Opening Remarks, Awards, and Keynote Address

Opening Remarks and Best Paper Awards

Program Co-Chairs: Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego; Alec Wolman, Microsoft Research

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USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award and Software Tools User Group (STUG) Award

Alva Couch, USENIX Board of Directors

Keynote Address: Where Does the Power Go in High-Scale Data Centers?

James Hamilton, VP & Distinguished Engineer, Amazon Web Services

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The cost advantages of high-scale services make them the dominant means of delivering consumer software, a growing part of enterprise IT infrastructure, and an inevitable part of our future. The application of high-scale services to more and more problems is bounded only by the value of the problem and the cost of the aggregate hardware and software solution. As solution costs fall, the number of problems that can be efficiently addressed continues to rise. Power is the most important limiting factor.

This talk focuses on understanding exactly where the power goes in a modern high-scale data center, some of what can be done about it, and where the interesting software problems lie. We will look at where power is spent in a high-scale data center: power distribution from the property line; PDUs, switchgear, transformers, and the UPS; CPU and memory; how servers are designed; and the software problems around raising utilization and efficiency. Finally, we look in detail at the mechanical cooling systems design.

REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Garth Goodson, NetApp

Awarded Best Paper!
Satori: Enlightened Page Sharing
Grzegorz Miłoś, Derek G. Murray, and Steven Hand, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory; Michael A. Fetterman, NVIDIA Corporation

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vNUMA: A Virtual Shared-Memory Multiprocessor
Matthew Chapman, The University of New South Wales and NICTA; Gernot Heiser, The University of New South Wales, NICTA, and Open Kernel Labs

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ShadowNet: A Platform for Rapid and Safe Network Evolution
Xu Chen and Z. Morley Mao, University of Michigan; Jacobus Van der Merwe, AT&T Labs—Research

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LUNCHTIME INVITED TALK

Teaching Computer Science in the Cloud
David J. Malan, Harvard University

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In this talk, I present Harvard University's first experience with cloud computing in the classroom. In the autumn of 2008, rather than continue to rely on the university's own instructional computing environment, we relocated our 300-student introductory computer science course to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a "web service that provides resizable compute capacity" by way of Xen-based virtual machines that can be spawned on demand.

Our goals were both technical and pedagogical. As computer scientists, we wanted full control over our course's infrastructure (i.e., root access), so that we could install software at will and respond to problems at any hour without an IT department between us and our hardware.

As teachers, we wanted easier access to our students' work (i.e., root access), as well as the ability to grow and shrink our infrastructure as problem sets' computational requirements demanded. But we also wanted to integrate into the course's own syllabus a discussion of scalability, virtualization, multicore processing, and cloud computing itself. What better way to teach topics like those than to have students actually experience them?

Although our experiment was not without cost (namely, the time to system-administer and some late-night technical difficulties), the upsides proved worth it. We have since run even more courses "in the cloud." I present in this talk what we did, how we did it, and why we did it—and I confess some mistakes so that you don't repeat them.

REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Alec Wolman, Microsoft Research

Design and Implementation of TCP Data Probes for Reliable and Metric-Rich Network Path Monitoring
Xiapu Luo, Edmond W.W. Chan, and Rocky K.C. Chang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

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StrobeLight: Lightweight Availability Mapping and Anomaly Detection
James W. Mickens, John R. Douceur, and William J. Bolosky, Microsoft Research; Brian D. Noble, University of Michigan

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Hashing Round-down Prefixes for Rapid Packet Classification
Fong Pong, Broadcom Corp.; Nian-Feng Tzeng, Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Sean Rhea, Meraki, Inc.

Awarded Best Paper!
Tolerating File-System Mistakes with EnvyFS
Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, NetApp, Inc.; Swaminathan Sundararaman, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin—Madison

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Decentralized Deduplication in SAN Cluster File Systems
Austin T. Clements, MIT CSAIL; Irfan Ahmad, Murali Vilayannur, and Jinyuan Li, VMware, Inc.

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FlexFS: A Flexible Flash File System for MLC NAND Flash Memory
Sungjin Lee, Keonsoo Ha, Kangwon Zhang, and Jihong Kim, Seoul National University, Korea; Junghwan Kim, Samsung Electronics, Korea

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Layering in Provenance Systems
Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy, Uri Braun, David A. Holland, Peter Macko, Diana Maclean, Daniel Margo, Margo Seltzer, and Robin Smogor, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

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INVITED TALK

Project SunSPOT
Roger Meike, Sun Microsystems

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Sun Labs' Project Sun SPOT is a small, wireless, embedded, sensor/effector platform that is based entirely on Java. Sun SPOT devices are designed to inspire programmers to think beyond the keyboard, mouse, and screen to move on to program the world around them. We will explore the capabilities of the platform, from wireless mesh networking to built-in public key cryptography. We will also see some of the novel uses of this technology in art, in robotics, and for applications from wildlife habitat restoration to making bicycles fly. The entire project (hardware and software) is open source. The software environment is freely available online and includes an emulation environment.

