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CALL FOR PAPERS

16th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing
(VHPC 21) held in conjunction with the International Supercomputing
Conference - High Performance, June 24 - July 2, 2021, Zoom Online Event.
(Springer LNCS Proceedings)

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Date: July 2, 2021
Workshop URL: https://vhpc.org

Abstract Registration Deadline: February 15, 2021
Paper Submission Deadline: April 23, 2021(extended)
Springer LNCS


Online Zoom Event registration [free, limited slots]
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Ux8jRopGhCYku3Z_FFMfud3RLwMg4-DABE_EeqlLmAQ


Call for Papers


Containers and virtualization technologies constitute key enabling
factors 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.
Most recently, Function as a Service (Faas) and Serverless computing,
utilizing lightweight VMs-containers widen the spectrum of
applications that can be deployed in a cloud environment, especially
in an HPC context. Here, HPC-provided services become accessible
to distributed workloads outside of large cluster environments.

Various virtualization-containerization 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; lastly, unikernels provide
for many virtualization benefits with a minimized OS/library surface.
I/O Virtualization in turn 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, containers-virtualization
and the cloud.


Major Topics:
- HPC workload orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Kubernetes HPC batch
- HPC Rootless Container Environments Landscape
- HW Heterogeneity
- Container ecosystem
- Networking
- Lightweight Virtualization
- Unikernels / LibOS
- State-of-the-art processor virtualization (RISC-V, EPI)
- Containerizing HPC Stacks/Apps/Codes:
Climate model containers

each major topic encompassing design/architecture, management,
performance management, modeling and configuration/tooling.
Specifically, we invite papers that deal with the following topics:

- HPC orchestration (Kubernetes, Virtualizing Kubernetes for HPC, Deployment paradigms
- Multitenancy
- Serverless
- Declarative data center integration
- Network provisioning
- Storage
- OCI i.a. images
- Isolation/security
- HW Accelerators, including GPUs, FPGAs, AI, and others
- State-of-practice/art, including transition to cloud
- Frameworks, system software
- Programming models, runtime systems, and APIs to facilitate cloud
adoption
- Edge use-cases
- Application adaptation, success stories
- Kubernetes Batch (Scheduling / job management, Execution paradigm - workflow, Data management, Deployment, Multi-cluster/scalability, performance, Workflow / execution paradigm)
- End-to-end rootless Docker alternative container environment & use-cases
- Creating, Running containers as non-root (rootless)
- Running rootless containers with MPI
- Container live migration
- Running containers in restricted environments without setuid
- Networking (SDN / NVF, SR-IOV, Network Slicing & provisioning, polling, federated learning OS abstractions).
- Lightweight Virtualization (Micro VMMs: Rust-VMM / AWS Firecracker / solo5, Xen, KVM, Nitro, RVirt, Rust based hypervisors / Cloud Hypervisor / Novel hypervisors
- Unikernels / LibOS
- HPC Storage in Virtualization
- HPC container storage
- Cloud-native storage
- Hypervisors in storage virtualization
- Processor Virtualization
- RISC-V (hypervisor extensions / ports / IOMMU specification)
- EPI
- Composable HPC microservices
- Merging of high throughput computing and HPC
- Novel schedulers for job to data placement
- Containerizing Scientific Codes (Building / Deploying / Securing / Storage / Monitoring)
- High performance containers
- Portability of containers/images, impact on performance
- Use case for containerizing HPC codes:
Climate model containers for portability, reproducibility,
traceability, immutability, provenance, data & software preservation


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

Rolling Abstract registration (extended)
April 23, 2021 - Paper submission deadline (extended) (Springer LNCS)
May 3, 2021 - Acceptance notification
July 2, 2021 - Workshop Day
July 10th, 2021 - Camera-ready version due


Chair

Michael Alexander (chair), BOKU, Vienna, Austria
Anastassios Nanos (co-chair), Nubis, Greece


Program committee

Stergios Anastasiadis, University of Ioannina, Greece
Paolo Bonzini, Red Hat, Italy
Jakob Blomer, CERN, Europe
Eduardo César, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Taylor Childers, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Stephen Crago, USC ISI, USA
Tommaso Cucinotta, St. Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy
François Diakhaté CEA DAM Ile de France, France
Balazs Gerofi, RIKEN, Japan
Kyle Hale, Northwestern University, USA
Brian Kocoloski, Washington University, USA
Simon Kuenzer, NEC Laboratories Europe, Germany
Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa, Italy
Klaus Ma, Huawei Technologies, China
Alberto Madonna, Swiss National Supercomputing Center, Switzerland
Nikos Parlavantzas, IRISA, France
Anup Patel, Western Digital, USA
Kevin Pedretti, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
Amer Qouneh, Western New England University, USA
Carlos Reaño, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Riccardo Rocha, CERN, Europe
Borja Sotomayor, University of Chicago, USA
Jonathan Sparks, Cray, USA
Kurt Tutschku, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
John Walters, USC ISI, USA
Yasuhiro Watashiba, Osaka University, Japan
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, 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.


Abstract, Paper Submission Link:
https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=28004


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)
2021, June 24 - July 2.