Efficiency of Modern Data Centers (EMDC)

Introduction to EMDC Workshop

Major research challenges in the operations of data centers include performance, power efficiency, availability, scalability, security among many others. As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices proliferates, data center capabilities will transcend basic management operations. That is, traditional management capabilities for CPU, memory and input/output operations need to be replaced with more advanced IoT-based management capabilities to include items such as temperature sensors, fan speed sensors, power sensors, moisture sensors among many others. Many modern data centers today continuously collect and aggregate a wide range of telemetry data in order to avoiding critical downtimes. For example, as heat load of modern data centers increases, the ability to monitor and manage ambient temperature becomes more and more vital for the availability, reliability, serviceability, safety, manageability and scalability of these mission-critical assets. However, such management capabilities also contribute to the consumption of network bandwidth, computational processing power and data storage. Therefore, we need more rigorous architectures and design methods for the efficient modern data centers, more sophisticated design and simulation tools, reliable equipment and software systems benchmarks, accurate performance evaluation methods, among many others.

This workshop will provide researchers and practitioners a venue to discuss the efficiency of modern data centers. The workshop’s ambition is to help in shaping a community of interest on the existing research opportunities and challenges associated with the engineering design and management of modern data centers. In this context, we believe having a dedicated workshop that brings researchers and practitioners together will help investigate innovative ideas or approaches to this new research challenge with main focus on the efficiency of modern data centers, foster collaborations and exchange points of view.

Research Topics

• • Theme: Datacenters'

  • Architecture & Design Methodologies

  • Design and Simulation Tools

  • Power Provisioning and Remote Management

  • Environmental Conditions and Energy Efficiency

  • Hardware Design and Optimization

  • Network and Compute Provisioning

  • Performance Monitoring, Accounting, and Optimization

  • Disaster Recovery Planning Methods

  • Large scale deep learning model training optimization

  • Lights out datacenters

  • Edge datacenters

  • Low, zero and/or negative carbon datacenters

  • Green datacenters and environmental conditions

  • Multi-tenant datacenter design and optimization

  • Containerization & Virtualization in datacenters

  • Deep learning inference optimization in datacenters

  • Multi-tendency workload and its optimizations

  • Large, small, and micro datacenter topologies

  • Regulations, protocols, and Standardization efforts

Important Dates

• • Mar 6, 2022: Due date for full workshop paper submissions

  • Mar 8, 2022: Notification of paper acceptance to authors

  • Mar 10, 2022: Camera-ready of accepted papers (firm date)

  • Apr 25 , 2022: Workshop Day

Keynote Speakers

• Sean James (Director of Energy Research, Microsoft):

How Sustainable Datacenter Innovation Will Lead the World to a Carbon Free Future

Abstract: Microsoft continues to make new investments in local infrastructure in response to the growing customer demand for Microsoft Cloud. As datacenters innovate to find the most sustainable technologies to solve datacenter size problems, they are solving city size problems.
Join Sean James as we explore advancements in sustainable building materials to reduce embodied carbon..

Biography: Sean James runs Microsoft’s datacenter research and development program within the Cloud Operations + Innovation. CO+I provide the foundational cloud infrastructure for over 1,000,000,000 Customers, 20,000,000 Businesses, 200+ Microsoft online services, in 90 Markets. Sean drives new datacenter technology for Microsoft’s next generation data centers including the evaluation, development, and testing. Sean joined Microsoft in 2006 to manage operations at one of Microsoft’s datacenters. Later, he joined the construction team and oversaw the design and building of new Microsoft datacenters. Prior to joining Microsoft, Sean worked in datacenter management overseeing the day-to-day maintenance and repair operations for both IT hardware and critical infrastructure, such as electrical infrastructure and cooling equipment. Prior to joining Microsoft, Sean served in the US Navy Submarine Fleet as an electrician. Sean holds many patents related to datacenters and energy, a degree in Information Technology, and is a certified Project Management Professional from the Project Management Institute. He enjoys vacationing with his family, fitness, and guitar.

• Liguang Xie (Senior Principal Architect, FutureWei Technologies)

Building Next-Gen Cloud Infrastructure and Networking in a Cloud-Native Approach

Abstract: As more enterprise customers migrate their on-premises workloads to a public cloud, the user base of a cloud provider has been in a significant growth for the past decade. Meanwhile, containers have emerged as building blocks for modern application development with high virtualization density and rapid network provisioning. Both trends raise higher requirements for the cloud infrastructure stack to be more performant and scalable than ever before.