Poster Session & Happy Hour

Tiki Pavilion & Poolside

Poster Session Co-Chairs: George Candea, EPFL; Andrew Warfield, University of British Columbia and Citrix Systems

Don't miss the cool new ideas and the latest preliminary research on display at the Poster Session & Happy Hour. Take part in discussions with your colleagues over a Mexican fiesta, including margaritas. Check out the list of accepted posters.

REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: John Dunagan, Microsoft Research

Object Storage on CRAQ: High-Throughput Chain Replication for Read-Mostly Workloads
Jeff Terrace and Michael J. Freedman, Princeton University

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Census: Location-Aware Membership Management for Large-Scale Distributed Systems
James Cowling, Dan R.K. Ports, Barbara Liskov, and Raluca Ada Popa, MIT CSAIL; Abhijeet Gaikwad, École Centrale Paris

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Veracity: Practical Secure Network Coordinates via Vote-based Agreements
Micah Sherr, Matt Blaze, and Boon Thau Loo, University of Pennsylvania

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REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Decaf: Moving Device Drivers to a Modern Language
Matthew J. Renzelmann and Michael M. Swift, University of Wisconsin—Madison

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Rump File Systems: Kernel Code Reborn
Antti Kantee, Helsinki University of Technology

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CiAO: An Aspect-Oriented Operating-System Family for Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems
Daniel Lohmann, Wanja Hofer, and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, FAU Erlangen—Nuremberg; Jochen Streicher and Olaf Spinczyk, TU Dortmund

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LUNCHTIME INVITED TALK

Towards Designing Usable Languages
Matthew Jadud, Allegheny College in Meadville, PA; Christian L. Jacobsen, Untyped Ltd.

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Edit, compile . . . edit, compile. This tireless cycle dates back to the 1960s, when the cost of editing and compiling was substantial.

Despite this being a long-standing interaction between human and computer, we have only recently linked the observable behavior of a novice programmer with affective states. That's a fancy way of saying, "We can detect when students are frustrated." Our short-term goal in this study is to support the learner with sensible interventions based on automated observation of their interactions with the compiler and their environment. Longer-term, we hope our work helps provide a human-centered foundation for the design of languages and their environments.

To this end, our language design target is ambitious: parallel languages for robotic control. We've built a small virtual machine to support message-passing parallel languages (the Transterpreter) and have begun exploring its use on small, microcontroller-based mobile robotics platforms. In part, we felt this was good engineering: begin by exploring, understanding, and reusing well-tested and formally verified languages with a rich 20-year history. Also, we thought more people might use our tools if they could play with them on robots made out of shiny yellow plastic. In short, ours is a story about people trying to do some cool stuff at the intersection of usability research and the design and implementation of parallel programming languages.

REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Landon Cox, Duke University

Automatically Generating Predicates and Solutions for Configuration Troubleshooting
Ya-Yunn Su, NEC Laboratories America; Jason Flinn, University of Michigan

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JustRunIt: Experiment-Based Management of Virtualized Data Centers
Wei Zheng and Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers University; G. John Janakiraman, Jose Renato Santos, and Yoshio Turner, HP Labs

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vPath: Precise Discovery of Request Processing Paths from Black-Box Observations of Thread and Network Activities
Byung Chul Tak, Pennsylvania State University; Chunqiang Tang and Chun Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Sriram Govindan and Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Pennsylvania State University; Rong N. Chang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

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REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College

The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts
Warren Toomey, Bond University

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Block Management in Solid-State Devices
Abhishek Rajimwale, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Vijayan Prabhakaran and John D. Davis, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley

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Linux Kernel Developer Responses to Static Analysis Bug Reports
Philip J. Guo and Dawson Engler, Stanford University

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Hardware Execution Throttling for Multi-core Resource Management
Xiao Zhang, Sandhya Dwarkadas, and Kai Shen, University of Rochester

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INVITED TALK

The Antikythera Mechanism: Hacking with Gears
Diomidis Spinellis, Athens University of Economics and Business

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The Mechanism of Antikythera is an astronomical calculator from the first century B.C. Its currently agreed-on model consists of 35 gears. Its back face contains four dials tracing a luni-solar calendar and an eclipse prediction table. A number of interlocked gears calculate the ratios required for moving the four dials. The front face shows the sun's and the moon's positions in the zodiac. The elliptical anomaly of the moon is calculated by advancing one gear eccentrically through another and mounting that assembly on a gear rotating according to the moon's long axis precession period. The mechanism's design eerily foreshadows a number of modern computing concepts from the fields of digital design, programming, and software engineering.

