What Usenix Can Do for Students

Jun 17, 2009 Conferences, Grad School Leave a comment

After the Usenix ATC welcome session tonight there was a brief Students BoF meeting to discuss what students get out of Usenix (both the organization and its conferences). We talked a fair amount about the idea of student conferences run by students, which I think is a very good idea. The main issue seems to be one of transportation – if it is a national conference, then only people with sufficient funding will be able to get to it, but if it is a regional conference, then only regions with a high density of students (ie the North East and California) will be capable of gathering a big enough crowd.

I still think this is an idea worth pursuing, although it probably works best at the regional level which will sadly leave out a lot of people in the middle of the country. I know that many AI students in my department attend NESCAI (the North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence held at Cornell each year), and find it very useful since it gives them a chance to practice presenting their work and networking with other people in a low stress environment. It was repeated several times during the discussion that the “hallway track” at Usenix can be the most valuable part, but many students miss out on that because it can be a bit intimidating to strike up conversations, especially with faculty or industry researchers. Giving students opportunities to practice that at a conference just among their peers would be very helpful. For the students helping with conference organization, they would be exposed to reviewing and how program committees work, experience which is normally very hard to acquire as a graduate student.  I don’t think that Usenix would have too much trouble finding students to help organize such a venture, and I’d be tempted to volunteer myself.

On a more broader note, I feel like Usenix currently does a great job in these areas:

• Technical research: Usenix ATC provides a forum for the presentation of top quality academic and industrial research. I consider it a great venue for any type of general systems work with strong technical components.
• Mixing industry and academia: In my (relatively limited) experience, Usenix ATC is the conference with closest to an even match between academics and industry professionals. This is good since both sides need the other, but in most other conferences I’ve seen their is a clear majority in one direction or the other.

Other areas that Usenix could expand on to better support students are:

• Graduate student development: offer tutorials or seminars on topics like research methods or personal organization (ie systems like GTD). A professor in my department teaches a research methods course which was incredibly helpful for me, and I know he has given 1 hour talks on the subject at other schools to rave reviews. These are the kinds of things that graduate students currently are learning on the job through trial and error, and it is much better to just have them taught to you upfront. I’m not sure how well this would fit at something like ATC, but it would definitely be ideal for a student conference, and even just lists of online resources could help.
• Insights into academia: this would include things like organizing student run conferences or shadow PCs that allow students to get a better idea of what keeps their advisors busy when they aren’t meeting with us. Learning how to review papers helps us become more critical (in a good way) of all the other papers we read, letting us get more out of them than we would otherwise.
• Realtime research updates: I wish I had a list of blogs written by systems researchers. Usenix could help organize this by at least setting up a list of links to all blog posts written about their conferences (you can start with my notes from HotCloud!). I want to know what other researchers are thinking about, and I also want to be updated whenever people in my area publish new pieces of work (currently I rely on elaborate mechanisms that automatically check the publicaion webpages of the top people in my field to see if they change each day).  Obviously for this to be fully useful, it needs to support more than just Usenix conferences and workshops, and the updates need to be propagated when papers are accepted, not four months later when they are presented.  Usenix’s push into social networks may help with this too, although I’ll admit that I haven’t “friended” Usenix yet, so I’m not sure…

That’s all I can think of for now, and I’m still on east-coast time, so I need to get to sleep.

Hot Cloud 2009

Jun 15, 2009 Cloud Computing, Conferences 1 Comment

Here are my notes on some of the interesting talks at Hot Cloud 2009. The full list of talks and papers are available at the hot cloud site. There were interesting talks on a variety of topics, but my notes here focus mostly on cloud platforms and work around resource provisioning from the first half of the day.

Open Cirrus Cloud Computing Testbed: Federated Data Centers for Open Source Systems and Services Research

Roy Campbell, Indranil Gupta, Michael Heath, and Steven Y. Ko, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Michael Kozuch, Intel Research; Marcel Kunze, KIT, Germany; Thomas Kwan, Yahoo!; Kevin Lai, HP Labs; Hing Yan Lee, IDA, Singapore; Martha Lyons and Dejan Milojicic, HP Labs; David O’Hallaron, Intel Research; Yeng Chai Soh, IDA, Singapore

This is a very large (more than 10K nodes spread across 9 sites) testbed being setup by HP and others to study large scale cloud computing problems. They are focusing on computation provisioning issues, and can provide users with either full physical or virtual resources.

