ASF Winter School 2018

Safe multicore scheduling in a Linux cluster environment

Modern clusters rely on servers containing dozens of cores that have high infrastructure cost and energy consumption. Therefore, it is economically essential to exploit their full potential at both the application and the system level. While, today's clusters typically rely on Linux, recent research shows that the Linux scheduler suffers from performance bugs that lead to core under-usage. The consequences are wasted energy, bad infrastructure usage, and lower service response time.

The fundamental source of such performance bugs is that the Linux scheduler, being monolithic, has become too complex. In this talk, we present ongoing work on the Ipanema project that proposes to switch to set of simple schedulers, each tailored to a specific application. Our vision raises scientific challenges in terms of easily developing schedulers and proving them safe. The key to our approach is designing a Domain-Specific Language for multicore kernel scheduling policy development. In my talk I will present on-going work on the DSL design, proving properties such as work conservation and performance.

Speaker's bio: Gilles Muller received the Ph.D. degree in 1988 from the University of Rennes I, and the Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches degree in 1997 from the University of Rennes I. After having been a researcher at INRIA and a Professor at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes, he is currently a senior research scientist at Inria Paris and the head of the Whisper group. His research interests include the development of methodologies based on domain-specific languages for the structuring of infrastructure softwares. He is one of the designers of the Coccinelle tool.

Gilles Muller is (or was) the PC Chair of DSN2018, EuroSys 2010 and PLOS 2010. He was involved in more than 50 program committees of international workshops and conferences such as OSDI, Usenix ATC, EuroSys, ASPLOS, DSN, PLOS, VEE and the

EuroSys prize for the best PhD thesis. Gilles Muller is a member of the Eurosys steering committee and was the vice chair of the ACM/SIGOPS from July 2003 to July 2007.

Two ways you did not know mobile networks could be useful

Mobile networks provide support to a variety of communication-based services that are steadily changing our lives. However, they are also pervasive infrastructures that can be used in unconventional ways unrelated to communication. Specifically, mobile networks can be seen as large-scale remote sensing platform capable of providing individual fine-grained information about a large (and increasing) fraction of the worldwide population. In this talk, I will discuss two case studies of remote sensing based on mobile networks: land use mapmaking, i.e., the detection of arrangements and activities in a target geographical region, and population density estimation, i.e., the monitoring of dwelling units and people presence. Solutions to both these problems have important applications in, e.g., urban planning and transportations, and can benefit from approaches that take advantage of the mobile network infrastructure.

Speaker's bio: Marco Fiore is a researcher at CNR-IEIIT, Italy, a Royal Society visiting research fellow, and a EU Marie Curie fellow. He received MSc degrees from University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA, and Politecnico of Torino, Italy, a PhD degree from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Université de Lyon, France. He held positions as Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) at Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) de Lyon, France, Associate Researcher at Inria, France, visiting research fellow at Rice University, TX, USA, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain, and University College London (UCL), UK. He is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM.

Dependability and Privacy in the Era of Big Data

"All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret." said Gabriel García Márquez.

As well as digital data, or how to provide contract-based privacy and dependability for distributed computing systems. In this talk, we first survey existing research results in the topic of privacy and dependability of big data distributed systems, with achievement in several areas such as data mining and machine learning, cryptography, distributed protocols, control theory, and game theory. We then present case studies to illustrate both theoretical and practical results. Finally, we summarize the challenges to shed light on the research opportunities in the coming years.

Speaker's bio: Sara Bouchenak is Professor in Computer Science at INSA Lyon. She is a member of the DRIM research group at LIRIS laboratory, where she conducts research on highly-available, dependable, secure and manageable distributed computer systems. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor at University of Grenoble until 2014, a visiting professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, in 2009/2010, and an associate researcher at EPFL, Switzerland, in 2003.

Sara Bouchenak is a member of ACM and IEEE, and was an officer of the French chapter of ACM-SIGOPS. She serves as scientific expert for the European Commission, and for various national agencies for research and innovation in Europe (e.g., France, Sweden, Switzerland). She also served as PC member for conferences such as DSN, ICDCS, SRDS, etc.