The talk will briefly go over the mechanism's provenance and the modern history of its study, focusing on recent findings that an international cross-disciplinary team of scientists obtained through surface imaging and high-resolution X-ray tomography. The talk will offer a detailed explanation of the mechanism's operation by presenting a Squeak EToys-based emulator that is built and operates entirely on mechanical principles.

Conference Reception

Tiki Pavilion & Poolside

Join us at the USENIX '09 poolside reception for dinner and drinks.

REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: Ken Yocum, University of California, San Diego

Reducing Seek Overhead with Application-Directed Prefetching
Steve VanDeBogart, Christopher Frost, and Eddie Kohler, UCLA

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Fido: Fast Inter-Virtual-Machine Communication for Enterprise Appliances
Anton Burtsev, University of Utah; Kiran Srinivasan, Prashanth Radhakrishnan, Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Kaladhar Voruganti, and Garth R. Goodson, NetApp, Inc.

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STOW: A Spatially and Temporally Optimized Write Caching Algorithm
Binny S. Gill and Michael Ko, IBM Almaden Research Center; Biplob Debnath, University of Minnesota; Wendy Belluomini, IBM Almaden Research Center

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REFEREED PAPERS

Session Chair: John Dunagan, Microsoft Research

Black-Box Performance Control for High-Volume Non-Interactive Systems
Chunqiang Tang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Sunjit Tara, IBM Software Group, Tivoli; Rong N. Chang and Chun Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

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Server Workload Analysis for Power Minimization using Consolidation
Akshat Verma, Gargi Dasgupta, Tapan Kumar Nayak, Pradipta De, and Ravi Kothari, IBM India Research Lab

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RCB: A Simple and Practical Framework for Real-time Collaborative Browsing
Chuan Yue, Zi Chu, and Haining Wang, The College of William and Mary

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LUNCHTIME INVITED TALK

A Computer Scientist Looks at the Energy Problem
Randy H. Katz, University of California, Berkeley

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In this talk we describe LoCal, a research project at Berkeley that applies the lessons of the Internet to a radical new architecture for energy generation, distribution, and sharing. We introduce the concept of packetized energy, stored and forwarded to where it is locally needed, exploiting technology for more efficient energy storage. As on the Internet, quality is achieved end-to-end via protocols over a best-effort, resilient, and scalable infrastructure. Distributed management and storage enable dramatic reductions in peak-to-average energy consumption. This approach affects infrastructure provisioning and investment and enables a virtuous cycle of power-limited design.

Our architectural building block, intelligent power switching, permits diverse, non-traditional energy storage. Rather than replacing the grid, we overlay it, achieving independence from existing generation and transmission systems. Our approach is suited to environments where a centralized infrastructure is prohibitively expensive—e.g., in the Third World or in military or humanitarian operations—where natural disasters may disrupt operation (e.g., post-Katrina, post-earthquake disruption of the wide-area energy grid), or where it is desirable to add incremental generation and distribution. Management of local demand is also important to dynamically reduce load in order to remain independent of the grid for as long as possible.

REFEREED PAPERS

Bugs and Software Updates

Session Chair: Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego

The Beauty and the Beast: Vulnerabilities in Red Hat's Packages
Stephan Neuhaus, Universitŕ degli Studi di Trento; Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research

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Immediate Multi-Threaded Dynamic Software Updates Using Stack Reconstruction
Kristis Makris and Rida A. Bazzi, Arizona State University

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Zephyr: Efficient Incremental Reprogramming of Sensor Nodes using Function Call Indirections and Difference Computation
Rajesh Krishna Panta, Saurabh Bagchi, and Samuel P. Midkiff, Purdue University

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Closing Session

Third Millennium Problem-Solving: Can New Visualization and Collaboration Tools Make a Difference?

David Brin, Hugo Award-winning author

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Western Civilization famously changed everything with innovations such as market economics, democracy, mass education, and science, empowering millions to compete, cooperate, and invent as never before. But there's been a price. Each generation must deal with sudden expansions of vision, memory, and attention . . . now accelerating faster than ever.

Today, some forecast that vast information flows will empower tomorrow's citizens to converge and tackle problems with greater agility than governments or corporations—an era of creative "smart mobs." Is this plausible? Can new innovative visualization and collaboration tools boost millions of new problem solvers? Underlying all of this is a deeper question: Can our civilization maintain its 200-year commitment to openness, transparency, accountability, and confident belief in progress, or will a growing "relinquishment movement" fight back against the onrush of change?

Discussing these and a wide variety of possibilities will be scientist, inventor, and novelist David Brin, author of Earth, The Postman, and The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?