3 faculty & 2 students), 4 from Princeton (2 Faculty & 2 students), 3 from UC Berkeley (2 faculty & 1 student), and 1 each from Washington, Penn State, and Brown. The agenda featured welcoming remarks by Wen-Hann Wang (Intel Labs, Executive Sponsor for ISTC-CC), keynotes by Balint Fleischer (General Manager, Intel Data Center Group) and Das Kamhout (Intel IT Cloud Lead), 12 research talks by faculty and students from all four Universities, a research collaboration talk by Ted Willke (Intel Labs / SAL), 5 breakout groups, and 53 posters. By all accounts, the retreat was a great success! The talks, poster sessions, and breakouts provided a tremendous opportunity for attendees to learn about and give feedback on ISTC-CC research projects. Faculty and students made key connections across Universities and with Intel folks that should greatly benefit the projects going forward. Agenda, presentations and posters can be found at http://www.istc-cc.cmu.edu/events/retreat12.shtml (user=istc-cc, pw=altostratus).
- Vijay Vasudevan’s (CMU grad student) Ph.D thesis on FAWN was one of two theses nominated by Carnegie Mellon for submission to ACM’s Outstanding Dissertation Award competition.
- Karsten Schwan (GA Tech), Priya Narasimhan (CMU) & Mike Kozuch (Intel) served on the program committee of ICAC’12.
- Karsten Schwan (GA Tech) co-chaired the ``Workshop on Management of Big Data Systems'', September 2013.
- Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley) served on the program committee of OSDI’12.
- Karsten Schwan (GA Tech), Phil Gibbons (Intel Labs), and Dan Siewiorek (CMU) served on the program committee of Middleware’12.
- Karsten Schwan (GA Tech), Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley) and Greg Ganger (CMU) served on the program committee of SOCC’12.
- Garth Gibson (CMU) served on the program committee of FAST’13.
- Garth Gibson, Mor Harchol-Balter, Priya Narasimhan (CMU), and Phil Gibbons (Intel Labs) served on the program committee of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E).
List of publications
[List of the publications that were PUBLISHED by center researchers during the month. This does not include submissions or acceptances, just publications.]
- “Architecture and Applications of Virtual Coaches, Special Issue on Quality of Life Technology,” D. Siewiorek, Smailagic, A, Dey, A., Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 100, No. 8, August 2012, pp 2472-2488
- “Generation Smart-phone,” D. Siewiorek, IEEE Spectrum, vol. 49, no. 9, September, 2012, pp. 54-58 (cover article)
- “When Average is Not Average: Large Response Time Fluctuations in N-tier Systems,” Qingyang Wang, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Motoyuki Kawaba, and Calton Pu, Proceedings of 2012 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’12), September 2012
- “Net-Cohort: Detecting and Managing VM Ensembles in Virtualized Data Centers,” Liting Hu, Karsten Schwan, Ajay Gulati, Junjie Zhang, and Chengwei Wang, Proceedings of 2012 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’12), September 2012
- "Net-Cohort: Detecting and Managing VM Ensembles in Virtualized Data Centers,” Liting Hu, Karsten Schwan, Ajay Gulati, Junjie Zhang, Chengwei Wang, Proceedings of 2012 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’12), September 2012
- "Project Hoover: Auto-Scaling Streaming Map-Reduce Applications", Rajalakshmi Ramesh, Liting Hu, Karsten Schwan, MDBS Workshop at ICAC Conference, September 2012
- "Row Buffer Locality Aware Caching Policies for Hybrid Memories,” HanBin Yoon, Justin Meza, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Rachael Harding, and Onur Mutlu, Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD’12), September 2012. Best paper award (in Computer Systems and Applications track)
- "Flash Correct-and-Refresh: Retention-Aware Error Management for Increased Flash Memory Lifetime,” Yu Cai, Gulay Yalcin, Onur Mutlu, Eric Haratsch, Adrian Cristal, Osman Unsal, and Ken Mai, Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD’12), September 2012
- "A Case for Small Row Buffers in Non-Volatile Main Memories," Justin Meza, Jing Li, and Onur Mutlu,
Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD’12) Poster Session, September 2012 - “Base-Delta-Immediate Compression: A Practical Data Compression Mechanism for On-Chip Caches,” Gennady Pekhimenko, Vivek Seshadri, Onur Mutlu, Todd C. Mowry, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Michael A. Kozuch, International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT’12), September 2012
- “Chrysalis Analysis: Incorporating Synchronization Arcs in Dataflow-Analysis-based Parallel Monitoring,” Michelle Goodstein, Shimin Chen, Phillip B. Gibbons, Michael Kozuch, and Todd Mowry, International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT’12), September 2012
- “The Evicted-Address Filter: A Unified Mechanism to Address Both Cache Pollution and Thrashing,” Vivek Seshadri, Onur Mutlu, Todd C Mowry, and Michael A Kozuch, International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT’12), September 2012
- "Application-to-Core Mapping Policies to Reduce Memory Interference in Multi-Core Systems," Reetuparna Das, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Onur Mutlu, Akhilesh Kumar, and Mani Azimi, Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT’12) Poster Session, September 2012
- “Architecture and Applications of Virtual Coaches,” D. Siewiorek, Smailagic, A., Dey, A., Chapter 11 in Quality of Life Technology Handbook, Richard Schulz (ed), CRC Press, 2013, pp. 197-226.
- “Wearable Computers,” D. Siewiorek, Smailagic, A., Starner, T., Chapter 12 in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications, Third Edition, J. A. Jacko (ed), CRC Press, pp. 273-296.
- “Performance Isolation and Fairness for Multi-Tenant Cloud Storage,” David Shue, Michael J. Freedman, and Anees Shaikh, Proc. Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '12), October 2012
- “PowerGraph: Distributed Graph-Parallel Computation on Natural Graphs,” Joseph E. Gonzalez, Yucheng Low, Haijie Gu, Danny Bickson, Carlos Guestrin, (OSDI’12), October 2012
- “GraphChi: Large-Scale Graph Computation on Just a PC,” Aapo Kyrola, Guy Blelloch, and Carlos Guestrin, (OSDI’12), October 2012
- “Heterogeneity and Dynamicity of Clouds at Scale: Google Trace,” C. Reiss, A. Tumanoy, G. R. Ganger, R. H. Katz, M. A. Kozuch, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), October 2012
- “Cake: Enabling High-level SLOs on Shared Storage Systems,” A. Wang, S. Venkataraman, S. Alspaugh, R. H. Katz, I. Stoica, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), October 2012
- “Using Vector Interfaces to Deliver Millions of IOPS from a Networked Key-value Storage Server,” Vijay Vasudevan, Michael Kaminsky, David Andersen, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), October 2012
- “Alsched: algebraic scheduling of mixed workloads in heterogeneous clouds,” Alexey Tumanov, James Cipar, Michael Kozuch, Gregory Ganger, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), October 2012
- “The Potential Dangers of Causal Consistency and an Explicit Solution,” Peter Bailis, Ali Ghodsi, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ion Stoica, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), October 2012
- “True Elasticity in Multi-Tenant Clusters through Amoeba,” Ganesh Anantharanayanan, Christopher Douglas, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Sriram Rao, Ion Stoica, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), October 2012
- “DCast: Sustaining Collaboration in Overlay Multicast despite Rational Collusion,” Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Chenwei Shi, (CCS’12), October 2012
- "A Reference Architecture for Mobile Code Offload in Hostile Environments," Simanta, S., Lewis, G., Morris, E., Ha, K., Satyanarayanan, M, Fourth International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCase’12), October 2012
- "HAT: Heterogeneous Adaptive Throttling for On-Chip Networks," Kevin Chang, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Chris Fallin, and Onur Mutlu, Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, October 2012
