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CALL FOR PAPERS



13th Workshop on Virtualization in High­-Performance Cloud Computing  (VHPC '18)

held in conjunction with the International Supercomputing Conference - High Performance,

June 24-28, 2018, Frankfurt, Germany.

(Springer LNCS Proceedings)


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Date: June 28, 2018

Workshop URL: http://vhpc.org


Paper Submission Deadline: April 23, 2018, Springer LNCS, rolling abstract submission


Abstract/Paper Submission Link: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=24355


Special Track: GPU - Accelerator Virtualization



Call for Papers


Virtualization technologies constitute a key enabling factor for flexible resource management

in modern data centers, and particularly in cloud environments. Cloud providers need to

manage complex infrastructures in a seamless fashion to support the highly dynamic and

heterogeneous workloads and hosted applications customers deploy. Similarly, HPC

environments have been increasingly adopting techniques that enable flexible management

of vast computing and networking resources, close to marginal provisioning cost, which is

unprecedented in the history of scientific and commercial computing.


Various virtualization technologies contribute to the overall picture in different ways: machine

virtualization, with its capability to enable consolidation of multiple under­utilized servers with

heterogeneous software and operating systems (OSes), and its capability to live­-migrate a

fully operating virtual machine (VM) with a very short downtime, enables novel and dynamic

ways to manage physical servers; OS-­level virtualization (i.e., containerization), with its

capability to isolate multiple user­-space environments and to allow for their co­existence

within the same OS kernel, promises to provide many of the advantages of machine

virtualization with high levels of responsiveness and performance; I/O Virtualization allows

physical network interfaces to take traffic from multiple VMs or containers; network

virtualization, with its capability to create logical network overlays that are independent of the

underlying physical topology is furthermore enabling virtualization of HPC infrastructures.


Publication


Accepted papers will be published in a Springer LNCS proceedings volume.



Topics of Interest


The VHPC program committee solicits original, high-quality submissions related to

virtualization across the entire software stack with a special focus on the intersection of HPC

and the cloud.


Major Topics


- Virtualization in supercomputing environments, HPC clusters, HPC in the cloud and grids
- OS-level virtualization and containers (LXC, Docker, rkt, Singularity, Shifter, i.a.)
- Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with virtual machines

- Novel unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments

- Performance improvements for or driven by unikernels

- Tool support for unikernels: configuration/build environments, debuggers, profilers

- Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks

 ([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation)

- VM & Container trust and security

- Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation

- GPU virtualization operationalization

- Approaches to GPGPU virtualization including API remoting and hypervisor abstraction
- Optimizations of virtual machine monitor platforms and hypervisors
- Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
- Virtualization support for emerging memory technologies

- Virtualization in enterprise HPC and microvisors
- Software defined networks and network virtualization
- Management, deployment of virtualized environments and orchestration (Kubernetes i.a.)
- Workflow-pipeline container-based composability

- Checkpointing facilitation utilizing containers and VMs

- Emerging topics including multi-kernel approaches and NUMA in hypervisors

- Operating MPI in containers/VMs and Unikernels  

- Virtualization in data intensive computing (big data) - HPC convergence
- Adaptation of HPC technologies in the cloud (high performance networks, RDMA, etc.)
- Performance measurement, modelling and monitoring of virtualized/cloud workloads

- Latency-and jitter sensitive workloads in virtualized/containerized environments
- I/O virtualization (including applications, SR-IOV, i.a.)

- Hybrid local facility + cloud compute and based storage systems, cloudbursting

- FPGA and many-core accelerator virtualization
- Job scheduling/control/policy and container placement in virtualized environments
- Cloud reliability, fault-tolerance and high-availability
- QoS and SLA in virtualized environments
- IaaS platforms, cloud frameworks and APIs
- Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization

- Configuration management tools for containers (including in OpenStack, Ansible, i.a.)

- ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions



Special Track: GPU - Accelerator Virtualization

GPU virtualization technologies, performance and benchmarking, integration with

workflow scheduling systems, integration to cluster managers.


GPUs are taking on many HPC workload areas, especially in deep learning within

machine learning. In addition, a lot of workload is being pushed to elastic environments

utilizing various virtualization technologies on different levels like hypervisors

(e.g. VMWare, Xen, KVM), kernel (Docker, Kubernetes) or on the resource manager

level (YARN, Mesos). In this track we invite submissions addressing these problems.


Suggested Themes and Topics:


Technology - What technologies and best practices exist for GPU - hardware accelerator

virtualization and usage of hardware accelerators in virtual environments on the hypervisor,

kernel or resource manager level


Developers - Real-life experience when addressing HPC/ML/DL problems with GPUs or

hardware accelerators in virtual environments


Performance - Performance comparisons between different technologies / solutions



The Workshop on Virtualization in High­-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC) aims to

bring together researchers and industrial practitioners facing the challenges

posed by virtualization in order to foster discussion, collaboration, mutual exchange

of knowledge and experience, enabling research to ultimately provide novel

solutions for virtualized computing systems of tomorrow.


The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each

followed by 10 min discussion sections, plus lightning talks that are limited to 5 minutes.

Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.




Important Dates


February 23, 2018 (AoE) - Abstract Submission

April 23, 2018 (AoE) - Paper submission deadline (Springer LNCS)

May 30, 2018 - Acceptance notification

June 28, 2018 - Workshop Day

July 12, 2018 - Camera-ready version due



Chair


Michael Alexander (chair), Institute of Science and Technology, Austria

Anastassios Nanos (co-­chair), OnApp, UK

Romeo Kienzler (co-chair), IBM, Switzerland



Program committee


Stergios Anastasiadis, University of Ioannina, Greece

Jakob Blomer, CERN, Europe

Eduardo César, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

Stephen Crago, USC ISI, USA

Tommaso Cucinotta, St. Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy

Christoffer Dall, Columbia University, USA

François Diakhaté, CEA, France

Patrick Dreher, MIT, USA

Kyle Hale, Northwestern University, USA

Brian Kocoloski, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Uday Kurkure, VMware, USA

John Lange, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa, Italy

Qing Liu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA

Nikos Parlavantzas, IRISA, France

Kevin Pedretti, Sandia National Laboratories, USA

Amer Qouneh, Western New England University, USA

Carlos Reaño, Technical University of Valencia, Spain

Borja Sotomayor, University of Chicago, USA

Anata Tiwari, San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA

Kurt Tutschku, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

Yasuhiro Watashiba, Osaka University, Japan

Chao-Tung Yang, Tunghai University, Taiwan

Andrew Younge, Sandia National Laboratory, USA

Na Zhang, VMware, USA





Paper Submission-Publication


Papers submitted to the workshop will be reviewed by at least two

members of the program committee and external reviewers. Submissions

should include abstract, keywords, the e-mail address of the

corresponding author, and must not exceed 10 pages, including tables

and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 point. Submission

of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper

be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the

conference to present the work. Accepted papers will be published in a

Springer LNCS volume. .


The format must be according to the Springer LNCS Style. Initial

submissions are in PDF; authors of accepted papers will be requested

to provide source files.


Format Guidelines:

ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/llncs2e.zip


Abstract, Paper Submission Link:

https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=24355




Lightning Talks


Lightning Talks are non-paper track, synoptical in nature and are strictly limited to 5 minutes.

They can be used to gain early feedback on ongoing research, for demonstrations, to

present research results, early research ideas, perspectives and positions of interest to the

community. Submit abstract via the main submission link.



General Information


The workshop is one day in length and will be held in conjunction with the International

Supercomputing Conference - High Performance (ISC) 2018, June 18-22, Frankfurt,

Germany.