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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