Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic. Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference.
Scheduling a BoF
It's not too late! To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on the BoFs board located in the registration area. If you have a description of your BoF you'd like posted on this web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send the title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "OSDI '18 BoF" in the subject line.
| ROOM | CAPACITY | 7:00 pm–8:00 pm | 8:00 pm–9:00 pm | 9:00 pm–10:00 pm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Palmas Room I (A/V Available) |
45 | |||
| Las Palmas Room II | 60 | USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) BoF | Students/Young Professionals Meetup | Board Game Night |
| ROOM | CAPACITY | 7:30 pm–8:30 pm | 8:30 pm–9:30 pm | 9:30 pm–10:30 pm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Palmas Room I (A/V Available) |
45 | Intro to Popper: Reproducible Experimentation Pipelines for Systems Research |
Alibaba Group Vendor BoF | |
| Las Palmas Room II (A/V Available) |
60 | Apple Vendor BoF |
| ROOM | CAPACITY | 7:30 pm–8:30 pm | 8:30 pm–9:30 pm | 9:30 pm–10:30 pm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Palmas Room I (A/V Available) |
45 | Academic Opportunities in Small Colleges | Ant Financial Vendor BoF | CloudLab Users BoF |
| Las Palmas Room II | 60 | Carnegie Mellon Alumni Meetup |
BoF Descriptions
USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC BoF)
Sunday, October 7, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Las Palmas Room II
Sponsored by Google
Let’s talk about women in advanced computing. All registered attendees—of all genders—are welcome to attend this BoF.
Students and Young Professionals Meetup
Sunday, October 7, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Las Palmas Room II
Come for the refreshments, stay for the opportunity to meet and network with other students and young professionals.
Board Game Night
Sunday, October 7, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Las Palmas Room II
Join us for some good old-fashioned board games. We’ll have some on hand, but bring your own games, too!
Intro to Popper: Reproducible Experimentation Pipelines For Systems Research
Monday, October 8, 7:30 pm–8:30 pm, Las Palmas Room I
Organizers: Ivo Jimenez and Carlos Maltzahn, UC Santa Cruz
Description: Experiments in systems research are notoriously hard to reproduce; building, deploying and testing a storage system with the goal of replicating performance behavior is a difficult task. In an ideal scenario, it should be easy to recreate the environment where a test originally executed, so that others can quickly replicate results. Popper is a convention and CLI tool for implementing testing pipelines following best DevOps practices. Popper pipelines encompass the end-to-end experimental workflow that is typically followed by researchers (building, deploying, executing and analyzing results) and are relatively easy to execute: clone a repository, define environment variables, and execute it by invoking bash scripts. This BoF will introduce Popper, walk through examples and open up a discussion on how we can create community-wide pipelines to run systems research experiments.
Alibaba Group Vendor BoF
Monday, October 8, 8:30 pm–9:30 pm, Las Palmas Room I
We will introduce and discuss some key system software in Alibaba, including OS, distributed storage system and resource management. They are used to support "millions" of application use cases in large scale, especially with extreme huge workloads on promotion events.
1. OS Development and Exploration in Alibaba
Abstract: Alikernel is the OS kernel used in Alibaba. It’s developed to support "millions" of application use cases in Alibaba. We will introduce some enhanced features and optimizations of Alikernel. In addition, we will also introduce our exploration on AliUK which is a unikernel and may be widely used in future.
2. Pangu2.0: New Distributed Storage System for Large-Scale Data Center
Abstract：In order to address large-scale data center storage issues, we proposed a new distributed storage architecture named pangu2.0 to achieve extreme low latency with high IOPS. In this presentation, the new storage architecture, core storage design ideas, fully user space storage engine and RDMA interconnection technology will be discussed in detail. Pangu2.0 has been widely deployed in large-scale data center and provide basic storage services for Alibaba. Some experience and evaluation results will be shared at last.
3. Sigma: Resource Management in Alibaba at Large Scale
Abstract: Sigma is the resource management system inside Alibaba Group and it manages tens of thousands of machines distributed in several data sites, in which applications from across over 60+ Business Units are running. Besides day-to-day operation, Sigma also plays an important role in resource provisioning in the promotion events such as 11/11, aka Singles Day, in which extreme workloads (up to 100X more than daily average) take place. In this session, we will introduce some of our efforts in provisioning the resource for the promotion events and how we try to improve the overall efficiency of our fleet during the day-to-day period.
Download the Alibaba OSDI '18 Vendor BoF Flyer.
Apple Vendor BoF
Monday, October 8, 8:30 pm–9:30 pm, Las Palmas Room II
Presenter: Alexander Shraer
CloudKit is Apple’s cloud backend service and application development framework that provides strongly-consistent storage for structured data and makes it easy to synchronize data across user devices or share it among multiple users. Launched more than 3 years ago, CloudKit forms the foundation for more than 50 Apple apps, including many of our most important and popular applications such as Photos, iCloud Drive, Notes, Keynote, and News, as well as many third-party apps. To deliver this at large scale, CloudKit explicitly leverages multi-tenancy at the application level as well as at the user level to guide efficient data placement and distribution. By using CloudKit application developers are free to focus on delivering the application front-end and logic while relying on CloudKit for scale, consistency, durability and security. CloudKit manages petabytes of data and handles hundreds of millions of users around the world on a daily basis.
Academic Opportunities in Small Colleges
Tuesday, October 9, 7:30 pm–8:30 pm, Las Palmas Room I
Organizer: Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College
Compared to large institutions, small colleges and universities offer a fundamentally different experience for both faculty and students. Join us to learn what it's like to work in an intimate environment with motivated, talented students, class sizes that make it possible to learn every person's name, friendly colleagues in non-CS fields, and minimal bureaucracy. The BOF will start with a short presentation and then have a discussion session to answer your questions.
Ant Financial Vendor BoF
Tuesday, October 9, 8:30 pm–9:30 pm, Las Palmas Room I
Agenda:
8:30-8:40 PM Opening
8:40-9:00 PM A Tale of One Million Payments per Second
9:00-9:20 PM Introduction of GeaBase
9:20-9:30 PM Q&A
CloudLab Users BoF
Tuesday, October 9, 9:30 pm–10:30 pm, Las Palmas Room I
Organizer: Robert Ricci, University of Utah
This BoF is for current users of CloudLab, and those who are interested in using it. We will have a short presentation on features recently added to CloudLab, and lots of informal time for Q&A.