Muli Ben-Yehuda

interesting call for papers

2009-11-17T19:38:28Z

I have been remiss in updating this thing recently. In penance, I offer you these interesting call for papers from conferences that you should, without a doubt, submit your best papers to:

The 2nd Workshop on I/O Virtualization, which I will be co-chairing, will be co-located with ASPLOS 2010 and VEE 2010 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in March 2010. Once again we will be looking for ground-breaking and thought-provoking papers in I/O virtualization, although if your paper is only ground-breaking or only thought provoking, that's fine too.

The 24th International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS'10) will be held in Japan (Japan!) in June 2010. We are soliciting papers on all aspects of research, development, and application of high-performance experimental and commercial systems. This will be my first time on the ICS PC, and I am looking forward to the experience.

Last but certainly not least, SYSTOR 2010---The 3rd Annual Haifa Experimental Systems Conference, will be held once again in Haifa in May, 2010, and you should all come visit.

More later.

SYSTOR 2009 Call for Participation

2009-04-07T13:04:17Z

                   CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

    SYSTOR 2009---The Israeli Experimental Systems Conference
       http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/conferences/systor2009/
                        4-6 May 2009
                        Haifa, Israel

Registration deadline: May 2nd

SYSTOR 2009, the Israeli Experimental Systems Conference, will be held
at IBM Haifa Labs, in Haifa, Israel. The conference program will run
over three days, combining the forefront of academic systems research
with real-world systems developed in industry. The goal of the
conference is to promote systems research and to foster stronger ties
between the Israeli and worldwide systems research communities and
industry. Conference proceedings will be published by ACM in the ACM
Digital Library.

There is a limited number of seats available on a
first-come-first-served basis upon registration at
http://www.haifa.ibm.com/conferences/systor2009/registration.shtml
(registration is free of charge). Lunch and refreshments will be
served on all three days courtesy of IBM Haifa Labs.

The first day of the conference will feature sessions on distributed
systems, concurrency, and power management. Marc Snir, University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign, will give a keynote talk, and in the
afternoon a student poster session with sweet refreshments will be
held.

The second day will begin with the keynote "Towards Invisible Storage"
by Alain Azagury, Director, XIV Business Executive, IBM, and an
invited talk on "The Next Generation Data Center" by Michael Kagan,
Mellanox CTO. After the morning talks, there will be paper sessions
focusing on data de-duplication and storage issues. The day will end
with an optional social event in Caesarea.

The third day will conclude the conference with paper sessions on
virtualization and system optimizations, and a panel of well-known
systems researchers who will debate "What is Systems Research about
and is it Relevant?" The full program for all three days is available
on the conference website.

We look forward to seeing you at SYSTOR 2009!

SYSTOR Advisory Committee
    * Marc Auslander, IBM
    * Ken Birman, Cornell
    * Danny Dolev, HUJI
    * Julian Satran, IBM
    * Marc Snir, UIUC
    * Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL

Program Chairs
    * Michael Factor, IBM
    * Dror Feitelson, HUJI

General Chair
    * Miriam Allalouf, IBM

Publicity Chair
    * Muli Ben Yehuda, IBM

Publication Chair
    * Gregory Chockler, IBM

miscellany

2009-04-04T21:14:13Z

I want to update this thing more often, but there's so much going on, the days filled with action and counter-action, that before I know it it's past midnight, and I have to wake up at 5 AM for a workout, and updating the blog is left on the TODO list for yet another day. Like, today.

So, content?

I've been a manager for a month and change now, managing the virtualization and systems architecture group at the lab. It's an interesting challenge (which is why I agreed to do it), often frustrating, occasionally exhilarating. To my surprise, the part I like most is dealing with human beings in their myriad forms. To my non-surprise, the part I like least is the bureaucracy, but I figured I'd wait a couple more months before I start tilting at wind-mills. I still write code (well, debug code, mostly) and conduct research, but it's no longer the most important part of my day.

On the research front, we had two papers accepted to ICAC 2009 (one full paper and one short paper/poster), both in the general area of treating virtual machines as black boxes and inferring useful things about them---performance bottlenecks and boot-time--via statistical analysis of their inputs and outputs. Another paper, on the DMA mapping problem in direct assignment, was not accepted to USENIX ATC to my disappointment, and we are now revising it while looking for a new home.

I am continuing to work out twice a week with a private trainer who is seriously kicking my butt. It's rare when I don't finish a workout on the brink of exhaustion, drenched in sweat. I *love* it. Twice a week is no longer enough---I crave the endorphin rushes and sore muscles---so I've also re-started going for long walks, and hitting the punching bag in the back-yard like I really mean it. The kilograms are coming off, too, an added bonus.

Last but not least, SYSTOR 2009 is coming up next month, with a great program combining academic research and real-world systems. See y'all there!

mulix @ 2009-01-28T05:50:00

2009-01-28T03:52:03Z

It's 5:40 AM. I am is sitting in an empty room full of half-assembled furniture, waiting for the personal trainer to arrive and whip my ass into shape.

mulix @ 2008-12-23T23:21:00

2008-12-23T21:21:41Z

There will be a half-day workshop at the Technion's EE department on Thursday afternoon on "Technology Transfer - from Academy to Industry" which looks mildly interesting. I am on nominally on vacation this week and flying to Italy that night, but perhaps I'll go anyway. Anyone else planning to go?

Scalable I/O paper online

2008-12-10T19:18:25Z

Our new paper is online: "Scalable I/O---A Well-Architected Way to Do Scalable, Secure and Virtualized I/O", by Julian Satran, Leah Shalev, Muli Ben-Yehuda, and Zorik Machulsky. This is an overview paper showcasing the main ideas underlying a system we've been working on on and off since 2004. It's not as detailed as I would've liked due to the space constraints, but hopefully it will be followed by more detailed papers. The slides I'll be presenting later today at WIOV '08 are also available and go into a bit more details in areas.

Today in both virtualized and non-virtualized systems the entire I/O functionality is based on device drivers. They are central to any system structure; both anecdotal and informed evidence indicates device drivers as a major source of trouble in the classical OS and a source of scaling and performance issues in virtual I/O, due to "trusted intermediary" required for the shared I/O. We propose an architecture which virtualizes the entire I/O subsystem rather than each I/O device, and provides device-independent I/O at higher level of abstraction than the traditional I/O interfaces. In our suggested architecture the system robustness is increased by isolating drivers; efficient and scalable virtualization becomes possible by a complete separation of the I/O and compute function and introducing a protection model that does not require a trusted intermediary for I/O.

new IOMMU paper available

2008-11-24T18:35:51Z

New online for your perusing pleasure: "Direct Device Assignment for Untrusted Fully-Virtualized Virtual Machines", by Ben-Ami Yassour, Muli Ben-Yehuda and Orit Wasserman, IBM Research Report H-0263.

This is a short paper describing and evaluating our work earlier this year on direct device assignment in KVM, using Intel's VT-d IOMMU. Not much new here if you've read our other IOMMU papers, but it does make two contributions. First, it's the best (and only) available description (IMHO) of KVM's direct device assignment code, and second it's yet another data point on the relative performance of device emulation vs. virtual I/O drivers vs. direct device assignment. As always, comments appreciated. The abstract follows.

The I/O interfaces between a host platform and a guest virtual machine take one of three forms: either the hypervisor provides the guest with emulation of hardware devices, or the hypervisor provides virtual I/O drivers, or the hypervisor assigns a selected subset of the host's real I/O devices directly to the guest. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, but letting VMs access devices directly has a number of particularly interesting benefits, such as not requiring any guest VM changes and in theory providing near-native performance.
In an effort to quantify the benefits of direct device access, we have implemented direct device assignment for untrusted, fully-virtualized virtual machines in the Linux/KVM environment using Intel's VT-d IOMMU. Our implementation required no guest OS changes and---unlike alternative I/O virtualization approaches---provided near native I/O performance. In particular, a quantitative comparison of network performance on a 1GbE network shows that with large-enough messages direct device access throughput is statistically indistinguishable from native, albeit with CPU utilization that is slightly higher.

