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CALL FOR PAPERS


13th Workshop on Virtualization in High­-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC '18)
held in conjunction with the International Supercomputing Conference - High Performance,
June 24-28, 2018, Frankfurt, Germany.
(Springer LNCS Proceedings)

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Date: June 28, 2018
Workshop URL: http://vhpc.org

Paper Submission Deadline: May 15, 2018 (extended)
Springer LNCS, rolling abstract submission

Abstract/Paper Submission Link: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=24355

Special Track: GPU - Accelerator Virtualization


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
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 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; I/O Virtualization 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.

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in a Springer LNCS proceedings volume.


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
and the cloud.

Major Topics

- Virtualization in supercomputing environments, HPC clusters, HPC in the cloud and grids
- OS-level virtualization and containers (LXC, Docker, rkt, Singularity, Shifter, i.a.)
- Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with virtual machines
- Novel unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments
- Performance improvements for or driven by unikernels
- Tool support for unikernels: configuration/build environments, debuggers, profilers
- Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks
([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation)
- VM & Container trust and security
- Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation
- GPU virtualization operationalization
- Approaches to GPGPU virtualization including API remoting and hypervisor abstraction
- Optimizations of virtual machine monitor platforms and hypervisors
- Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
- Virtualization support for emerging memory technologies
- Virtualization in enterprise HPC and microvisors
- Software defined networks and network virtualization
- Management, deployment of virtualized environments and orchestration (Kubernetes i.a.)
- Workflow-pipeline container-based composability
- Checkpointing facilitation utilizing containers and VMs
- Emerging topics including multi-kernel approaches and NUMA in hypervisors
- Operating MPI in containers/VMs and Unikernels
- Virtualization in data intensive computing (big data) - HPC convergence
- Adaptation of HPC technologies in the cloud (high performance networks, RDMA, etc.)
- Performance measurement, modelling and monitoring of virtualized/cloud workloads
- Latency-and jitter sensitive workloads in virtualized/containerized environments
- I/O virtualization (including applications, SR-IOV, i.a.)
- Hybrid local facility + cloud compute and based storage systems, cloudbursting
- FPGA and many-core accelerator virtualization
- Job scheduling/control/policy and container placement in virtualized environments
- Cloud reliability, fault-tolerance and high-availability
- QoS and SLA in virtualized environments
- IaaS platforms, cloud frameworks and APIs
- Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization
- Configuration management tools for containers (including in OpenStack, Ansible, i.a.)
- ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions



Special Track: GPU - Accelerator Virtualization
GPU virtualization technologies, performance and benchmarking, integration with
workflow scheduling systems, integration to cluster managers.

GPUs are taking on many HPC workload areas, especially in deep learning within
machine learning. In addition, a lot of workload is being pushed to elastic environments
utilizing various virtualization technologies on different levels like hypervisors
(e.g. VMWare, Xen, KVM), kernel (Docker, Kubernetes) or on the resource manager
level (YARN, Mesos). In this track we invite submissions addressing these problems.

Suggested Themes and Topics:

Technology - What technologies and best practices exist for GPU - hardware accelerator
virtualization and usage of hardware accelerators in virtual environments on the hypervisor,
kernel or resource manager level

Developers - Real-life experience when addressing HPC/ML/DL problems with GPUs or
hardware accelerators in virtual environments

Performance - Performance comparisons between different technologies / solutions


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, plus lightning talks that are limited to 5 minutes.
Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.

Keynotes
Gregory M. Kurtzer, CEO Syslabs Inc.
Singularity: Application containers using operating system environment virtualization.

Josh Simons, HPC Chief Technologist, VMWare, Inc.
Practical Aspects of On-Premises Virtualized High Performance Computing.


Important Dates

May 15, 2018 (extended) - Paper submission deadline (Springer LNCS)
May 30, 2018 - Acceptance notification
June 28, 2018 - Workshop Day
July 12, 2018 - Camera-ready version due


Chair

Michael Alexander (chair), Institute of Science and Technology, Austria
Anastassios Nanos (co-­chair), OnApp, UK
Romeo Kienzler (co-chair), IBM, Switzerland


Program committee

Stergios Anastasiadis, University of Ioannina, Greece
Jakob Blomer, CERN, Europe
Eduardo César, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Stephen Crago, USC ISI, USA
Tommaso Cucinotta, St. Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy
Christoffer Dall, Columbia University, USA
François Diakhaté, CEA, France
Patrick Dreher, MIT, USA
Kyle Hale, Northwestern University, USA
Brian Kocoloski, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Uday Kurkure, VMware, USA
John Lange, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa, Italy
Qing Liu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Nikos Parlavantzas, IRISA, France
Kevin Pedretti, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
Amer Qouneh, Western New England University, USA
Carlos Reaño, Technical University of Valencia, Spain
Borja Sotomayor, University of Chicago, USA
Anata Tiwari, San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA
Kurt Tutschku, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Yasuhiro Watashiba, Osaka University, Japan
Chao-Tung Yang, Tunghai University, Taiwan
Andrew Younge, Sandia National Laboratory, USA
Na Zhang, VMware, USA




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, keywords, 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 a
Springer LNCS volume.

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:
ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/llncs2e.zip

Abstract, Paper Submission Link:
https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=24355



Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks are non-paper track, synoptical in nature and are strictly limited to 5 minutes.
They can be used to gain early feedback on ongoing research, for demonstrations, to
present research results, early research ideas, perspectives and positions of interest to the
community. Submit abstract via the main submission link.


General Information

The workshop is one day in length and will be held in conjunction with the International
Supercomputing Conference - High Performance (ISC) 2018, June 24-28, Frankfurt,
Germany.