2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

The technical program information for the 2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference appears to be online now. Although the videos are restricted to USENIX members, access to the other technical information is available to all -- kudos to USENIX for making this information available to the broader community!

This conference has a fairly broad scope, with activity in many of the currently hot areas of computing:

• Virtualization


• Cloud Computing


• Storage systems


• Security


• and more.

Among the talks that immediately jumped out at me as intriguing were these:

• vIC: Interrupt Coalescing for Virtual Machine Storage Device IO, Irfan Ahmad, Ajay Gulati, and Ali Mashtizadeh, VMware, Inc.


• Taming the Flying Cable Monster: A Topology Design and Optimization Framework for Data-Center Networks, Jayaram Mudigonda, Praveen Yalagandula, and Jeffrey C. Mogul, HP Labs. I love the premise of this work:
  

  
  Imagine that you have been given the task to design a shipping-container cluster containing 1000 server-class computers. The container provides the necessary power and cooling, you have already chosen the servers, and now you must choose a network to connect the servers within the pod.
  



• The Design and Evolution of Live Storage Migration in VMware ESX, Ali Mashtizadeh, Emré Celebi, Tal Garfinkel, and Min Cai, VMware, Inc. -- my co-worker Dave Ackerman was really impressed by this work by the VMWare team.


• Building a High-performance Deduplication System, Fanglu Guo and Petros Efstathopoulos, Symantec Research Labs


• Semantics of Caching with SPOCA: A Stateless, Proportional, Optimally-Consistent Addressing Algorithm, Ashish Chawla, Benjamin Reed, Karl Juhnke, and Ghousuddin Syed, Yahoo! Inc.


• TidyFS: A Simple and Small Distributed File System, Dennis Fetterly, Maya Haridasan, and Michael Isard, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; Swaminathan Sundararaman, University of Wisconsin, Madison

This is just a sampling of what was discussed at the conference. It looks like there was a whole section of the conference devoted to advanced techniques for capturing and replaying system activity under the control of debuggers; another intriguing section had to do with improved scheduling techniques for things like multicore systems, non-uniform memory systems, and GPU-rich systems.

It looks like it was a very interesting conference, and I'm looking forward to digging into it in more detail.