Nebulas: Using Distributed Voluntary Resources to Build Clouds

Abhishek Chandra and Jon Weissman, University of Minnesota

The idea here is to explore the potential for creating peer-to-peer style cloud computing platforms that uses resources provided by volunteers similar to something like SETI @home.  I like this idea a lot, but there have been many attempts at making things like volunteer based network file systems which never quite took off, and this seems even harder.  The difficulty will be determining what the basic platform that people are given access to is like (ie. can you run any app you want within some VM, or is it a specific platform you must develop your app against to make it work), and how do you make the resources shared by users not impact their own application performance.  People are pretty willing to share network bandwidth and disk space, but that is because those are generally over provisioned resources.  CPU is over-provisioned in a different way — most of the time desktop users use only a fraction of the power provided by their system, but when they do decied to go do something computation intensive, they expect it to respond quickly.  This also reminds me of the “transparent memory contribution” work done by Jim Cipar when he was still at UMass, since it had to deal with similar issues of volunteering resources in as transparent a way as possible.

The Case for Enterprise-Ready Virtual Private Clouds

Timothy Wood and Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Alexandre Gerber, K.K. Ramakrishnan, and Jacobus Van der Merwe, AT&T Labs—Research

I thought this paper was really great, but maybe I’m biased since I wrote it.  I’ve written a separate blog post about my own work, but the gist is that current cloud computing platforms are insufficient for enterprise users, and we propose using network virtualization techniques to make seamless and secure connections between the cloud resources and enterprise sites.

ElasTraS: An Elastic Transactional Data Store in the Cloud

Sudipto Das, Divyakant Agrawal, and Amr El Abbadi, University of California, Santa Barbara

The idea here is that databases currently don’t scale well into the cloud.  Instead people are using simpler (but more easily scaled) key-value stores to keep track of data in the cloud.  This doesn’t work well because key stores don’t provide the transaction and consistency features of real databases. They propose Elastras – a scalable, trasactional data store based around the idea of partitioned databases. It wasn’t clear how difficult the problem of determining how to partition data is in the first place, as it tends to be application specific.

Reflective Control for an Elastic Cloud Application: An Automated Experiment Workbench

Azbayar Demberel, Jeff Chase, and Shivnath Babu, Duke University

The idea of reflection is to make an application change its behavior based on the available resources.  This could be based on energy or computation resources.  This lets you opportunistically exploit surplus resources, and to defer work during congestion. An example of a reflective application is a digital experiment (generally has large data sets, can be partitioned, does not have strong time requirements). Seems to me like this is useful for any batch processing style application.  The work focuses on figuring out how to determine the utility of running different experiments depending on what resources are available, which may be very difficult since the experiment design space can be huge. It seems to me that the idea of reflective applications is useful even at a more basic level to both let applications be aware of what resources are available and for service providers to know what applications desire.

Colocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management

Jorge Londoño, Azer Bestavros, and Shang-Hua Teng, Boston University

This paper explores the placement problem within data centers using game theory techniques. In general they find that a Nash Equilibrium will not be reached, but that in a restricted environments it will always converge.  I’ll be interested to look through their results more carefully to better understand how the potential for multiplexing resources in these environments can be reduced based on the self-interests of users.

Virtual Putty: Reshaping the Physical Footprint of Virtual Machines

Jason Sonnek and Abhishek Chandra, University of Minnesota

The idea here is that the physical footprint required by a VM can vary depending on its environment. For example, VMs colocated together may be able to share memory, or may require much fewer network resources if they can put on the same LAN. To exploit this, you need to estimate the “virtual” footprint of a VM that captures how its physical requirements can change depending on its environment.  The first challenge here is to efficiently capture this model — you will only be able to get a significant benefit from this kind of technique if it is being applied across a very large number of VMs (my memory sharing work suggests this as well). Second is the issue of determining how to deal with applications changing over time – memory and network communication patterns may change over time, so how often do you need to recompute the footprint?