- “Discovering Structure in Unstructured I/O,” Jun He, John Bent, Aaron Torres, Gary Grider, Garth Gibson, Carlos Maltzahn, and Xian-He Sun, Proc. of the Seventh Parallel Data Storage Workshop (PDSW12), co-located with the Int. Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC12), November 2012
- “A Case for Scaling HPC Metadata Performance through De-specialization,” Swapnil Patil, Kai Ren, Garth Gibson, Proc. of the Seventh Parallel Data Storage Workshop (PDSW12), co-located with the Int. Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC12), November 2012
- “TABLEFS: Embedding a NoSQL Database inside the Local File System,” Kai Ren and Garth Gibson, 1st Storage System, Hard Disk and Solid State Technologies Summit, IEEE Asia-Pacific Magnetic Recording Conference (APMRC), November 2012
- "AutoScale: Dynamic, Robust Capacity Management for Multi-Tier Data Centers," Anshul Gandhi, Mor Harchol-Balter, Ram Raghunathan, and Mike Kozuch, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) vol. 30, No. 4, Article 14, 2012
- "VScope: Middleware for Troubleshooting Time-Sensitive Data Center Applications,” Chengwei Wang, Infantdani Abel Rayan, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, Vanish Talwar, Matthew Wolf, and Chad Huneycutt, ACM Middleware (Middleware’12), December 2012
- “SOFTScale: Stealing Opportunistically For Transient Scaling,” Anshul Gandhi, Timothy Zhu, Mor Harchol-Balter, and Michael A. Kozuch, ACM Middleware (Middleware’12), December 2012
- “Faster, Larger, Easier: Reining Real-Time Big Data Processing in Data Centers”, Chengwei Wang, Infantdani Abel Rayan, and Karsten Schwan, ACM Middleware (Middleware’12) Poster Session, December 2012
- “Theia: Visual Signatures for Problem Diagnosis in Large Hadoop Clusters,” Elmer Garduno, Soila P. Kavulya, Jiaqi Tan, Rajeev Gandhi, Priya Narasimhan, USENIX Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA’12), December 2012. Best Student Paper Award
List of presentations
In addition to the conference/workshop presentations associated with each of the published conference/workshop papers listed above, we had the following presentations:
- Garth Gibson (CMU) gave the keynote talk at the Storage System, Hard Disk and Solid State Technologies Summit, co-located with the Asia-Pacific Magnetic Recording Conference (APMRC), Singapore, November 1
- Dan Siewiorek (CMU) presented “Virtual Coaches in Healthcare, A Vision of the Future, NSF Directorate” for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture, Washington, DC, September 20
- Dan Siewiorek (CMU) gave an overview of Virtual Coaches at the WPASH Retreat, Nemacolin, PA, September 24
- Ada Gavrilovska(Georgia Tech) presented “Experiences from Fighting the Cloud Management Wars at Scale” at the VMware Research Symposium, September 26
- Karsten Schwan(Georgia Tech) did a panel presentation at VMware Research Symposium: Big Data Panel, September 26
- Ada Gavrilovska(Georgia Tech) presented “OpenCirrus as a datacenter research instrument” at the NSF workshop on Instrumentation-as-a-Service for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
- Karsten Schwan(Georgia Tech) presented “Managing Applications on Exascale Machines“ at the DOE ExaOS workshop in Washington DC, September
- Dan Siewiorek (CMU) gave a keynote talk “Overview of the Quality of Life Technology Center: Six Years of Progress,” at Fourth International Symposium on QoLT, Incheon, Korea, October 31
- Dan Siewiorek (CMU) gave a keynote talk “Human System Interaction in QoLT” at the Fourth International Symposium on Rehabilitation Research, Incheon, Korea, November 1
- Dan Siewiorek (CMU) gave an invited talk on Virtual Coaches in Health Care at Sangnam Institute of Management, Yonsie University, Seoul, Korea, November 2
- Hyeontaek Lim (CMU grad student) gave a talk at Facebook on the SILT work
- Phil Gibbons (Intel Labs), “Trumping the Multicore Memory Hierarchy with Hi-Spade,” at Georgia Tech CSE Seminar, November 7
- Michael Kozuch (Intel Labs), “Don’t Overspend in the Datacenter: Dynamic Resource Scaling Techniques for Internet Services,” at the Penn State CSE Colloquium, November
- Mike Freedman (Princeton) presented “Performance Isolation and Fairness for Multi-Tennant Cloud Storage” at UC Berkeley, Systems Seminar, December 4