Tagged: Virtualization

VEE 2010 Call for Papers

I am on the program committee for the 2010 International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE ’10). What is this conference on? From the website:

Virtualization, broadly speaking, is a recognition of the adage that any problem in computer science can be solved through the introduction of an additional layer of indirection.  The technique is applied to modern systems at many interfaces, from hardware (Xen, VMware), to OS system calls (VServers, Jails), to high-level language run times (Java, Python).  While these approaches differ dramatically in implementation, they provide similar benefits and often must tackle related challenges.

The 2010 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments brings together researchers across the many applications of virtualization in today’s systems.  We invite original papers on topics relating to virtualization — especially those that will have broad appeal across these approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  • Design and implementation of the virtualization layer,
  • The use of virtualization to provide novel functionality, such as high availability, enhanced security and dependability,
  • Challenges in applying virtualization in new environments, such as unusual architectures, real-time constraints, and very large scales,
  • Novel virtualization techniques to support cloud computing,
  • Development and debugging for virtual environments, such as record/replay debugging and omniscience,
  • I/O concerns specific to virtualization,
  • Experience reports from deployments of virtualized environments,

In short, the conference is broadly interested in lessons from virtualization that will apply to a wide range of researchers as well as the novel use of virtualization techniques to solve practical problems.

Here are the important dates:

Submission   : November 9, 2009
Notification : February 5, 2010
Camera Ready : March 4, 2010

Detailed submission guidelines and instructions are available on the conference website (http://vee2010.cs.princeton.edu/).

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Show me the money!


The last few weeks have been very exciting for the virtualization market. Here are some highlights:

First, the [[http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vienna.html|VMware IPO]] created a lot of waves: amidst [[http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2007/04/vmware_ipo_reve.html|skyrocketing stock prices]] and huge oversubscription, this IPO was right up there with the [[http://www.google-ipo.com/|Google IPO]] in the hype meter. It is being called the year’s [[http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/IBD-0001-19108530.htm|best IPO]] for a good reason — in relative terms, this IPO was indeed huge, closing at 76% higher than the initial prices at the end of the first day.

The repercussions of all this money influx can already be seen. Silicon valley has been haunted the last few years by Google’s hiring spree: for a long time it seemed like the default destination of anyone smart in the bay area looking for a job was Google. They hired good people, and they paid well. It was scaring a lot of the big players in the market. Well, now it seems that VMware has [[http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/328375_vmwaregoogle21.html|joined the club]], with jobs paying [[http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2007/08/sorry_google_vm.html?source=rss|between 130-160K]]. Phew!

A day after VMware’s IPO, software giant [[http://citrix.com|Citrix]] announced its acquisition of [[http://xensource.com|XenSource]] (see [[http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/lp/lp_680809.asp?ntref=hp_promo1_US|press release]]). Needless to say, the timing of these events was unlikely to be completely co-incidental. Surprisingly, the Xen community has been awfully quiet about the deal — the development mailing lists barely touched upon the subject. I’m not sure if thats good or bad, only time will tell.

Meanwhile, in a series of recent [[http://udrepper.livejournal.com/15795.html|posts]], the GNU libc maintainer, [[http://people.redhat.com/drepper/|Ulrich Drepper]] has [[http://udrepper.livejournal.com/17577.html|criticized the hypervisor approach]] taken by both Xen and VMware, and instead thinks the KVM approach is a much feasible route to efficient virtualization. More on this later.

The essential workspace


Whenever I switch work spaces — which, thankfully, is not often — I spend a huge amount of time just setting up my working environment, typically 1-2 days. Its critical for your productivity, efficiency and general well being at your work place that you are familar and comfortable with your workspace. In my context, workspace typically means your computer/laptop, your desk, keyboard and pointing devices, and your chair. For people in different industries, workspaces may be different.

Anyways, so I was saying that it takes me quite some effort to setup the workspace just the way I like it. Often times its impossible to get it //exactly// the way I want it (if, for instance, my employer “recommends” that I use Windows only). I’m so used to running cutting edge stuff that even when I’m using Linux systems in a corporate environment, I usually don’t immediately feel at home. I mean, msot of these systems are running really old “stable” software (like RHEL 4WS, or Debian 3 etc).

Some of the things I go after right away are:

* browser (Flock)
* editor (Vim 7)
* email (kmail or gmail)
* scripting language (Python)
* version control (Mercurial)

That pretty much covers the basic necessities. I avoid instant messengers except from my laptop or my lab machine at UCSD, so thats not a big concern. Although I did give Meebo a shot, and its pretty cool. Infact, these days it can even store your chat logs (across all messengers, of course). The only problem was that running Meebo in Flock pretty much killed my system’s memory, so thats a no go for now.

But the point of this post is that it is //still// incredibly hard to //quickly// setup your workspace to your liking. A solution that immediately jumps out is to use VMs: each user could carry his/her customized profiles in a USB key, plug it in the base station, and voila, you’re ready to go. Microsoft already has a [[http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/keychain/|prototype for the desktop on a keychain]], but several kinks need to be worked out for this to fly. The most important one is security. What is the threat model here? Do I trust the base station? Does the base station trust my VM image? What if the organization wants to impose some restrictions on the things VMs can do? Sounds like we need a policy based architecture for this :-D

So, how long do you take to set up your workspace?

Forrest


Last 2 days I’ve been pretty active with [[http://forrest.apache.org | Apache Forrest]]. Primarily with the development and enhancement of the new theme mechanism (skins or views).

Just today I have updated my website with a completely redesigned theme using the new views mechanism. I also wrote the entire CSS from scratch, using the colors from the publicly available KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu color palettes. So far the feedback has been nice, and this theme might actually make its way to the default Forrest theme for the next version!

I’m still tweaking the theme so things might break unexpectedly. If you find something, do drop me a note!

On the academic front, I have read some more papers on virtualization and its kind of disappointing that a lot of the challenges had been very clearly identified and laid out almost 3 decades back, and the worst part is that we are **still** fighting those very same issues today. I have written up some more stuff that I have to go over with Amin tomorrow.

The house hunt for Palo Alto is coming along pathetically, I just have the worst luck ever. [sigh] :-(