Hyperledger Fabric: a Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains

Hyperledger Fabric is an open-source system that provides a modular and extensible platform for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains (distributed ledgers). Starting from the premise that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all‘ distributed consensus protocol, Hyperledger Fabric is the first blockchain system to support pluggable consensus protocols which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Hyperledger Fabric also features a radically different architecture compared to its predecessors, with the goals of facilitating blockchain performance, scalability, confidentiality and modularity. Unlike other blockchain systems that require their distributed applications to be written in domain-specific languages, Hyperledger Fabric allows the development of distributed applications/smart-contracts in general-purpose programming languages, without dependency on a specific cryptocurrency. Satisfying these requirements required an overhaul of state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain design and rethinking the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion and performance attacks.

In this talk we discuss Hyperledger Fabric architecture, detailing the rationale behind various design decisions. We also briefly discuss distributed ledger technology (DLT) use cases to which Hyperledger Fabric is relevant, including financial industry, manufacturing industry, supply chain management, government use cases and many more.

Speaker's bio: Dr. Marko Vukolić is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research - Zurich. Previously, he was a faculty at EURECOM and a visiting faculty at ETH Zurich. He received his PhD in distributed systems from EPFL in 2008 and his dipl. ing. degree in telecommunications from University of Belgrade in 2001. He was General Chair of Eurosys 2017, and winner of the Best Paper Award of Eurosys 2010. His research interests lie in the broad area of distributed systems, including blockchain and distributed ledgers, cloud computing security, distributed storage and fault-tolerance.

Real-Time scheduling in open systems: challenges and solutions

In this talk, I will discuss the problem of scheduling real-time applications on open execution platforms and operating systems like Linux. First, I will give a brief introduction to the area of real-time scheduling and analysis. I will then describe the difficulties encountered by software developers of real-time systems due to the many sources of unpredictability of modern hardware platforms.

I will then present the resource reservation framework, a set of techniques for implementing timing isolation in operating systems. One implementation of these techniques is now available in the Linux kernel with the SCHED_DEADLINE scheduler. Finally, I will present examples of the usage of this scheduler on some hard and soft real-time applications.

Speaker's bio: Giuseppe Lipari is Professor of Computer Science at University of Lille. He is head of the Embedded Real-Time Adaptative system Design and Execution (Émeraude) team of the Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique (CRIStAL) de Lille. He is IEEE Fellow and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers. His research interests are in real-time systems, real-time operating systems, scheduling algorithms, embedded systems, static analysis.

Freeride DIET Tour

15 years. Fifteen years of research around high-performance computing in a distributed environment. And throughout these years, the development of the DIET middleware, a playground for many research topics. The purpose of this talk will be to share the experiment of this adventure given a comprehensive description of the DIET middleware. Then, we will focus on three hot topics related to the DIET project: (1) Workflow Management in Cloud environment, (2) SAM: Software Asset Management and (3) Security in Cloud environment.

Speaker's bio: Eddy Caron is an Associate Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds a position with the LIP laboratory (ENS Lyon, France). He is a member of AVALON project from INRIA and Technical Manager for the DIET software package. He received his PhD in C.S. from University de Picardie Jules Verne in 2000 and his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches) from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2010. His research focus on distributed computing environment, from P2P to Grid, Cloud and Edge computing. At the middleware level, he deals with a large scope of subjects (scheduling, workflow management, data management, energy management, security, software management, etc.) with the same point of view of the resource magement in heterogeneous environments.

He is involved in many program committees (as HCW, IPDPS, ISPA, CloudTech, etc.). Since 2000, he contributed to more than 30 articles in journal or book chapter and more than 80 publications in international conferences. He was co-chair of the GridRPC working group in OGF. He was coordinator of two french ANR project (LEGO and SPADES). He was workpackage leader in the European project Seed4C around the security. He is the supervisor of 15 Phd (4 in progress). He teaches Distributed system, Architecture Operating System and Network, Grid and Cloud, etc. Moreover he was the Co-funder and Scientific Consultant of a company (SysFera). Deputy Director in charge of call for projects, research transfert and international affairs for the LIP Laboratory. See http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~ecaron for further information.