** Submission deadline extended to Apr 26th (abstracts due on Apr 19th).**

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, 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.

KEYNOTE TALKS

*) “rtla: finding the sources of OS noise on Linux”, Daniel Bristot De Oliveira, Senior Principal Software Engineer in the real-time kernel team at Red Hat.
*) “DynamoDB: NoSQL database services for predictable HPC workloads”, Akshat Vig, Principal Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

FOCUS TOPICS

*) Container Platforms (Kubernetes, Docker, Singularity, Shifter, rkt, …) for Scientific Workflows
*) Composable Lightweight Applications and Unikernel Frameworks
*) Latency Control and Data/Container Placement in Heterogeneous HPC Virtualized Environments
*) Energy-efficiency and Service Orchestration in Virtualized Cloud & HPC Infrastructures

OVERVIEW

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 and heterogeneous infrastructures in a seamless fashion to support the highly dynamic and diverse workloads and 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. More recently, Function as a Service (Faas) and Serverless computing, leveraging on lightweight virtualizaton and containerization solutions, widens the spectrum of applications that can be deployed in a cloud environment, especially in an HPC context. Here, HPC-provided services can 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 bare-metal 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.
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.)
*) Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks ([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation)
*) 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
*) Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization
*) Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation
*) Virtualization support for emerging memory technologies
*) Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with virtual machines
*) Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
*) Novel unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments
*) ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions

Management:

*) Container, VM and data management for HPC and cloud environments
*) 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)
*) Novel 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

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 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.

GENERAL CHAIRS

*) Michael Alexander, BOKU Vienna, Austria
*) Anastassios Nanos, Nubificus Ltd., UK
*) Tommaso Cucinotta, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy