[Call for Paper - late-breaking] VHPC'24: June 7th submission deadline

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CALL FOR PAPERS

19th Workshop on Virtualization in High­-Performance Cloud Computing
(VHPC '24) held in conjunction with the European Conference on
Parallel and Distributed Computing Aug 26-30, 2024, Madrid, Spain.
(Springer LNCS Proceedings)

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Paper submission deadline: June 7th, 2024 AoE (extended)

Date: August 26, 27, 2024
Workshop URL: vhpc dot org

To submit an abstract or paper, please follow the link provided
in the Call for Papers (CfP) announcement at the end of this message.


Call for Papers

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 co­-existence 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 manyvirtualization benefits with a
minimized OS/library surface. I/O virtualization, in turn, allows
physical network interfaces to exchange traffic with multiple VMs
or containers; network virtualization, with its capability to create
logical network overlays independently from the underlying physical
topology, is another fundamental enabling technology for Cloud/HPC
infrastructures.  Last, storage virtualization needs to evolve to
support increasingly demanding requirements in terms of performance
and reliability for the managed application data.


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, 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/Podman,
  Nitro/Firecracke, Singularity)
- Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, NPUs,
  co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
- GPU hypervisor memory virtualization in support of high-memory LLM
  training workloads
- Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks
  ([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation)
- Use of Risc-V related technologies for cloud, virtualized and HPC
  use-cases
- 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
- Cloud-based quantum compute services
- Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization
- Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation
- Virtualization support for emerging memory and storage technologies
- Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with
  virtual machines
- Unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments
- Formal definition and verification of hypervisors and virtualization
  system properties
- ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions

Management:
- Container and VM management for HPC and cloud environments
- Virtualized/Cloudified instances to support Lambda / Function-as-a-
  Service (FaaS) Paradigms
- 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 with an emphasis on AI GPUs/TPUs/NPUs
- 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, including the use of
  cloud functions / FaaS

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

This year, we are calling the timely topic of virtualization in support
of high-memory LLM training workloads including, but not limited to:

- GPU hypervisor memory virtualization: Techniques for virtualizing GPU
  memory to allow flexible and efficient allocation across multiple
  workloads, enabling higher utilization of GPU resources
- Flat CPU/GPU memory page tables/TLB: Unified virtual memory spaces
  and page table structures that allow both GPUs to address CPU memory
  mapped to accelerator global memory space
- Storage/filesystem to virtual memory mapped approaches
- Distributed memory virtualization
- Memory compression and reduction techniques: approaches for
  compressing model parameters, activations, and gradients to reduce
  memory requirements during training
- Out-of-core training algorithms
- Efficient memory allocation and management: Techniques for optimizing
  memory allocation, reducing fragmentation, and improving memory
  utilization during training
- Memory-efficient data formats and processing: Data formats and
  processing techniques that minimize memory overhead while maintaining
  training efficiency
- Benchmarking and profiling tools: Tools and methodologies for
  measuring, analyzing, and optimizing memory usage in
  LLM training workloads
- Case studies and applications: Real-world examples and applications of
  virtualization techniques in LLM training scenarios


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.


Important Dates

Rolling abstract submission
Jun 7th, 2024 AoE (extended) - Paper submission deadline
Jun 20th, 2024 - Acceptance notification
Jul 1st, 2024 - Camera-ready due
Aug 26th-27th, 2024 - Workshop Day(s)

Chair

Michael Alexander (chair), Austrian Academy of Sciences
Anastassios Nanos (co-chair), Nubificus Ltd., UK
Tommaso Cucinotta (co-chair), Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy

Publicity chair

Remo Andreoli, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy

Technical Program Committee

- Stergios Anastasiadis, University of Ioannina, Greece
- Gabriele Ara, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
- Jakob Blomer, CERN, Switzerland
- Eduardo César, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
- Taylor Childers, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
- François Diakhaté, CEA DAM, France
- Roberto Giorgi, University of Siena, Italy
- Kyle Hale, Northwestern University, USA
- Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa, Italy
- Nikos Parlavantzas, IRISA, France
- Amer Qouneh, Western New England University, USA
- Carlos Reaño, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
- Riccardo Rocha, CERN, Switzerland
- Lutz Schubert, University of Ulm, Germany
- Jonathan Sparks, Cray, USA
- Kurt Tutschku, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
- John Walters, USC ISI, USA
- Yasuhiro Watashiba, Osaka University, Japan
- Chao-Tung Yang, Tunghai University, Taiwan


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 12 pages, including tables
and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 points.

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. Initial
submissions are in PDF; authors of accepted papers will be requested
to provide source files.


Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks are in a 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 abstracts via the main submission link.

General Information

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International European
Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing on Aug 26-30, 2024,
Madrid, Spain.

Please contact ahead of time for presenting remotely via video.


Abstract, Paper Submission Link:
https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=31582

LNCS Format Guidelines:
https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

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