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.

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.

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.

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.)
Unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments
ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions

Management:

Container and VM 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)
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.

Workshop Co-chairs

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