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 HPC/Cloud scenarios to foster discussion, collaboration, mutual exchange of knowledge and experience, enabling research to ultimately provide novel solutions for virtualized computing systems.

Containers and virtualization technologies constitute key enabling factors for flexible resource management in modern data centers, particularly in cloud environments. Cloud providers need to manage complex infrastructures seamlessly 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-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 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 exchange traffic with multiple VMs or containers; network virtualization, with its capability to create logical network overlays independently from the underlying physical topology, is another fundamental enabling technology for Cloud/HPC infrastructures. Last, storage virtualization needs to evolve to support increasingly demanding requirements in terms of performance and reliability for the managed application data.

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 cloud computing.

Each topic encompasses aspects related to design/architecture, management, performance management, modeling and configuration/tooling:

Design / Architecture:

- Containers and OS-level virtualization (LXC, Docker, rkt, Singularity, Shifter)
- Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
- GPU hypervisor memory virtualization in support of high-memory LLM training workloads
- Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks ([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation)
- Use of Risc-V related technologies for cloud, virtualized and HPC use-cases
- VM & Container trust and security models
- Multi-environment coupling, system software supporting in-situ analysis with HPC simulation
- Cloud reliability, fault-tolerance and high-availability
- Cloud-based quantum compute services
- Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization
- Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation
- Virtualization support for emerging memory and storage technologies
- Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with virtual machines
- Unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments
- Formal definition and verification of hypervisors and virtualization system properties
- ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions

Management:

- Container and VM management for HPC and cloud environments
- Virtualized/Cloudified instances to support Lambda / Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)
Paradigms
- HPC services integration, services to support HPC
- Service and on-demand scheduling & resource management
- Dedicated workload management with VMs or containers
- Workflow coupling with VMs and containers
- Unikernels and lightweight VM application management
- Environments and tools for operating containerized environments (batch, orchestration)
- Models for non-HPC workload provisioning on HPC resources

Performance Measurements and Modeling:

- Performance improvements for or driven by unikernels
- Optimizations of virtual machine monitor platforms and hypervisors
- Scalability analysis of VMs and/or containers at large scale
- Performance measurement, modeling and monitoring of virtualized/cloud workloads
- Virtualization in supercomputing environments, HPC clusters, HPC in the cloud
- Energy-efficient deployment of high-performance, ultra-low latency and real-time workloads in cloud infrastructures
- Modeling, control and isolation of end-to-end performance for parallel & distributed cloud/HPC applications, including the use of cloud functions / FaaS

Configuration / Tooling:

- Tool support for unikernels: configuration/build environments, debuggers, profilers
- Job scheduling/control/policy and container placement in virtualized environments
- Measuring and controlling “OS/Virtualization noise”
- Operating MPI in containers/VMs and Unikernels
- GPU virtualization operationalization.

The workshop will be two days 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.