In this talk, we would like to share with the community our learning journey of building a hyperscale cloud infrastructure to transform the infrastructure services towards a cloud-native design and fulfill surging customer requirements. First, we will discuss key challenges of cloud infrastructure including system scalability, on-demand resource provision and multitenancy, among others. To address those challenges, we will talk about Futurewei's open-source projects in compute infrastructure, network SDN control plane and programmable data plane to provide native support for the fast-growing modern workloads such as containers and serverless functions. Last, we will deep dive into a few challenging topics including scalable east-west communication and virtual network topology-aware southbound message delivery in clouds.

Biography: Dr. Liguang Xie is an Sr. Principal Architect and Sr. Director of Engineering in Futurewei Seattle Research Center, where he leads the Cloud Networking R&D Division and oversees cloud networking open-source, research, and engineering efforts. Prior to Futurewei, he was with Microsoft Azure Networking Team, and he has over 10 years industry and research experiences of designing and building large-scale distributed systems for public cloud infrastructure and networking systems.

Liguang is an IEEE Senior Member, and he won Futurewei Gold Team Award, President Team Award for Business Contribution, and ACM ICN best demo award. He published 20+ articles in top-tier journals and conferences in Computer Networks and Communications including ToN, JSAC, NSDI, INFOCOM and MobiHoc, and has accumulated nearly 2,000 citations. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering and a simultaneous M.S. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering, both from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Monday – April 25th, 2022 - virtual (All times are Central European Time - CET) - Please use this time zone converter to know exact time in your location. The time contains links to the coverted PST time zone.

Virtual Meeting URL: https://www2022.events.whova.com

Workshop Schedule (CEST TIme)

• 15:35 PM – 15:40 PM Opening Remarks and Welcome

• 15:40 PM – 15:55 PM Optimizing Data Layout for Training Deep Neural Networks
  Bingyao Li, Qi Xue, Geng Yuan, Sheng Li, Xiaolong Ma, Yanzhi Wang and Xulong Tang

• 16:00 PM – 16:15 PM Security Challenges for Modern Data Centers with IoT: A Preliminary Study
  Zhen Zeng, Chun-Jen Chung and Liguang Xie

• 16:20 PM – 16:35 PM Streaming Analytics with Adaptive Near-data Processing
  Atul Sandur, ChanHo Park, Stavros Volos, Gul Agha, and Myeongjae Jeon

• 16:40 PM – 16:55 PM Powering Multi-Task Federated Learning with Competitive GPU Resource Sharing
  Yongbo Yu, Fuxun Yu, Zirui Xu, Di Wang, Minjia Zhang, Ang Li, Shawn Bray, Chenchen Liu and Xiang Chen

• 17:00 PM – 17:30 PM Short Break

• 17:30 PM – 18:50 PM Plenary Talk (WebConf: Andrew Zhai (Pinterest): Powering the AI Inspiration Engine )

• 18:15 PM – 19:00 PM [Keynote] Building Next-Gen Cloud Infrastructure and Networking in a Cloud-Native Approach
  Liguang Xie (FutureWei Technologies)

• 19:15 PM – 20:00 PM [Keynote] How Sustainable Datacenter Innovation Will Lead the World to a Carbon Free Future
  Sean James (Microsoft)

• 20:15 PM – 20:20 PM Closing Remarks

Workshop Team

Chairs:

• • Eyhab Al-Masri (University of Washington, USA)

  • Di Wang (Microsoft, USA)

Program Committee Members:

• • Xiaolin Chang (Beijing Jiaotong University)

  • Jordi Guitart (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain)

  • Myeongjae Jeon (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea)

  • Chao Li (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)

  • Shaolei Ren (University of California, Riverside, USA)

  • Krishna Malladi (Samsung, USA)

  • Anand Ramesh (Google, USA)

  • Alexandros Daglis (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

  • Abhinandan Majumdar (Intel, USA)

Submission Instructions

We welcome contributions describing original ideas, experiments and applications relevant to the workshop theme which have not been published earlier or are not currently pending submission at any other venue. All submitted papers must include the names and affiliations of all authors. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by members of the Workshop Program Committee. All accepted papers will be included in the main conference proceedings (see Proceedings section below).

Submission Categories:

• • Long Papers: up to 8 pages (research at a mature stage)

  • Short/Work-in-Progress Papers: up to 4 pages (early or intermediate stage)

Paper Submission Link:

• • Please use this link for submitting papers to EMDC.

Templates:

• • Paper submissions should adhere to the format of the ACM guidelines using the generic "sigconf" template. https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

Camera Ready Instructions:

• • Will be sent via email.

Proceedings:

• • All papers accepted will be published in the ACM Digital Library and will be included in the Companion volume of the Web Conference (WebConf) 2022 proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper at the workshop for the paper to be included in the companion volume. Details on the registration will be posted on the main conference's page.