notes for Sunday Oct 20 through Tuesday Oct 22nd

2008-10-22T09:52:51Z

This is not serious, I'm supposed to remember what I was doing three days ago? I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

I started walking again in the mornings. Today I was up before the crack of dawn for a brisk walk on the sea shore, and when I got back home, I even had enough energy left for a few rounds with the boxing bag. Finished reading Haruki Murakami, and now re-reading Living the Martial Way. It's a funny little book, so earnest it's hard to take it seriously, but with nuggets of wisdom nonetheless.

mulix @ 2008-10-19T09:27:00

2008-10-19T07:27:44Z

The WIOV 08 website is up, including the full program! See y'all there.

notes for Thursday Oct 16 through Saturday Oct 18

2008-10-19T07:25:11Z

Thursday: just another day at work . In the afternoon, went to meet an amazing carpenter (US: cabinet maker). Spent three hours going over the plans in minute detail, making lots of changes, and then he told us how much it was going to cost. Staggered to Noga's cauldron for a late dinner.

Friday: BBQ with old friends at Ira's. Once upon a time it would've been all Linux hacking, all the time, but now business and what the kids are doing is that much more interesting. Progress, of a sort.

Saturday: a day of rest and recuperation. In the evening off to Mika's 1-year old birthday party. I still remember the sense of accomplishment we felt at Yael's 1-year old birthday party, that we actually managed to raise her and she is fine. Resumed reading Haruki Murakmi's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

notes for Wednesday Oct 15

2008-10-16T09:36:47Z

A day of odds and ends. The WIOV schedule should be going up today or tomorrow. Continued looking into the feasibility of a new project which will require coordination with an inordinate amount of people. Worked on a bunch of new patent disclosures. Hacked a bit on a new idea for IOTLB design until the serial port server stopped giving me love, and then went into paper reading mode.

Reservoir research report available

2008-10-15T09:12:03Z

Last year I helped conceive and write a proposal for an ambitious EU project called Reservoir: Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers. IBM Research Report H-262, 2008, "RESERVOIR---An ICT Infrastructure for Reliable and Effective Delivery of Services as Utilities" is now available. This research report summarizes the (172 pages...) proposal and describes the key ideas underlying Reservoir.

notes for Tuesday Oct 14

2008-10-15T09:05:10Z

Lunch with the Tel-Aviv, business oriented, brunch of the family in their nice new house. In the evening didn't feel like doing much of anything; ended up de-cluttering my publications page.

notes for Monday Oct 13

2008-10-14T07:46:10Z

More work on the nap and vnic papers in the morning, making progress toward their respective deadlines. In the evening BBQ---fillet mignon and a good wine---with my folks in our garden.

notes for Sunday Oct 12

2008-10-12T19:41:46Z

Woke up bleary eyed, but settled into a productive day at the office debugging by proxy and reviewing a couple of draft papers (vnic and nap). In the evening got some work done on the secret project, too.

mulix @ 2008-10-12T13:38:00

2008-10-12T11:39:31Z

For those who haven't seen it yet, the call for papers for the SYSTOR 2009 Israeli Experimental Systems Conference is out. Better get started working on those papers!

notes for Satuday Oct 11th

2008-10-12T06:52:40Z

Planned, prepared for and executed Yael's 2-year birthday. Splendid success, including several tipsy family members. Pictures to come. Cleaned up afterwards and eventually crashed. Woke back up at 2:30 AM and tried to convince Yael to go back to sleep until 4 AM. Re-crashed.

mulix @ 2008-10-11T08:55:00

2008-10-11T06:56:15Z

Two years ago Orna and I embarked on one of the great projects of our lives.

Two years later, it is going splendidly.

Happy birthday, Yael, my little princess. You fill our lives with joy, every single day.