Statistical Machine Learning Makes Automatic Control Practical for Internet Datacenters

Peter Bodík, Rean Griffith, Charles Sutton, Armando Fox, Michael Jordan, and David Patterson, University of California, Berkeley

The goal here is to model application performance and automate management online. Models are based on data gathered from the system as it is running, allowing it to be adapted as more data is produced. Has some automated techniques to detect phase shifts in application type that will require a new model. The problem with these systems is always a question of how well they can deal with data that is outside of their training data.  One of this system’s benefits is supposed to be that it doesn’t rely on training data produced from experimental setups, and instead builds the model on the fly as data is gathered. Bbut of course that may mean that the models are only really applicable for “normal” operating conditions, and that it will not be able to make reasonable predictions for what will happen after a load spike.

Other Hot Cloud Reports

I’ll add any other hot cloud blogs or reports as I find them (or comment below).

• NetworkWorld 5 Cool Cloud Computing Research Projects – sadly does not mention me… ;]

Hot Cloud 2009: The Case for Enterprise Ready Virtual Private Clouds

Jun 15, 2009 Cloud Computing, Papers 1 Comment

The work I presented at Hot Cloud was about what enterprise customers need from cloud computing platforms, and how we can go about building enterprise clouds that are more secure, transparent, and flexible.

You can find a copy of our paper here, and my slides here. Or you can get a summary of our ideas below.

Here are the three key features we feel are lacking from existing cloud platforms:

Security: Enterprises need strong security guarantees about the isolation of both the computation and network resources they are getting from the cloud. Existing systems rely on firewall rules for security that must be configured on a per-VM basis. While firewalls are a very powerful form of access control, they are incredibly fine grain and need to be carefully configured. This is a especially a problem in highly dynamic (ie. cloud) environments where new VMs are often being created or moved between servers.

Transparency: Another problem with cloud computing is that the resources it gives you are completely separated from the systems an enterprise is already running within its data centers. This makes it difficult to deploy applications since you can’t get the abstraction of having your cloud resources seamlessly connected to your existing LANs within the enterprise.

Resource Flexibility: There are two issues here. First, existing cloud platforms grant users very limited control over the network resources connected to their VMs.  This means, for example, that it is impossible to do something like reserve a high bandwidth link between a pair of VMs, and certainly not between a VM and the enterprise site that is going to be accessing it. Secondly, cloud platforms are not as flexible as they should be: if you replicate a VM to increase the processing power of an application you need to deal with these security and transparency issues all over again.

To help provide these three features, we propose the idea of a Virtual Private Cloud, that uses VPNs to securely connect groups of VMs within a cloud data center back to the enterprise sites that will use them.  VPNs make it so that the cloud resources are only accessible by other members of the same VPN.  This is a much coarser grain access control mechanism than firewalls, but it is much cleaner and we use MPLS based VPNs that have the benefit of being both highly scalable for enterprises that may run many hundreds or thousands of VMs, and that require no endhost configuration on the VMs — the VPN is entirely setup at the routers at the cloud and enterprise sites.  Finally, there is the option of using layer 2 VPNs (a Virtual Private LAN Service) to bridge the cloud computing data center and enterprise networks, giving the abstraction that cloud resources are seamlessly connected to the enterprise’s own LAN.

We are building a system that will implement this sort of system, and are exploring how it can be used to simplify VM migration over the WAN and for providing high availability services capable of seamlessly failing an application over from one cloud data center to another.

Quick Tips: Adding a Fancy Header in Latex

May 16, 2009 Latex Leave a comment

I’ve recently been pumping out a lot of technical report versions of my papers to add to our department’s library. Here is some code I copied from a former student in my lab to produce fancy headers at the top of each page in a latex document.  This would probably work well for adding copyright notifications as well.


\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancyhf{}
\fancypagestyle{plain}{% define header for first page of document
\fancyhead[L]{University of XXX, Technical Report 2009-YY}
\fancyhead[R]{\thepage}
}
%Header for remaining pages in document
\fancyhead[L]{University of XXX, Technical Report 2009-YY}
\fancyhead[R]{\thepage}

You can replace the “University of XXX” bit with whatever you want to appear at the top of each page.  The first declaration defines the header for the document’s title page, the second is used for all remaining pages. More details on the fancyhdr package are here.

