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CALL FOR PAPERS


9th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC '14)


held in conjunction with Euro-Par 2014, August 25-29, Porto, Portugal


(Springer LNCS)

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Date: August 26, 2014

Workshop URL: http://vhpc.org


Paper Submission Deadline: June 9, 2014 (extended)


Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Ron Brightwell, Sandia National Laboratory

Hobbes: Using Virtualization to Enable Exascale Applications

and

Helge Meinhard, CERN



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 dynamically manage complex infrastructures in a

seamless fashion for varying workloads and hosted applications, independently of

the customers deploying software or users submitting highly dynamic and

heterogeneous workloads. Thanks to virtualization, we have the ability to manage

vast computing and networking resources dynamically and close to the marginal

cost of providing the services, 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

under-utilized 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, with its capability to isolate multiple user-space

environments and to allow for their co-existence 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
NICs/HBAs to take traffic from multiple VMs; network virtualization, with its
capability to create logical network overlays that are independent of the

underlying physical topology and IP addressing, provides the fundamental

ground on top of which evolved network services can be realized with an

unprecedented level of dynamicity and flexibility; the increasingly adopted

paradigm of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) promises to extend this

flexibility to the control and data planes of network paths.  These technologies

have to be inter-mixed and integrated in an intelligent way, to support

workloads that are increasingly demanding in terms of absolute performance,

responsiveness and interactivity, and have to respect well-specified Service-

Level Agreements (SLAs), as needed for industrial-grade provided services.

Indeed, among emerging and increasingly interesting application domains

for virtualization, we can find big-data application workloads in cloud

infrastructures, interactive and real-time multimedia services in the cloud,

including real-time big-data streaming platforms such as used in real-time

analytics supporting nowadays a plethora of application domains. Distributed

cloud infrastructures promise to offer unprecedented responsiveness levels for

hosted applications, but that is only possible if the underlying virtualization

technologies can overcome most of the latency impairments typical of current

virtualized infrastructures (e.g., far worse tail-latency). What is more, in data

communications Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is becoming a key

technology enabling a shift from supplying hardware-based network functions,

to providing them in a software-based and elastic way. In conjunction with

(public and private) cloud technologies, NFV may be used for constructing the

foundation for cost-effective network functions that can easily and seamlessly

adapt to demand, still keeping their major carrier-grade characteristics in terms

of QoS and reliability.


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, and lightning talks, limited to 5

minutes. Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.


TOPICS


Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


- Management, deployment and monitoring of virtualized environments

- Language-process virtual machines

- Performance monitoring for virtualized/cloud workloads

- Virtual machine monitor platforms

- Topology management and optimization for distributed virtualized applications

- Paravirtualized I/O

- Improving I/O and network virtualization including use of RDMA, Infiniband, PCIe

- Improving performance in VM access to GPUs, GPU clusters, GP-GPUs

- HPC storage virtualization

- Virtualized systems for big-data and analytics workloads

- Optimizations and enhancements to OS virtualization support

- Improving OS-level virtualization and its integration within cloud management

- Performance modelling for virtualized/cloud applications

- Heterogeneous virtualized environments

- Parallel virtualized - virtualization aware file systems

- Network virtualization

- Software defined networking

- Network function virtualization

- Hypervisor and network virtualization QoS and SLAs

- Cloudbursting

- Evolved European grid architectures including such based on network virtualization

- Workload characterization for VM-based environments

- Optimized communication libraries/protocols in the cloud

- System and process/bytecode VM convergence

- Cloud frameworks and APIs

- Checkpointing/migration of VM-based large compute jobs

- Job scheduling/control/policy with VMs

- Instrumentation interfaces and languages

- VMM performance (auto-)tuning on various load types

- Cloud reliability, fault-tolerance, and security

- Research, industrial and educational use cases

- Virtualization in cloud, cluster and grid environments

- Cross-layer VM optimizations

- Cloud HPC use cases including optimizations

- Services in cloud HPC

- Hypervisor extensions and tools for cluster and grid computing

- Cluster provisioning in the cloud

- Performance and cost modelling

- Languages for describing highly-distributed compute jobs

- VM cloud and cluster distribution algorithms, load balancing

- Instrumentation interfaces and languages

- Energy-aware virtualization


Important Dates


Rolling Paper registration

June 9, 2014 - Full paper submission (extended)

July 4, 2014 - Acceptance notification

October 3, 2014 - Camera-ready version due


August 26, 2014 - Workshop Date



TPC


CHAIR


Michael Alexander (chair), TU Wien, Austria

Anastassios Nanos (co-chair), NTUA, Greece

Tommaso Cucinotta (co-chair), Bell Labs, Dublin, Ireland


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Costas Bekas, IBM

Jakob Blomer, CERN

Roberto Canonico, University of Napoli Federico II, Italy

Piero Castoldi, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

Paolo Costa, MS Research Cambridge, England

Jorge Ejarque Artigas, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain

William Gardner, University of Guelph, USA

Balazs Gerofi, University of Tokyo, Japan

Krishna Kant, Temple University, USA

Romeo Kinzler, IBM

Nectarios Koziris, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa, Italy

Jean-Marc Menaud, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France

Christine Morin, INRIA, France

Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, Queen's University of Belfast, UK

Herbert Poetzl, VServer, Austria

Luigi Rizzo, University of Pisa, Italy

Josh Simons, VMware, USA

Borja Sotomayor, University of Chicago, USA

Vangelis Tasoulas, Simula Research Lab, Norway

Yoshio Turner, HP Labs, USA

Kurt Tutschku, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

Chao-Tung Yang, Tunghai University, Taiwan



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, key words, 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 the Springer LNCS series - 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:

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html


EasyChair Abstract Submission Link:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=europar2014ws


GENERAL INFORMATION


The workshop is one day in length and will be held in conjunction with
Euro-Par 2014, 25-29 August, Porto, Portugal