I'm a-twitter

2008-08-26T15:43:59Z

I was working from home today and didn't have anyone to talk to. So I finally bit the bullet and figured, why talk to *someone*, when I can talk to *everyone*? Hence, muliby on twitter. Leave a comment if you're on twitter.

WIOV '08 CFP

2008-08-07T02:08:49Z

It is my great pleasure to invite all of you to submit papers and participate in the First Workshop on I/O Virtualization (WIOV '08), to be held in conjunction with OSDI '08.

First Workshop on I/O Virtualization (WIOV '08)
December 10–11, 2008, San Diego, CA, USA
http://www.usenix.org/wiov08

WIOV '08 will be held in conjunction with the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '08), December 8–10, 2008.

Overview

Over the past decade, the use of virtualization technology has grown rapidly. Moreover, it is being used in a variety of places, ranging from the data center to the desktop. Although this has spurred great advances in processor and memory virtualization in commodity hardware and virtualization software, I/O virtualization has received far less attention. However, both personal computers and servers may perform significant amounts of I/O. For example, efficient virtualization of graphics hardware has presented significant challenges on the desktop and efficient virtualization of network interfaces has limited server consolidation in the data center.

This workshop is meant to provide a forum to discuss challenges of I/O virtualization that span the virtual machine monitor, guest operating system, processor, memory subsystem, and I/O subsystem. In that spirit, we welcome papers that describe new challenges in I/O virtualization and papers that describe novel approaches to solving known problems in I/O virtualization. The final program will consist of both reviewed submissions and invited talks. The invited talks will focus on open problems in I/O virtualization and will be accessible to a broad audience.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Hardware support for I/O virtualization
* Novel I/O device architectures for virtualization
* Novel software approaches to I/O virtualization
* Software methods for I/O device emulation
* Para-virtualized I/O device driver design for virtualization
* Virtual machine monitors I/O subsystems

Important Dates

Submissions due: September 15, 2008
Notification to authors: October 3, 2008
Final files due: November 3, 2008

Workshop Organizers

Program Co-Chairs

Muli Ben-Yehuda, IBM Haifa Research Lab
Alan L. Cox, Rice University
Scott Rixner, Rice University

Program Committee

Eyal de Lara, University of Toronto
Jun Nakajima, Intel
Renato Santos, HP Labs
Karsten Schwan, Georgia Institute of Technology
Pratap Subrahmanyam, VMware
Leendert van Doorn, AMD
Andrew Warfield, University of British Columbia

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an extended abstract in PDF format through the workshop submission web form, which will be available at http://www.usenix.org/wiov08 soon. The extended abstract should be no more than 4 double-column pages using 10-point type on 12-point leading ("single-spaced"). Figures and references are not included in this 4-page limit.

recent happenings and MMCS 2008 position statement

2008-06-26T21:28:28Z

I'm in lovely Boston this week. Originally I was supposed to attend the Xen Summit North America 2008, MMCS 2008, and USENIX 2008, but I ended up missing the Xen Summit completely and making a just-in-time appearance at MMCS, due to some trouble at home. Thankfully everything is fine now.

At the Xen Summit my colleague Todd DeShane presented our preliminary results of a quantitative comparison of Xen and KVM. I'm sorry I missed the summit, by all accounts I heard it was a pretty fun event.

At USENIX, I presented a poster on our SCIMITAR work which introduces the notion of "virtual memory for I/O devices". It got generally positive feedback, including a few "wow, that's pretty cool" comments. I kept wishing our prototype was at a stage where we could finally have some results, but as I told those who asked, if we had had any results, I would've been presenting a paper, not a poster...

At MMCS, I participated in a panel on "Platform Management---Coordination or Not?", moderated by Intel's Milan Milenkovic. Platform management is a subject that comes up fairly often in my day-to-day work, so it was fun spending some time thinking about it and trying to come up with an appropriate position statement for the panel. The way I see it, the primary function of a panelist is to encourage the audience to think, and the easiest way to do that is to be a bit controversial. A panel where everyone---both panelists and audience---agree on everything, is a dull affair.