Quick Tips: Latex QED symbol

May 15, 2009 Latex Leave a comment

Some Latex document styles include a definition for a QED symbol (typically a box), but others do not.  If you are using a style that doesn’t come with one, you can quickly add your own definition of QED, just add:

\newcommand{\qed}{\hfill \mbox{\raggedright \rule{.07in}{.1in}}}

at the start of your document, and then you can use \qed to make the symbol wherever you need.

Speeding Up Migration with Page Sharing

May 8, 2009 Memory, Virtualization Leave a comment

Update: Looking at this now, I’ve definitely become fully convinced that it is a good idea.  Clearly you need to be a little careful that your pages match up at each end, but as long as you keep an intelligent cache at each end, you definitely should be able to significantly reduce the amount of migration traffic due to duplicate memory contents.

Kevin Lawton (author of old-school virtualization tool Bochs), recently wrote an article (and followup) on how you could speed up VM migration in a data center by exploiting things like page duplication between the source and destination machines.  The idea is that a lot of VMs have common memory pages that you wouldn’t actually need to copy over.  He references some of my own work that looked at the amount of sharing that actually occurs between VMs, the first (but hopefully not last) time I’ve ever seen a link to one of my papers in a random blog post in my RSS feed!

The only problem I see has to do with detecting when pages are truly identical. When you do page sharing between VMs on a single host, you detect the similarity by producing a short (32 or 64 bit) hash for each page in memory. If you scan two pages and they produce the same hash, then those pages are very likely identical. I say “very likely“, because it could just be a hash collision, and you need to actually scan all the bits in each page before you can truly know that the two pages are identical.

When you do this on a single machine, it’s not too big a deal to scan two pages and compare their bits, but if you are trying to verify that pages on the source and destination of a migration are identical, it is a big problem. Obviously you can’t just copy the page over the network to do the comparison, since that is what you were trying to avoid in the first place. I guess the only solution is to use a longer hash value (thus reducing the chance for collisions) and really hope that you don’t have a malicious VM at the destination that is trying to corrupt your memory by purposefully creating memory pages that will collide with your content.

I think it is a neat idea that would generally work in practice, but you will need a pretty smart cache at each end to make sure your really keeping the pages consistent.

Another idea would be to use a “post copy” based approach that tries to get the VM started up on the destination machine as quickly as possible, deferring copying most memory pages until after it has already started.  You might be able to use this to quickly unload a host that is approaching the overload limit, although the migrated VMs may see a larger performance penalty because of how the migration technique works.

The End of Desktops (and all your applications)

May 7, 2009 Cloud Computing 2 Comments

I have to agree with Google’s Eric Schmidt about the importance of cloud services on the future of everyday computing. Desktop style applications that run entirely on your own computer don’t have much life left because 1) people will have too many different devices, so keeping them all synced with local storage is a pain, 2) it’s easier for application developers to maintain a single online version of an app instead of dealing with pushing out updates and bug fixes to users, 3) forcing users to go online to get an app prevents piracy, 4) applications can get as much or as little computation and storage power as they need from the cloud, 5) etc.  Sadly, I think it might be #3 that is the real motivation in the end for many companies.

Cloud based services are also better for the environment.  If the average everyday computer can be reduced down to a basic thin client for accessing remote cloud services, that reduces the cost and energy usage of home devices.  The applications running in the cloud can in turn exploit massive degrees of multiplexing to reduce their own energy costs.  As it stands today, most peple’s computers are far more powerful than they really need to be, and they spend a lot of time sitting around idle.  You might as well give consumers devices that are as simple as possible.  Make them so simple that they don’t crash all the time.   Make it so they don’t require technically adept family members to service them a few times a year. Then people will spend less time being frustrated by their computers, and more time able to use the applications running on them.

UMass Thesis Proposal Writing

May 4, 2009 Grad School, Latex Leave a comment

I’ve started writing my Ph.D proposal recently. It’s pretty exciting because it makes me realize that I actually have accomplished quite a bit since coming here–a good thing, since it has been 4 years already!  I also enjoy writing the proposal because you just need to cover the high level purpose of everything and can ignore all the gritty details. I’m pretty happy with the big picture I’m getting so far.

For future reference, you can get the Latex style file and template for the proposal/thesis from this site.

Clean Slate

May 3, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a comment

I started writing on this blog about a year ago, but never got anywhere with it.

Now I am giving it the old “reboot” and hopefully this time around I’ll turn it into something more useful.