Here is my MMCS 2008 panel position statement---paraphrased, not transcribed! For context, you probably want to read the panel description first.

"Hello everyone,

Thank you for inviting me to participate in the panel. When thinking about the questions Milan raised with regards to platform management, I had a bit of a problem coming up with a suitable position statement. As it happens, I either wear or used to wear many different hats. I used to work on real applications. I currently work on operating systems and hypervisors, and occasionally I dabble in computer architecture. I wondered, what kind of insight could I get from each of these perspectives?

From the application writer's perspective, there are three different classes of application writers: those who do not care about the platform at all, those who think they know everything best but actually don't, since they only have localized knowledge, and those that really do know everything best.

From the operating systems developer perspective, you don't get too many kernel developers who don't care about the platform, so we can leave those out. That leaves two classes: those who think they know best, but are wrong since again they only have localized knowledge (think virtual machines), and those who really do know best.

From the hypervisor's developer perspective, well, really, hypervisors are just a new name for operating systems!

From the computer architecture folks perspective, well, they just know everything best. Having said that, they have a whole lot of legacy stuff to support which severely constrains what they can and want to do.

Now, having shared with you all of these perspectives, let me share something else: none of it actually helped me come up with a good answer to the question's Milan raised.

So I tried a different approach. I assume most of you are familiar with the end-to-end argument in system design, which is usually applied to networking. Well, what does the end-to-end argument tell us about platform management? As far as I can apply it, it tells us that we should let each layer do what it knows how to do best. Not a very satisfying answer.

Well, let's try a different approach then. Programming language folks like to say that programming languages should make "the simple things easy, and the hard things possible". And here I think we may have actually hit on something. How does this apply to platform management? The way I interpret it, it means two things. First, that each layer in the system should make sensible decisions on its own. Second---more importantly, and hopefully somewhat controversially---that each layer should provide a "chicken switch".

What's a chicken switch? It's a term you sometimes hear in hardware design. It means that when you have all these new functionality in your design, which is not as well tested (or thought out...) as the old, reliable stuff, you usually enable it (it's new and shiny after all), but you also provide a way of "shouting chicken". A way of disabling the new stuff and going back to the old, proven way of doing things.

By analogy, I claim that the most important feature a platform component can have when it comes to management, is a way for the layer above or below it to tell it to "do nothing, and get out of the way".

Thanks you."

upcoming conference submission deadlines

2008-05-25T22:30:47Z

Still haven't decided which conferences to submit which paper to, except SYSML which is the obvious venue for the follow-on paper to our Vigilant work.

ASPLOS '09: August 1st, VEE '09: August 29, SYSML '08: Sep 26th, EuroSys '09: Nov 7th, HOTOS '09: Jan 13th, 2009.

mulix @ 2008-05-26T01:17:00

2008-05-25T22:17:57Z

On Thursday this week I'll be giving a talk at the 2008 Israeli Networking Seminar on "Networked I/O for Virtual Machines: Approaches and Challenges."

Next month I'll be returning to one of my favorite cities in the world, Boston, for the 2008 Xen Summit North America, the Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems (MMCS) and USENIX ATC.

The Operating Systems Review special issue on research and developments in the Linux kernel is shaping up quite nicely and should be going to the printers soon. All of the accepted papers are good, but some are real diamonds.

mulix @ 2008-05-26T00:44:00

2008-05-25T21:44:35Z

Simon L. Peyton Jones, John Hughes, and John Launchbury , Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland, "How to write a great research paper".

Link via Silvia Miksch's excellent page of tips on how to do research.

mulix @ 2008-04-27T23:00:00

2008-04-27T19:58:44Z

I spent a couple of pleasant hours today trying to wrap my head around KVM's MMU code. After reading "The Shadowy Depths of the KVM MMU", it suddenly starts to - almost - makes sense.

The tentative agenda for the 2008 KVM forum has been published and is chock-full of awesomeness.